Articles & Media

ONE WAY TO LOSE a popularity contest in the United States is to mention in polite company — who may be chatting about, say, the impeachment or the Mueller investigation — the numerous ways the United States has meddled in the affairs of other countries throughout many years.

Rigging elections might be the most benign offense on a list that includes engineering military coups, forcing economic policies beneficial to corporations, or blasting another country to bits. And if you mention any of these truths, and the wrong person is in the crowd, there is a chance that the rebuttal will be the following old insult: if you don’t like the country, why don’t you just leave?

Read the rest here, as published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In the last few months, all publicly known banking partners of the US private prison and immigrant detention leader GEO Group have committed to severing their ties with the industry. The banks’ decision was a major win for campaigners and grassroots activists who have long been working to stop the flow of capital into companies profiting from the destructive combination of mass incarceration in the United States, more aggressive border control policies and increased migration flows exacerbated by climate change.

The survival of private prisons depends on keeping a consistent and increasing number of people incarcerated and today immigrants serve as this predatory industry’s primary cash generators. According to a report by the New York Times, last year, private companies incarcerated about nine percent of the total US prison population, but 73 percent of immigrant detainees.

Read the rest here on Al Jazeera.

This report examines the role of the world’s largest arms (as well as a  number of other security and IT) firms in shaping and profiting from the militarization of US borders. Through their campaign contributions,  lobbying, constant engagement with government officials, and the revolving door between industry and government, these border security corporations and their government allies have formed powerful border–industrial complex that is a major impediment to a humane response to migration.

Click here for full report and executive summary.

The driver of the passenger van pulled onto the shoulder of the road, looked back, and said, “There’s an immigration checkpoint up ahead. Does everyone have their papers?”

We were just north of the Guatemalan border, outside the town of Ciudad Hidalgo in the Mexican state of Chiapas. There were 10 of us in the van: a family of eight from nearby Monte Rico, Guatemala, photojournalist Jeff Abbott, and me. The driver pointed to the road blockade, already in sight. From a backseat, I could see uniformed officials questioning people inside stopped vehicles.

It was a broiling afternoon in August 2014. Dark clouds were building overhead, threatening rain. There was a murmur of hushed conversation among the family members whom I had first seen no more than half an hour before. They had only recently landed on the Mexican side of the Suchiate River on a raft made of gigantic inner tubes and wooden boards and were already aboard the van when Abbott and I crammed in.

They would prove to be a boisterous crew. “Welcome to the family!” a woman who later introduced herself as Sandra said. “At least for this trip to Tapachula!” Much laughter followed. They were going to the wake of a family member in Mexico and, as people had done here forever, they simply crossed the river, avoiding the official entry point less than a mile away. Like so many political borders around the world, the Guatemalan-Mexican divide had been officially demarcated relatively recently — in 1882, to be exact — cutting through regions with strong family, community, and linguistic ties.

The checkpoint just ahead represented a new kind of demarcation line: the United States border arriving 1,000 miles to the south. A month before, in July 2014, when Mexican officials announced a bolstering of their own border in what they called Programa Frontera Sur (the Southern Border Program), the United States immediately applauded that country’s new “strategy for its southern border” in an embassy press release.

Read the rest here, as first published in TomDispatch.

In 2008, performance artist Pilvi Takala took her seat as a new employee at the company Deloitte, a global consulting firm, and began to stare into space. When asked by other employees what she was doing, she said, “brain work” or that she was working “on her thesis.” One day she rode the elevator up and down the entire workday. When asked where she was going, she said nowhere.

This image of utter inactivity, writes Jenny Odell in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, is what completely “galled” Takala’s coworkers.

In capitalist American culture, productivity is sacrosanct. If somebody says they had a productive day, the implicit assumption is that they had a good day. Descriptions like “non-contributing member of society” and “loiterer” clearly stigmatize those who aren’t considered productive.

For Odell, this stigma on unproductivity is a real problem. What we really need is to loiter more, do less—in fact, she seems to say, life on this planet might depend on it.

For years, my work as a journalist has centered on the climate crisis, the displacement of people, and the proliferation of segregating, militarized borders around the world. I’ve seen the ways that the hyperproductivity that drives capitalism helped create these problems.

Read the rest, as published in Yes! Magazine, right here .

“Today, Todd Miller joins us to talk about his new book, “Empire of Borders.” What is going on at the US-Mexico border, is just the tip of the iceberg. The US Security state is worldwide and it is waging a war in on the Poor.”

Listen here.

In June it was finally settled, the short-term detention centers run by the U.S. Border Patrol were—quite technically—concentration camps. While they are not the extermination camps of the Holocaust, the rounding up and mass incarceration of people who haven’t seen a judge fits the definition exactly, according to expert Andrea Pitzer. The legal definition of concentration camps are “places of forced relocation of civilians into detention on the basis of group identity.”

