El Magonista Newsletter | Vol. 11, No. 18 | June 9, 2023

By Cameron Langford | Tucson Sentinel | JUN. 2, 2023 | Photo by Molly Adams

Having already declared an Obama-era policy that shields around 600,000 immigrants from deportation illegal, a federal judge indicated in a hearing [last] Thursday he will also rule against a new version rolled out by President Joe Biden.

More than 580,000 undocumented immigrants from dozens of countries are enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants them work permits and protection from deportation for two-year renewable periods.

They range in age from their late teens to early 40s and have deep roots in the U.S., as many were brought to the country as children with their parents or became undocumented with their families when their visas expired. And now they have started families of their own. There are around 250,000 U.S.-born children of DACA recipients – kids who are U.S. citizens because they were born on American soil.

Texas is leading a challenge filed against the federal government in 2018 by nine red states who say DACA flouts the Immigration and Nationality Act by allowing people to stay in the country who should be removed.

The Lone Star State claims a new version of DACA enacted by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last October, after President Biden tasked him with fortifying the policy, is “substantively identical” to the original regime.

Attorneys for the state Thursday urged U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, who in July 2021 declared DACA unlawful and barred DHS from approving any new applications, to issue a judgment that winds down the program and blocks the government from renewing any applications two years from the date of the judgment.

But Nina Perales of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represents 22 DACA recipients who intervened in the case to try to save the program, urged Hanen to keep it going based on the “significant reliance interests” of those who have come to depend on it... READ MORE

He hasn’t admitted it yet, but let’s say for the sake of argument that Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is behind the recent ferrying of South American migrants from Texas to the steps of a Catholic church in Sacramento. What, exactly, would he be trying to accomplish?

Last year, there was some strained logic, I suppose, in a similar stunt, where DeSantis organized flights of migrants from the southern border to Martha’s Vineyard.

You remember that, of course: DeSantis’ minions rounded up several dozen Venezuelan asylum seekers, ranging in age from 2 to 68, in San Antonio in September, promised them jobs and financial assistance, then flew them in chartered planes at taxpayer expense to Massachusetts. The migrants said they were told they were heading to New York or Boston.

In the Republican political imagination, Martha’s Vineyard is an elite liberal bastion whose residents have no real grasp of the border “crisis.”

“No one really cared about this in the national media perspective until 50 show up in Martha’s Vineyard,” DeSantis said at the time. (Translation: Nobody was paying attention to me.)

But in California, home to the busiest border crossing in the world, where the agricultural and service economies would collapse without the labor of immigrant workers — here illegally or not — what on Earth might someone like Cruella DeSantis be trying to prove?

After all, he’s not running against California’s well-liked Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

He’s running against former President Trump, and a host of other Republican hopefuls, all of whom are trailing Trump badly in the polls. But the stranglehold that Trump has on the GOP means that DeSantis can’t pick a fight with the former guy for fear of alienating the Republican base, not to mention fear of unleashing Trump’s toxic brand of rhetorical annihilation. (Trump’s preferred insult for the Florida governor, “Ron DeSanctimonious” is ungainly, but apt.)

Anyway, DeSantis is probably hoping that Chris Christie will be Trump’s pain sponge, now that the combative former New Jersey governor has entered the race... READ MORE

• A Florida GOP lawmaker said the anti-immigration law he backed was supposed to tell new immigrants to "stay out."

• But now migrant families are fleeing the state, and it's a "big problem" for farmers and tourism, Rep. Rick Roth said.

• Videos shared on Twitter showed Roth and other GOP lawmakers urging people to convince migrants to stay.

A Florida GOP lawmaker said he still supports a strict anti-immigration law he backed earlier this year — but now fears the new legislation could be causing a "major problem" as migrants flee the state.

"The bill has a lot of negative consequences that I'm trying to mitigate," Florida Rep. Rick Roth told Insider. "The bill has a lot of positive consequences, which I believe was the main purpose of the bill, which is to keep people from moving to Florida that are undocumented."

