El Magonista | Vol. 11, No. 7 | March 2, 2023

On February 17, 77 individuals detained at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield and the Golden State Annex in McFarland launched a joint hunger strike demanding the immediate release of all individuals detained at the facilities and the shutdown of both detention centers, owned and operated by the private prison contractor GEO Group. Detained people have described living conditions in both facilities as “abhorrent” and “soul-crushing.”

Since then, the hunger strike has grown to about 100. Similar hunger strikes are occurring in other states among the vast network of immigrant prisons-for-profit passing as “detention” and “processing” centers that constitute “America’s Gulag” - one of our country’s most egregious moral failures, costly boondoggles, and policy quagmires.

It bears repeating that most of the tens of thousands undocumented immigrants imprisoned every year are not criminals but have immigration status irregularities deemed civil infractions. The waste of public funds, in the billions every year, is scandalous and unnecessary, as there are other proven, community-based approaches to manage immigrants awaiting their immigration status cases to be resolved. 

Just last fiscal year (2022), the daily average for the number of immigrants held in these prisons was over 22,000, costing the American taxpayers hundreds of dollars a day per immigrant to keep them caged in small rooms and under cruel, terrible conditions, sometimes for years. 

While this figure is lower than the 34,000 daily average number of held immigrants on the last year of the Trump administration, candidate Joe Biden did pledge to shut down the gulag and adopt the well-tested, cheaper, more humane, and less harsh approaches. And now, as the appalling conditions in these for-profit facilities have become intolerable to those detained, they have been pushed to desperate measures like hunger strikes. 

It’s time President Biden shuts down the gulag and carries out his promise to the millions of Latinos and others who voted for him. And there’s a way he can do that at the stroke of his pen, even with a gridlocked Congress and a hostile Supreme Court: pardon all undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S. for their immigration infractions!

It requires political audacity, something in very short supply thus far in this administration; but if Biden does that, overnight there will be no legal basis to keep in detention the thousands of people for their immigration infractions; the cruel and immoral gulag will be denied any more bodies to fill their “warm beds” and will have to be shut down - at great taxpayers’ savings! 

But more importantly, it would bring relief to those many more on the outside, too - the estimated 11 million Americans-in-waiting who have languished for decades waiting and in fear of sudden detention and deportation.

President Biden abandoned too quickly his early efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform when he came into office. While he did introduce a strong bill to Congress in early 2021, the appetite to fight for it quickly dissipated in the face of relentless Republican (and some Democrat, too) attacks over the surge of asylum-seekers appearing at the border.

All subsequent partial relief bills submitted or included in major funding bills – including the effort made over the last so-called “lame-duck session” failed, in the face of total Republican obstructionism and Democrat lack of resolve. The hopes were raised among Dreamers, TPSers, and farm workers, only to be dashed again. 

So, this is another promise the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress have not delivered on, choosing instead to engage in Kabuki Theater performances to feign “commitment” and express lamentations at the lack of action even when they have controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House. Latinos and other people who voted for them to get immigration reform results are rightfully disappointed (and appalled and disgusted at the Republicans’ callous obstructionism).

A last word on the asylum-seeker crisis at the border. It is real, but only because of the deep state of denial among both parties of the duopoly in Washington. It is a humanitarian crisis – not a “security” crisis. The fentanyl traffic, for instance, is done by U.S. citizens crossing ports of entry. It’s as if the countries neighboring Ukraine would begin closing their borders to asylum-seekers in fear they may be Communist infiltrators sent by Putin!

The problem is that the Biden administration has caved to the Republican narrative and is now busy trying to enact new rules that essentially enforce the notorious “travel ban” that the Trump administration sought to impose on asylum-seekers – which was thrown out of court for violating U.S. and international asylum law – prior to adopting the public health “Title 42” rule.

This does not bode well for either asylum-seekers or interior undocumented communities, nor for the incarcerated migrants in the gulag, because instead of displaying political courage and boldness, President Biden is showing that he is capitulating to the Republican’s relentless immigrant-baiting, border hysteria, and Trumpist hatemongering. 

And in doing so, he is betraying his pledges to Latino voters and the immigrant communities, in utter fear of sure-to-come Trumpist attacks instead of showing leadership and resolve, call their bluff and act boldly. He is thus risking the support of his base for his reelection campaign next year, who will surely demand: President Biden: shut the American Gulag, issue a Presidential Pardon, and uphold universal asylum rights!