But then the debate stalled out before getting to the broader context. The prison camps are not just an anomaly from a nativist Trump administration, they are something that has been happening for years and years. I’m not only referring to short-term Border Patrol detention, but also the mass round-up, incarceration, expulsion, and banishment of non-citizens that has been happening in a sustained way in the United States since the 1990s, and through a variety of huge operations before then. And it’s not something that is just limited to the United States. While the concentration camp may vary from country to country, it is one of the cornerstones of a global border system designed to arrest and confine uprooted, displaced, and dispossessed people. Many are on the move because of the current global economic and political system (globalization and the free market neoliberal economic model) that has long privileged the wealthy elite and protected the interests of multinational corporations, all else be damned.

The Global Detention Project, for example, has identified more than 2,000 detention centers worldwide. While those numbers are in fluctuation (and thus unreliable) given the constant closure and opening of such prisons—when seen visually on a map, these detention centers cluster in and around the United States, Europe, and Australia. Worldwide, there are more than 70 border walls, billions upon billions of dollars worth of surveillance technology—from sophisticated cameras to biometrics such as facial recognition—and tens of thousands of armed agents, police, and soldiers guarding the dividing lines between the Global North and Global South tasked with arresting unauthorized people. From the United States to Europe to Australia, but also from Mexico to Libya to Papua New Guinea the planet has prison camps crammed with tens of thousands of people—many forcibly separated from their families—who dared to cross a border. There is a violent global war on migrants.

Read the rest here on the Verso Blog.

Dotted throughout the Arizona-Sonora borderlands are more than forty new surveillance towers, the backbone of a “virtual wall” — the newest symbol of the border’s ever-expanding fortification. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has equipped the towers with sophisticated long-range, night vision, infrared cameras, and wide-ranging ground-sweeping radar. All of the feeds go into the command-and-control centers where agents (or National Guard soldiers) stare at monitors all day and all night, listening for alerts from one of the thousands of implanted motion sensors in the desert. On these screens it is highly likely that the towers’ solar-powered cameras will capture the growing numbers displaced by the droughts and hurricanes battering Central America — and the rest of the hemisphere and the world.

The climate plan of the Department of Homeland Security stands in sharp contrast to the Green New Deal (GND), championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that came to the forefront of US politics at the end of 2018. The Department of Homeland Security has made a commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25.3 percent by the year 2020. But more significantly, they plan to expand a fortified and foreboding border apparatus, one that entails the arrest, incarceration, and expulsion of people who cross the US border without authorization, at least partly in anticipation of a growing number of climate refugees. The overcrowded prison camps that have received considerable media scrutiny this year are yet another glimpse into a future of intensified eco-apartheid.

Read the rest, as originally published in Jacobin, here.

Although Arriaga, Chiapas, a town of 25,000 people, was 150 miles away from the Guatemalan border, it had the feeling of a border town. Up until the summer of 2014, it thrummed with Central Americans, many of whom would congregate in the train yard that divided Arriaga in two. But in July, it changed dramatically, as if a switch had been flipped. The U.S. border extension had clicked on.

As I sat with Carlos Bartolo Solis in his dark office in the town’s only migrant shelter, he told me that authorities wouldn’t let people board the train, and crowds of people—primarily Central Americans from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—had just vanished from the train yards. When the train blasted its baritone horn and began to chug north, immigration agents in sleek vans, accompanied by the Mexican federal police and sometimes the army, rode along in search of unauthorized people. At night, Solis said, they used blinding spotlights.

Things had changed quickly and suddenly on the Mexico-Guatemala frontier. It was perhaps one of the best places to see the anatomy of U.S. border externalization, how swiftly it could strike, with the force of a superstorm, impacting any human being unfortunate enough to be in its path. The border battle we were seeing played out in Arriaga was what anthropologist Jeff Halper has called a “securocratic war.” In his book War Against the People, he explains its origins: Inequality between countries has skyrocketed in a short period of time. The ratio of per capita GDP between the richest and poorest nations went from a ratio of 22:1 at the beginning of the twentieth century to 267:1 by the year 2000. In this situation, “the experience of the vast majority of people worldwide becomes one of impoverishment, marginality, exploitation, dislocation and violence.”

Read the rest here as published at NACLA.

In March 2018, Joaquin Estevan was on his way back home to Sells, Ariz., after a routine journey to fetch three pots for ceremonial use from the Tohono O’odham community of Kom Wahia in Sonora, Mexico (where he grew up)—a trek his ancestors have made for thousands of years. His cousin dropped him off on the Mexico side of the San Miguel border gate, and he could see the community van of the Tohono O’odham Nation waiting for him just beyond.

But when Estevan handed over his tribal card for identification, as he had done for years, to the stationed Border Patrol agent, he was accused of carrying a fraudulent ID, denied entry to Arizona and sent back to Mexico.

Please read the rest here as published on the In These Times website.