Roth spoke to Insider after he and fellow Republican state legislators Alina Garcia and Juan Fernandez Barquin held a meeting about the new law — FL Law SB1718, which takes effect next month — in Hialeah, Florida, on Monday morning, according to an advertisement for it shared on Twitter by activist Thomas Kennedy.

During the meeting, Roth told constituents that migrants have started moving to Georgia and other states.

"The negatives is there are families leaving Florida right now where some of them work, some of the family members are legal, and some of them are not," he added to Insider. "But they're all deciding that they're not going to split up and live in two different states. So it's going to be a major problem for the agriculture, construction, and tourism, which just about happens to be most jobs in Florida."

Some farm workers are too scared to go to work because they're worried about the crackdown on illegal immigration, WPTV reported. CBS News reported that undocumented immigrants, including construction workers, are leaving Florida for other states... READ MORE

The notice from the office of the special counsel Jack Smith suggested that an indictment was on the horizon in the investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents.

Federal prosecutors have informed the legal team for former President Donald J. Trump that he is a target of their investigation into his handling of classified documents after he left office, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The notification to Mr. Trump’s team by prosecutors from the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, was the clearest signal yet that the former president is likely to face charges in the investigation.

It remained unclear when Mr. Trump’s team was told that he was a target of the special counsel’s inquiry, but the notice suggested that prosecutors working for Mr. Smith had largely completed their investigation and were moving toward bringing an indictment.

In court papers last year, prosecutors indicated that they were scrutinizing whether Mr. Trump had broken laws governing the handling of national security documents and whether he had obstructed government efforts to retrieve them.

Mr. Trump was found to have had more than 300 documents with classified markings at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, including some found in a search there by F.B.I. agents two months after lawyers for the former president said a diligent search had not turned up any more.

Notifying a potential defendant that he or she is a target is a formal way of indicating that the person is a direct focus of a criminal investigation and often precedes the filing of charges. The notification typically opens the door to defense lawyers requesting a meeting with prosecutors to offer their side of the story... READ MORE

A decade-plus of uncertainty continues as Texas Federal Judge Andrew Hanen heard oral arguments this week in a Texas-led, nine-state coalition seeking to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that grants work authorization and protection from deportation to more than 600,000 people brought to the country illegally as children.

The states’ arguments about cost ridiculously presuppose that DACA is entirely a financial drain due to increased services. They don’t mention that DACA holders are paying for those services with their taxes and other contributions; in fact, DACA recipients almost uniformly overpay on taxes considering they’re ineligible for many of the benefits the taxes are going to.

Let’s be clear that this doesn’t mean states like Texas should toss new asylum seekers to the wolves just because they’re not as economically productive yet, but they certainly can’t credibly make such a claim for DACA recipients that work in every imaginable place and often are employers themselves. The states’ other plank, that DACA was issued arbitrarily and without proper administrative process, should be neutralized by the Biden administration’s new DACA rule, which went through months of public notice and comment before being promulgated.

That’s unlikely to sway Hanen, who was the judge who originally killed the similar Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) and a concurrent DACA expansion with a nationwide injunction in 2015, and ruled DACA as a whole unlawful two years ago, before the new rule was issued. Even the plaintiff states understand the potentially dire economic consequences of what they seek, asking the judge for an “orderly wind down” as opposed to stark termination... READ MORE

A second plane carrying migrants arrived in Sacramento on Monday, according to California officials who say the transportation was arranged by the state of Florida.

Over the weekend, more than a dozen migrants from South America were flown on a chartered jet from New Mexico and dropped off in Sacramento. 

Documents carried by the migrants appear to show that the weekend flight was arranged through the Florida Division of Emergency Management and that it was part of the state’s program to relocate migrants, mostly from Texas, to other states, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said.

The contractor for the program is Vertol Systems Co., which coordinated similar flights that took dozens of Venezuelan asylum seekers from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts last year, he said.