SAN BENITO, Texas — Raul Rodriguez says he’ll never forget the moment he realized his life was built on a lie.

He was so shaken that he felt the blood rushing to his feet. In a matter of seconds, a family secret had shattered the way he saw the world and his place in it.

“That day will never leave my mind. … It’s a terrible feeling,” he says. 

It all began in April 2018 when federal investigators showed him a shocking document: a Mexican birth certificate with his name on it. 

A conversation with his father soon afterward confirmed what Rodriguez had feared as soon as he saw the paperwork. The US birth certificate he’d used for decades was fraudulent. Rodriguez wasn’t a US citizen. He was an undocumented immigrant. 

Rodriguez says he had no idea he’d been born in Mexico before his father’s confession that day, but he knew immediately how serious the situation was. He’d spent nearly two decades working for the US government at the border.

By his estimates, he’d helped deport thousands of people while working for US Customs and Border Protection and before that, for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Suddenly, he found himself on the opposite end of the spectrum, fighting for a chance to stay in the United States. 

He lost so much so quickly after that: his job at CBP, his friends in law enforcement, his sense of self. He hasn’t seen his father since that day in April 2018 and says he never wants to speak with him again. 

But now, nearly five years later, Rodriguez, 54, says he realizes he also gained something surprising after that moment when he learned he wasn’t a US citizen.

“It started off as a nightmare,” he says. “But then it turned out to be – holy moly – this is what I was meant to do... READ MORE

As Americans become increasingly anxious about immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris is searching for answers in all of the wrong places.

The solutions to the causes of migration aren’t in Central America — certainly not in corporate investments that have been a big factor in depriving people of their lands and livelihoods. As a daughter of immigrants, Harris must know the truth. Now would be a good time to end myths Americans cling to about immigration.

A new Gallup survey found that about 19% of Democrats said they want less immigration, a steep increase from 2% in 2021. Most of the people who said they want less of it are Republicans: 71%, compared with 69% last year.

It doesn’t matter that the U.S. is experiencing a worker shortage so dire that some Republicans propose lifting restrictions on child labor. It doesn’t matter that tens of thousands of unfilled jobs are in industries that rely on immigrants, such as meat-packing and construction. Many Americans want less immigration, period. And the truth is, nobody would benefit more from undoing the drivers of migration — poverty, violence and corruption — than people south of the border.

But so far, the Biden administration continues to rely on the useless strategy of trying to curb immigration by encouraging investment from international corporations. This month, Harris announced $950 million in new private investments in Central America to address “root causes” of immigration, including from Nestlé — which is known to displace small coffee farmers and has been accused of benefiting from slave labor — and Target, which is hostile to unions. The irony is stark when the administration claims to be prioritizing labor rights... READ MORE

WASHINGTON — With the United States recording more than 10 million job openings each month since mid-2021 and the unemployment rate hitting a 54-year low in January, the U.S. economy is hungry for more workers. Yet longstanding bureaucratic inefficiencies in the legal immigration system and case backlogs that worsened dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic are preventing individuals eligible for immigration to the United States from filling some of the vacancies. They also are hampering conditions for temporary workers already in the country, some of whom are struggling to renew their status and work authorization.

Though legislative action is ultimately the solution to better align a legal immigration system that was last updated in 1990 with present and future U.S. economic imperatives, Congress has failed repeatedly over the past two decades to take up substantive reform and appears highly unlikely to do so in the near term. Yet there are a range of actions beyond those already advanced that the executive branch could take under current law to facilitate the migration of needed workers, retain immigrants already in the U.S. workforce and ease challenges experienced by U.S. employers and their foreign-born workers.

A Migration Policy Institute (MPI) policy brief out today details 21 measures that the executive branch could adopt to improve the functioning of the legal immigration system for the benefit of the U.S. economy, employers and immigrant workers alike... READ MORE

Not since 1986 has Congress solved the puzzle of bipartisan legislative action on immigration reform — and the past two weeks only reinforced the difficulty both parties will have in making any progress this year.

For Republicans, the ongoing surge of migrants at the southern border tops their complaints about the Biden Administration.

