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-- Two million hectares of tropical forest turned over to private developers displacing many thousands of people to make way for "development" and clear-cutting forests.
-- Crushed homegrown industries unable to compete against subsidized US giants like behemoth Wal-Mart (Wal-Mex) now the country's largest private employer and biggest retailer in Latin America.
The Message to Immigrants On Our Southern Border - No Vacancy, or Enter As Indentured Servants with No Rights
Post 9/11, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was passed establishing the repressive Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and in March, 2003 its largest investigative and enforcement arm - the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) charged with protecting the public safety by identifying and targeting "criminal" and "terrorist" threats to the country, most of whom, in fact, are just desperate people whose NAFTA-ruined lives at home force them el norte to survive.
ICE was established to head them off at the border or hunt them down ruthlessly once here. It's comprised of four integrated divisions with responsibilities over the nation's infrastructure, economic security, transportation system and the subject of this essay - policing our southern border with Mexico going after people the color of the earth victims suffering for what we did to them by our made-in-Washington trade and other unfair economic policies. So the gloves are off, anything goes, and ICE is free to rampage with its large share of DHS's total budget now up to $43 billion, heading for $46.5 in the president's submitted FY 2008 budget.
On the Homeland Security web site, ICE openly boasts about what it should be condemned for. At FY-end 2006 on October 30, it listed what it called "historic results (and) new records for enforcement activity" including:
-- Total work site arrests sevenfold greater than in FY 2002.
-- Ended the former practice of "catch and release" ICE called "the greatest impediment to border control." It substituted the harsher practice of catch and incarcerate or catch and deport - or hound, threaten, catch, brutalize, incarcerate, then deport victimized people who'll try again to survive.
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