On Monday, Bonta’s office said a second plane carrying roughly 20 people landed in Sacramento.

“Special agents from the California Department of Justice are on the ground and have made contact with these individuals,” the office said in a statement. “The contractor operating the flight that arrived today appears to be the same contractor who transported the migrants last week. As was the case with the migrants who arrived on Friday, the migrants who arrived today carried documents indicating that their transportation to California involved the state of Florida.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office did not return calls or emails from The Times seeking comment, and it’s unclear what role, if any, the GOP presidential candidate may have had in the flight.

But Bonta said the responsibility lay with DeSantis... READ MORE

District attorney could weigh felony charges of unlawful restraint over Martha’s Vineyard flights in 2022.

The sheriff of Bexar County, Texas is recommending criminal charges against those involved with flights that sent 49 mostly Venezuelan migrants from El Paso to Martha’s Vineyard last year, what was widely derided as a political stunt orchestrated by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

A statement from the sheriff’s office says it has completed an investigation launched last September and recommended several counts of unlawful restraint, both misdemeanors and felonies, to the office of the Bexar County district attorney.

“At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA’s office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public,” the statement said. The sheriff’s office has not named suspects.

The flights faced international scrutiny following allegations that migrants and their families, who were in the country with legal permission, were deceptively lured onto planes travelling out of state after they were processed in the US after crossing the southern border with Mexico, with their asylum cases pending in Texas.

“What infuriates me the most about this case is that here we have 48 people who are already on hard times, they are here legally in the country at that point,” sheriff Javier Salazar said in a statement announcing the investigation last year.

“They have every right to be where they are, and I believe they were preyed upon – somebody came from out of state, preyed upon these people, lured them with promises of a better life, which is what they were absolutely looking for, with the knowledge that they were going to cling to whatever hope they could be offered ... to just be exploited and hoodwinked into making this trip,” he said.

A federal lawsuit filed by attorneys for a group of migrants last year alleges that the DeSantis administration supervised a “fraudulent and discriminatory scheme” to collect migrants and fly them, unannounced, hundreds of miles out of state.

The lawsuit alleges the governor and members of his administration targeted immigrants who were recently released from shelters with false promises of job opportunities, education and financial assistance before they landed on the island with only volunteer support from local groups and emergency assistance from state agencies... READ MORE

Donald Trump was the most anti-immigrant U.S. president in nearly 100 years. He oversaw a family separation policy at the border that traumatized countless childrenand lost track of hundreds of parents; slashed refugee admissions to record lows; gutted access to asylum; and much more.

But for some of the most influential U.S. nativists and white nationalists — people Republican presidential candidates have decided they need to court during and after the primary season — Trump’s crackdowns were not enough. Some see greater potential in his top rival for the 2024 nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Can DeSantis successfully co-opt Trump’s trademark issue? DeSantis is trying to paint the MAGA leader as soft on immigration. At the end of May, he attacked Trump as pro-amnesty for his one-time support of a failed GOP bill that would have legalized some immigrants brought here as children in exchange for more border militarization and cuts to legal immigration. And last weekend, DeSantis met with families of victims of the 9/11 terror attacks as they criticized Trump’s decision to host a Saudi-funded golf tournament.

On Tuesday, Trump sought to reclaim his position as the No. 1 anti-immigrant crusader by reviving one of the most extreme ideas explored during his presidency: an executive order ending birthright citizenship.

The proposed order, which he promised to sign his first day in office if reelected, would face immediate legal challenges for its clear violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to everyone born in the U.S. His plan relies on a tortured reading of the amendment from pseudo-intellectuals at California’s Claremont Institute, such as Trump’s former lawyer John Eastman, a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election who also wrote an unhinged article questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’ citizenship (it led to an editors’ apology).

But restrictionists are skeptical that Trump would follow through on his promise given his record of sloppy executive orders and their chaotic implementation. Past orders were often blocked by courts... READ MORE

By one reckoning, the state’s payments could reach $1.2 million per person. But who is compensated, and by whom, is far from resolved.

