El Magonista Newsletter | Vol. 10, No. 31 | August 17, 2022

By Caitlin Dickerson | The Atlantic | AUG. 7, 2022 | Photo from U.S. Gov.

An in-depth investigation by The Atlantic reveals the Trump Administration's expressed desire & intent to traumatize asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

As a therapist for children who are being processed through the American immigration system, Cynthia Quintana has a routine that she repeats each time she meets a new patient in her office in Grand Rapids, Michigan: She calls the parents or closest relatives to let them know the child is safe and well cared for, and provides 24-hour contact information.

This process usually plays out within hours of when the children arrive. Most are teens who have memorized or written down their relatives’ phone numbers in notebooks they carried with them across the border. By the time of that initial call, their families are typically worried, waiting anxiously for news after having—in an act of desperation—sent their children into another country alone in pursuit of safety and the hope of a future.

But in the summer of 2017, Quintana encountered a curious case. A 3-year-old Guatemalan boy with a toothy smile and bowl-cut black hair sat down at her desk. He was far too little to have made the journey on his own. He had no phone numbers with him, and when she asked where he was headed or whom he’d been with, the boy stared back blankly. Quintana scoured his file for more information but found nothing. She asked for help from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, who came back several days later with something unusual: information indicating that the boy’s father was in federal custody.

At their next session, the boy squirmed in his chair as Quintana dialed the detention center, getting his father on the line. At first the dad was quiet, she told me. “Finally we said, ‘Your child is here. He can hear you. You can speak now.’ And you could just tell that his voice was breaking—he couldn’t.”

The boy cried out for his father. Suddenly, both of them were screaming and sobbing so loudly that several of Quintana’s colleagues ran to her office.

Eventually, the man calmed down enough to address Quintana directly. “I’m so sorry, who are you? Where is my child? They came in the middle of the night and took him,” he said. “What do I tell his mother..."  READ MORE

By Alex Leary, Aruna Viswanatha & Sadie Gurman | The Wall Street Journal
AUG. 12, 2022 | Photo by Evelyn Hockstein

Trump allies claim the former president declassified the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago which include high-level nuclear weapons secrets.

FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the “President of France,” according to the three-page list. The list is contained in a seven-page document that also includes the warrant to search the premiseswhich was granted by a federal magistrate judge in Florida.

The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents... READ MORE

By Bill Chappell | NPR | AUG. 8, 2022 | Photo by John Minchillo

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is criticizing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for sending busloads of migrants to the city, saying that Abbott "used innocent people as political pawns to manufacture a crisis."

"Unlike Governor Abbott, New York City will always do our part," Adams said via Twitter, after his office posted images of the mayor greeting migrants and refugees arriving at the Port Authority bus terminal in midtown Manhattan.

"This is horrific when you think about what [Abbot] is doing," Adams said on Sunday, according to the Gothamist website, which reports that more than 4,000 immigrants had arrived from Texas so far... READ MORE

By Juan de Dios Sánchez Jurado | Latino Rebels | AUG. 8, 2022
Photo by Jacquelyn Martin for AP

Last Wednesday, a New York judge denied a request by over 80,000 first-time applicants for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to order the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to resume the processing of first-time applicants.

Specifically, the immigrants wanted the court to resolve an ambiguity caused by DHS’ misinterpretation of the combined effect of a 2021 Texas court’s order barring new applications and another order issued in 2020 by the New York court that had ordered the government to accept first-time, renewal, and advance parole DACA requests.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis rule that the requested relief exceeded the purpose of his court’s prior injunction and what his court could do in light of the 2021 Texas court order because, as he wrote in his opinion: “ordering the Department of Homeland Security to change its definition has the purpose only of skirting the Texas II stay, not effectuating this court’s command.”

“It brings this court no pleasure to be unable to offer them the certainty they need and the justice they deserve to plan their lives in America. But this court cannot do so acting alone,” Garaufis said after acknowledging the vital importance of the DACA program and its protection of thousands of people who were brought to the United States as children and who know no other country as their home... READ MORE

Intel’s planned microchip plant outside Columbus, Ohio, is the administration’s poster child for reviving high-tech manufacturing. But failure to allow a small number of foreign-born doctorates to stay in the U.S. could cause the effort to fizzle.

JOHNSTOWN, Ohio — Just 15 minutes outside of downtown Columbus, the suburbs abruptly evaporate. Past a bizarre mix of soybean fields, sprawling office parks and lonely clapboard churches is a field where the Biden administration — with help from one of the world’s largest tech companies — hopes to turn the U.S. into a hub of microchip manufacturing.