“Our nation is being invaded,” U.S. Rep. Rick Allen, R-Evans declared at a recent border hearing held in Texas.

“Joe Biden has willfully caused a humanitarian and national security crisis at our southern border,” said U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Athens, who has called for the Homeland Security Secretary to be impeached.

But while immigration is a hot-button topic for the GOP, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has not been able to fulfill his promise to hold a quick vote on a border policy bill — because Republicans can’t agree on the details of a plan.

It’s not just a GOP problem — Democrats are also at odds on immigration.

When the Biden Administration laid out new plans this week for the southern border, they were met with sharp attacks from fellow Democrats who said they weren’t much different from Donald Trump’s policies.

“It’s unconscionable, unacceptable, and un-American,” said U.S. Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., of the plan that would turn away most people seeking asylum, much like the Title 42 Coronavirus restrictions started under the Trump Administration.

One of the few bipartisan efforts in Congress would shield younger immigrant ‘Dreamers’ from being deported, opening up a plan to put them on a 10-to-12-year pathway to U.S. citizenship.

But the chief GOP sponsor of the ‘Dream Act’— U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — said that bill won’t go anywhere until Congress addresses what he labeled a “tsunami of illegal immigration.”

With Congress paralyzed and unable to legislate, that leaves a policy vacuum usually filled by a President making various immigration policy changes — which are then often challenged in court... READ MORE

MEXICO CITY —  Juan Manuel Martinez remembers the days when he would vote in Mexico’s elections with no confidence that they were being run fairly.

For decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, remained in power by buying votes or stuffing ballot boxes. Election after election, the same story repeated itself.

“No election was clean, democracy didn’t exist, the government both controlled the elections and was the referee, which isn’t right,” said Martinez, a retired 70-year-old accountant. “We always knew that they were tricking us, that the candidate that was always going to win was from the PRI.”

That history motivated Martinez and more than 100,000 others in Mexico City to march Sunday against the major downsizing last week of the agency that oversees Mexico’s elections, a measure that they say jeopardizes the country’s democracy and could harm the 2024 presidential race.

Crowds of people wearing pink — the color of the National Electoral Institute, known as the INE — tightly packed the main square downtown. “You don’t touch the INE,” they chanted. One man carried a poster — wrapped in transparent pink cloth — of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Other protests took place across Mexico.

Mexican lawmakers on Wednesday approved the overhaul of the electoral institute, an independent agency that helped Mexico transition from one-party rule a few decades ago. The changes, backed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador,drastically reduce the institute’s staff and autonomy and are expected to result in a challenge before the nation’s Supreme Court.

The electoral institute says that the downsizing — known as “Plan B” because it follows an earlier, failed attempt at an overhaul — will eliminate the jobs of thousands of staffers who organize elections across the country, including identifying spots for polling stations, verifying voting credentials and overseeing the tally. The changes also limit the agency’s ability to discipline political candidates who violate campaign spending rules.

The downsizing “diminishes accountability for politicians, which threatens the equity and transparency of the elections,” the electoral institute said in a Twitter post.

Passage of the measure has raised bipartisan concerns in the United States. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) released a statement warning that “returning Mexico to its dark past of presidentially controlled elections not only sets the clock back on its democracy, but also U.S.-Mexico relations.”

“In spite of his hope to be remembered as a democrat and champion for the country’s most vulnerable, President López Obrador’s ongoing efforts to undermine INE’s autonomy and independence will assuredly cement his legacy as just the opposite,” they said... READ MORE

Up to 1.8 million people of Mexican descent—most of them American-born—were rounded up in informal raids and deported in an effort to reserve jobs for white people.

In the 1930s, the Los Angeles Welfare Department decided to start deporting hospital patients of Mexican descent. One of the patients was a woman with leprosy who was driven just over the border and left in Mexicali, Mexico. Others had tuberculosis, paralysis, mental illness or problems related to old age, but that didn’t stop orderlies from carrying them out of medical institutions and sending them out of the country.

These were the “repatriation drives,” a series of informal raids that took place around the United States during the Great Depression. Local governments and officials deported up to 1.8 million people to Mexico, according to research conducted by Joseph Dunn, a former California state senator. Dunn estimates around 60 percent of these people were actually American citizens, many of them born in the U.S. to first-generation immigrants. For these citizens, deportation wasn’t “repatriation”—it was exile from their country.