The numbers are striking in their precision. The statistical value of each year of human life, accounting for racial differences in life expectancy: $13,619. Wealth missing due to lower rates of Black home ownership: $148,099. Average devaluation of Black-owned businesses: $77,000. Each year of disproportionate incarceration factored by race, combining lost wages and freedom: $159,792.

These calculations by California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, buried in the nearly 500-page draft of a report that will go to the state legislature in late June, belie the complexity and raw emotion underlying the first state-level effort to provide compensation for the legacy of slavery and discriminationin the US. By even considering reparations for harms that have compounded for centuries, California is transforming what has been a largely theoretical concept into a detailed model that may be adopted elsewhere as others also attempt to reckon with the costs of historical injustices. And at a potential cost of up to $800 billion, this would be to datethe largest — and one of the most complex — reparations efforts in history.

Commissioned in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, California’s reparations panel has spent two years analyzing the racial gaps in health, wealth, housing, education and employment that affect many of the state’s Black residents — about 2.25 million, or 5.7% of a diverse population of nearly 40 million with no racial majority. Their recommendations will be delivered to the legislature on June 29, and supportive lawmakers plan to propose bills enacting at least some of the measures by the end of the legislative session in 2024... READ MORE

Support for a reparations plan for Black residents doesn't appear to be popular in California, according to a new survey.

While most Californians surveyed believe racism occurs in the state, less than half of them don't support the idea of a reparations task force that's working on how much the state may owe some Black residents.

The survey by the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California released Monday said even though 71% of Californians think racial and ethnic discrimination contributes to economic inequalities in the United States, only 43% of those surveyed said they support having a state task force seeking reparations.

The survey also said that nearly 60% would approve of an official apology from the California lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom for the state's longstanding discrimination policies and practices.

The latest findings from the PPIC, a San Francisco-based nonpartisan think tank come nearly a month after the first-of-its-kind nine-member reparations task force approved a series of recommendations that suggest as much as $1.2 million be given to eligible Black residents in California.

The reparations task force did not immediately respond to USA TODAY for comment Wednesday about the survey. The group is scheduled to submit its final recommendations to the California State Legislature by June 30. Lawmakers will then decide whether to follow through with the reparations and whether to accept or modify the task force's proposals.

Some state economists have estimated that California, which is poised to have the world's fourth-largest economy, could owe roughly $800 billion in reparations, slightly more than double the current state budget of $306.5 billion... READ MORE

This exhibition of the 1898 Spanish-American War at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., is worth a trip to go and see.

The U.S. wars of the nineteenth century were essentially fought for the U.S. continental expansion, fought against imperialist Great Britain (1812), the sister republic of Mexico (1846-48), against Southern secession (1861-65), and against all the North American Indigenous nations (from the 1830s up to the 1890s). By 1898 the U.S. had become a continental nation-state.

This quick and lop-sided imperialist war beyond North America, played out in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, marked the entry of the U.S. as a young imperialist world power, vying with Germany, Russia, Japan, and other major powers for succession of the British global hegemony, then entering it's final, terminal crisis. World War I sixteen years later, would leave the issue of the next paramount global power unresolved; finally, by the end of World War II in 1945, the U.S. emerged as the unquestioned victor - the new supreme global hegemon, which would rule the world through the Cold War era, freezing out the Socialist Block (so-called "Second World"), and intervening at will in the Third World.

Back to the 1898 war, which led to the (peaceful) annexation of Puerto Rico and Guam as territories, the forceful takeover of the Kingdom of Hawaii (made into a state since 1959), the violent occupation and forceful neocolonization of Cuba - which ended when the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959 -, and the twisted history of U.S.-Philippines relations (first made into a colony through a brutal, genocidal counterinsurgency war, then lost to Japan during WW II, then recovered, granted independence, and kept ever since as a neocolony, with major U.S. military bases ever since)... READ MORE

They were targeted and beaten. Stripped of their prized garbs and brutalized in the streets.