In his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden called this 1,000-acre spread of corn stalks and farmhouses a “field of dreams.” Within three years, it will house two Intel-operated chip facilities together worth $20 billion — and Intel is promising to invest $80 billion more now that Washington has sweetened the deal with subsidies. It’s all part of a nationwide effort to head off another microchip shortage, shore up the free world’s advanced industrial base in the face of a rising China and claw back thousands of high-end manufacturing jobs from Asia... READ MORE

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday nominated Justice Patricia Guerrero to be the next chief justice of the California Supreme Court, elevating a Latina to California’s top judicial post for the first time.

Newsom, a Democrat, also nominated Alameda County Superior Court Judge Kelli Evans to fill the associate justice spot that would be vacated by Guerrero. Evans, who is Black, would be the first openly lesbian woman on the high court.

The nominations follow current Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye’s announcementtwo weeks ago that she would not seek a second term when her current term ends in January.

If confirmed, the two nominations would cement Newsom’s influence on the court and state for years. Guerrero, 50, is a moderate who falls slightly to the center-left ideologically, according to legal experts, while Evans, 53, falls more solidly to the left.

Justices are appointed to 12-year terms but can be reappointed... READ MORE

MEXICO CITY - Fernando Bustos Gorozpe was sitting with friends in a cafe here when he realized that — once again — they were outnumbered.

“We’re the only brown people,” said Bustos, a 38-year-old writer and university professor. “We’re the only people speaking Spanish except the waiters.”

Mexico has long been the top foreign travel destination for Americans, its bountiful beaches and picturesque pueblos luring tens of millions of U.S. visitors annually. But in recent years, a growing number of tourists and remote workers — hailing from Brooklyn, N.Y., Silicon Valley and points in between — have flooded the nation’s capital and left a scent of new-wave imperialism.

The influx, which has accelerated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and is likely to continue as inflation rises, is transforming some of the city’s most treasured neighborhoods into expat enclaves... READ MORE

The dusty truck bounced along the narrow streets of Jomulquillo, the village in the Mexican state of Zacatecas where my father was born. It darted in front of vacant homes, slowed past the church and finally stopped in front of the rancho’s sole corner store. 

There, I stood alongside my dad and a group of older men — what was left of Jomulquillo’s population since nearly everyone else had left for East Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley decades earlier.

We eyed the man who slowly emerged from the pickup — middle-aged, white, wearing sunglasses, a polo shirt, jeans and a smile. He asked in broken Spanish to no one in particular whether there were any houses for sale. Everyone was so bewildered at the sight of a gabacho in a tiny hamlet up in the mountains of central Mexico that we stayed silent for a bit.

Then came a chorus of polite, but firm “No.”

I asked in English what he was doing so far from the United States.

“I want to move here,” said the man, who never gave his name. “It’s too expensive back home.” READ MORE

She’s the kind of heroine Latinas need today: 12-year-old Cucu Castelli, played on HBO’s “Gordita Chronicles” by Olivia Goncalves, knows how to stand up to bullies and bigots.

She’s proudly brown and chubby. (Her nickname, “Gordita,” refers lovingly to her thicker self.) When a white teacher tells her to stop speaking Spanish, the Dominican immigrant girl in 1980s Miami at first renounces her native language, as I did in 1990s San Diego. But when her teacher uses the French “déjà vu,” Cucu calls out the double standard, boldly crying “bull––!”

Unfortunately she has a nemesis out here in the real world that she might be unable to beat: the media industry, which sees Latinos as disposable if it sees them at all.

On July 29, a month after the premiere of the comedy series based on creator Claudia Forestieri’s life, it became the latest Latinx show to be canceled despite critical acclaim and general popularity.

Executive producer and showrunner Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz told me: “It’s sort of like, you do everything they tell you, you get an ‘A’ on the assignment, and then you still get expelled.”

Sound familiar? It certainly would to generations of immigrants in this country... READ MORE

By Krista Mahr, Megan Messerly and Katherine Ellen Foley | POLITICO
AUG. 14, 2022 | Photo by Mario Taima

The disease has gained a foothold among men who have sex with men, and experts warn that time is running out to stop the virus from spreading in the U.S. population more broadly.

It may be too late to stop monkeypox from circulating in the U.S. permanently.

The Biden administration was caught off-guard when the CDC confirmed monkeypox in a Massachusetts man on May 18. It was part of the first major outbreak outside parts of Africa where the virus is endemic, an unusual event that quickly spun into a global health crisis.

U.S. public health officials tracked the early cases around the country that followed. But a series of setbacks in the administration’s response — including clunky early testing protocols, slow vaccine distribution, a lack of federal funding to help state and local governments respond to the outbreak, and patchy communication with communities most affected by the virus — allowed the disease to gain a foothold among men who have sex with men, particularly those who have had multiple partners in a short period of time.

Epidemiologists, public health officials and doctors now fear the government cannot eliminate the disease in that community, and they’re warning that they are running out of time to stop the virus from spreading in the U.S. population more broadly... READ MORE