The logic behind these raids was that Mexican immigrants were supposedly using resources and working jobs that should go to white Americans affected by the Great Depression. These deportations happened not only in border states like California and Texas, but also in places like Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio and New York. In 2003, a Detroit-born U.S. citizen named José Lopez testified before a California legislative committee about his family’s 1931 deportation to Michoacán, a state in Western Mexico.

“I was five years old when we were forced to relocate,” he said. “I…bec[a]me very sick with whooping cough, and suffered very much, and it was difficult to breathe.” After both of his parents and one brother died in Mexico, he and his surviving siblings managed to return to the U.S. in 1945. “We were lucky to come back,” he said. “But there are others that were not so fortunate.”

The raids tore apart families and communities, leaving lasting trauma for Mexican Americans who remained in the U.S. as well. Former California State Senator Martha M. Escutia has said that growing up in East Los Angeles, her immigrant grandfather never even walked to the corner grocery store without his passport for fear of being stopped and deported. Even after he became a naturalized citizen, he continued to carry it with him.

The deportation of U.S. citizens has always been unconstitutional, yet scholars argue the way in which “repatriation drives” deported non-citizens was unconstitutional, too... READ MORE

A new national university that will teach Indigenous languages will begin classes by September, Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) announced.

Adelfo Regino Montes, INPI’s general director, signed the foundational documents for the University of Indigenous Languages of Mexico (ULIM) at a ceremony organized to coincide with International Mother Language Day, on Feb. 21.

“The creation of ULIM seeks the teaching of courses and the establishment of research faculties, with the purpose of strengthening and developing the linguistic heritage of Mexico, based on respect and recognition of multilingualism,” a statement by INPI said.

The ceremony at Mexico City’s Tlatelolco University Cultural Center opened with a ritual of gratitude to Mother Earth and featured speeches by leaders of several Indigenous and educational institutes, including some in Indigenous languages.

Natalio Hernández Hernández, coordinator of the ULIM project, explained that the university will operate through a mix of online and face-to-face classes. The campus is being built in Santa Ana Tlacotenco, in Milpa Alta, but the university will open in provisional headquarters no later than Sep. 13.

Students will learn through linguistic immersion and be evaluated partly through community projects that promote the development of their chosen language.

The ULIM will initially offer four degrees in Teaching of Indigenous Languages; Interpretation and Translation of Indigenous Languages; Literature in Indigenous Languages; and Indigenous Intercultural Communication.

“This is the raw material of our nascent university; we are going to make a wide call to the whole country to form part of our teaching staff, as well as the academic and research teams for each degree,” INPI director Regino Montes said.

He said that the ULIM aims to fulfill a commitment made by President López Obrador to the Nahuatl Indigenous people of Milpa Alta on Feb. 9, 2020... READ MORE

SACRAMENTO —  California’s COVID-19 state of emergency officially ends Tuesday, bringing a symbolic close to one of the most challenging chapters of state history and of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political career.

The Democratic governor declared the state of emergency three years ago, giving himself broad executive powers to protect Californians from an unpredictable and deadly virus. After previously resisting GOP pressure to end the emergency as conditions improved, Newsom now says California is finally ready to move forward. 

“California is better prepared and that’s because we have a serious Legislature and the health ecosystem in California is second to none in the country,” Newsom said.

The governor proclaimed a state of emergency March 4, 2020, at a time when there were only 53 known cases of COVID-19 in California. 

Anticipating rapid spread of the virus that could overwhelm hospitals, the proclamation gave the governor the legal authority to make, amend and rescind state regulations, suspend state statutes and redirect state funds. The emergency declaration also allowed Newsom to commandeer private property, including hospitals, medical labs, hotels and motels.

Although the pandemic solidified Newsom’s legacy as a crisis governor, his use of power opened him up to scrutiny from across the political spectrum. His decisions to enact mask and vaccine mandates and ever-shifting restrictions on businesses and everyday activities turned him into a GOP caricature of oppressive Democratic rule. 

Newsom was spotted dining with lobbyist friends at the posh French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley after advising Californians to avoid mixing with other households, leading to headlines across the country and criticism of him as a hypocritical leader.... READ MORE