This June marks the 80th anniversary of the Zoot Suit Riots, a dark period in Los Angeles and American history in which young Mexican, Filipinx and Black men and boys were attacked by servicemen and white Angelenos, driven by racial and anti-immigrant animus, throughout the city over the course of a week.

To commemorate this event, a group of Times journalists and editors put together this vital story package.

“The cliche about history repeating itself if history is forgotten is true, but exploring history isn’t just recalling the past,” said Column One editor Steve Padilla, who oversaw the project.

“It’s important to show how the past informs the present, and that was one of the goals of our stories on the Zoot Suit Riots. Another motivating factor behind our work: After 80 years, the riots simply are not as well known as they once were.”

He’s not wrong.

Growing up in Texas, I didn’t learn about the Zoot Suit Riots in school — this isn’t particularly surprising given how much of U.S. Latinx history is still kept out of high school textbooks. My first exposure to this historic event came through the 1992 film “American Me,” which devotes a nearly six-minute montage to the white rage the parents of the protagonist endured. It wasn’t until college, when I took a course titled the History of Mexican Americans Since 1848 that I began to learn the extent of what transpired.

Central to The Times’ package is this comprehensive timeline compiled and written by multiplatform editor Christian Orozco, which not only outlines the events that took place, but also where. It connects the occurrences of that week with other historically relevant events like the Pearl Harbor bombing and the Sleepy Lagoon trials that fed into the racial violence.

Orozco did a fantastic job of digging through the archives, including our own coverage that further fueled the violence.

“Sadly, one of the many newspapers cheering on the marauding servicemen was The Times,” said Padilla, noting that an editor had brought up in an early meeting that “unlike other civil disturbances in American history,” this dark stain was “essentially state-sanctioned chaos.”

“It was only proper, and honest, to detail our own complicity.”

Padilla also shared that several Times staffers had a personal connection to the Zoot Suit Riots... READ MORE

When the new film “Flamin’ Hot” arrives on streaming platforms on Friday, audiences should prepare themselves for something they don’t often see. This movie puts a Latino — Richard Montañez, played by Jesse Garcia — front and center. While this may not seem like a radical act, only 4% of the 1,600 most popular movies from 2007 to 2022 featured a Latino in the lead.

“Flamin’ Hot” does more than just defy the odds on screen. Behind the scenes, this film about snack foods shatters other conventions. Among the 1,600 top-grossing films from the last 16 years, only one out of every 320 had a Latina director. Only one was directed by a Mexican American woman. In other words, you’re more likely to know a person hit by lightning or to be born on Feb. 29 than to see a top-grossing film with someone like Eva Longoria — yes, the actor-producer-director Eva Longoria — at the helm.

It isn’t just the director either. A mere 3% percent of all casting directors in top-grossing films are Latinos. From the top of the call sheet to the last credit to roll, the composition of the cast and crew on “Flamin’ Hot” is an anomaly.

The Latino community has a rich history and strong cultural impact in this country, but you wouldn’t know it by watching movies. “Flamin’ Hot” takes direct aim at the lack of Latinos in film and the persistent stereotyping they face. It puts businessman Montañez at the center of the story and surrounds him with Latino family and friends. Given that our research shows that 50% of Latino main characters are isolated on screen, the film provides an important lens on Latino family and community life. The movie also showcases key aspects of Latino culture — food, faith, clothing, relationships — that are often absent from popular movies.

Hollywood is often quick to tell stories of the Latino as an outsider, someone who wasn’t born in this country and doesn’t have a say in shaping American values. Although the majority of the U.S. Hispanic/Latino population is born in the U.S., only about one-third of the Hispanic/Latino characters we examined in 2019 were Latinos born in the U.S. “Flamin’ Hot” has no time for such myths: The Latinos at the core of this story are fully American and fully Mexican, and as the characters demonstrate, this means they have an advantage that often goes overlooked... READ MORE