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General News    H3'ed 6/8/23

Tomgram: Todd Miller, Out-Trumping Trump at the Border

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Tom Engelhardt
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

These days, it seems as if it happened in another world. I'm thinking of that June afternoon in 2015 when The Donald rode a Trump Tower escalator down to waiting reporters (and a cheering crowd of -- yes! -- actors he had hired at $50 a pop) to announce that he was going to run for president. In that speech, he took the crowd and those reporters with him on a quick trip, however metaphoric, southwest, swearing he would build a "great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall." Why? Because, of course, Mexico was sending its worst people northwards. "They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. "

But count on one thing, the man who only recently was convicted of" well, not quite raping but "sexually abusing" E. Jean Carroll" sure didn't think many of them were "good people" like him, nor does he now. Admittedly, he neither successfully built much of that "big, beautiful wall" of his, nor managed to make Mexico pay for any of the wildly expensive parts he did get constructed (47 new miles, the rest replacing fencing already there). And yet, almost eight years later, without an escalator in sight, in some fashion he's still on that border. Only recently, for instance, the former president running for the Republican nomination in 2024 swore that when he returned to the White House, he would quickly issue an executive order ensuring that the children of undocumented immigrants "will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship"; in other words, he would end the "birthright citizenship" guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, something he had promised to do in 2015 and again as president.

And of course, with the race for that nomination heating up, in mid-May, Ron DeSantis tried to out-Trump Trump by dispatching 800 members of the Florida National Guard, 200 agents from the state Department of Law Enforcement, 101 state highway patrol troopers, 20 agents from the State Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Department of Emergency Management, 5 fixed-wing aircraft, 17 unmanned drones, and 10 boats to" yes, you guessed it, Texas's border with Mexico -- for, well" at least 30 days as the Trump/covid era Title 42 border expulsion policy finally ended.

What you wouldn't know, however, unless you were reading the work of TomDispatch regular and border expert Todd Miller, was that, while the Republicans made (mostly fake) border policy their pride, joy, and nightmare first class, what he calls the border-industrial complex has been making a fortune off American taxpayers by fortifying that border in ways that fit not Trump's wall-eyed vision of prevention, but one more in keeping with our increasingly AI-ed world. Let me not tell you more though, just suggest you get on the nearest escalator and head down this page to Miller's latest border foray to see for yourself. Tom

The Real Border Surge
The End of Title 42 and the Triumph of the Border-Industrial Complex

By

On May 11th, I was with a group of people at the bottom of the Paso del Norte bridge in Ciudad Jua'rez, Mexico. Suddenly, I realized that I didn't have the small change needed to cross the bridge and return to El Paso, Texas, where I was attending the 16th annual Border Security Expo. Worse yet, this was just three hours before Title 42, the pandemic-era rapid-expulsion border policy instituted by the Trump administration, was set to expire. The media was already in overdrive on the subject, producing apocalyptic scenarios like one in the New York Post reporting that "hordes" of "illegals" were on their way toward the border.

While I searched for those coins, a woman approached me, dug 35 cents out of a small purse -- precisely what it cost! -- and handed the change to me. She then did so for the others in our group. When I pulled a 20-peso bill from my wallet to repay her, she kept her fist clenched and wouldn't accept the money.

Having lived, reported, and traveled in Latin America for more than two decades, such generosity didn't entirely surprise me, though it did contradict so much of the media-generated hype about what was going on at this historic border moment. Since Joe Biden took office in 2021, the pressure on his administration to rescind Trump's Title 42 had only grown. Now, it was finally going to happen -- and hell was on the horizon.

But at that expo in El Paso that brought together top brass from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its border and immigration enforcement agencies, and private industry, I was learning that preparations for such a shift had been underway for years and -- don't be shocked! -- the corporations attending planned to profit from it in a big-time fashion.

Seeing the phase-out of Title 42 through the lens of a growing border-industrial complex proved grimly illuminating. Border officials and industry representatives continued to insist that just on the other side of the border was a world of "cartels," "adversaries," and "criminals," including, undoubtedly, this woman forcing change on me. By then, I had heard all too many warnings that, were the United States to let its guard down, however briefly, there would be an infernal "border surge."

As I later stood in the halls of that expo, however, I became aware of another type of surge not being discussed either there or in the media. And I'm not just thinking about the extra members of the National Guard and other forces the Biden administration and Texas Governor Greg Abbott only recently sent to that very border. What I have in mind is the surge of ever higher budgets and record numbers of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts guaranteed to ensure that those borderlands will remain one of the most militarized and surveilled places on planet Earth.

Robo-Dogs at the Expo

Earlier that day, I found myself standing in front of the Ghost Robotics booth. There sat a vendor and, in front of him, a chrome-colored robotic dog on a puke-green carpet. Behind him, a large sign said: "Robots that Feel the World." He was explaining to prospective customers that the robo-dog could run at a pace of up to nine miles an hour. A vendor in the adjacent booth, Persistent Systems, that claimed to connect "soldiers, sensors, unmanned systems, and cameras in a dynamic network," was not impressed. (Those, by the way, were but two of nearly 200 companies in that large exhibition hall.). He said, "I'll take my dog any day," meaning his living and breathing dog.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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