Ripping Suckling Babes From Their Mothers' Breasts: Trump's Border Porn

By Greg Grandin, TomDispatch

06 March 19

 

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Let me recommend a new book by an author you know well at this website. Today, Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America is being published. Given Donald Trump’s endless focus on that great wall of his, it couldn’t be more timely or historically pathbreaking. Of it, Andrew Bacevich says, “Written with insight, passion, and uncompromising moral clarity, The End of the Myth renders all prior interpretations [of the saga of American expansionism] obsolete.” It is, in my opinion, a must-read and here’s the good news: for a $100 contribution ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of the book from the author and, at the same time, help support this website. Just check out our donation page for the details.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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Bread, Circuses, and Duct Tape
Bound at the Border, or How to Make Border Porn

n February 15th, Donald Trump declared a state of national emergency in order to fund his “great, great” border wall without having to go through Congress. There is, of course, no emergency, despite the rape fantasy that the president has regularly tried to pass off as public policy. In speech after speech, including his declaration of that emergency, he has told the same story: the United States needs a border wall to prevent sex traffickers from driving women into the country, bound with duct tape.

“Women are tied up,” he typically says. “They're bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases they can't even breathe.”

It’s a scenario he’s only continued to elaborate over time. “They have tape over their mouths, electrical tape, usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good. And they have three, four, five of them in vans, or three of them in back seats of cars.” As they approach ports of entry, he swears, the vehicles carrying them “get off the road, and they drive out into the desert and they come in, they make a left turn -- usually it's a left, not a right.”

Fact-checkers and experts in border sex trafficking have been quick to insist that they know of no such incidents, however elaborately imagined -- not one. Instead, most women and children forced into prostitution, they report, enter the country through legal ports of entry.

Border Patrol headquarters even sent out a request asking agents to provide any evidence whatsoever that might help support the president’s tall tales. None apparently did. It’s worth noting that Trump first added stories of duct-taped women to his border repertoire in early January, not too long after the heartbreaking news broke of the discovery of two Saudi sisters, 16 and 22, found dead in New York City’s Hudson River, duct-taped together. Their deaths were ruled suicides, committed after the United States denied them asylum and ordered them deported to Saudi Arabia, a close American ally. Their bodies even washed up on West 68th Street and Riverside Drive, close to Trump Place Condominiums. (He seems inescapable.)

In any case, one doesn’t need Sigmund Freud to grasp the crude displacement evidently underway here. By narrating the “crisis” on the border in a pornographic manner, painting it as a hellscape ruled by MS-13 murderers and rapists, President Trump is undoubtedly using ever more salacious fables to sublimate guilty desires, as well as his and the nation’s complicity in hellish atrocities.

Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has nearly 50,000 migrants in custody. That’s roughly the number of people Canada incarcerates in its entire prison system. And no one knows how many migrant children the U.S. is detaining, except that the number is much higher than the 2,737 listed in court documents. The Department of Health and Human Services can’t even provide journalists with an accurate count: “The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown” is all its spokespeople can say.

Many of those children are housed in tent compounds in the desert or vacant Walmarts, forced to eat in shifts and sleep on the floors of chain-link cells covered only by a thin, metallic blanket. In one Florida detention center, children are packed “like sardines” in large halls stacked with bunk beds with little room even to walk. At such places, they are reportedly taunted or even sexually terrorized, either by staff or older migrants. They are overprescribed psychotropic drugs to numb them, given pills to make them sleep, and often refused medical attention when sick.

Border Patrol agents have even reportedly snatched babies from their mothers as they were breastfeeding them. Families have been tear gassed at the border and children have already died in Border Patrol custody (though “custody” is undoubtedly too soft a word to describe what the U.S. is doing to the progeny of nearby republics). “These kids are incarcerated,” said an MSNBC reporter who visited one of the detention complexes.

Some of the incarcerated migrant children are then delivered to a Christian adoption service with links to Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has all but given up trying to reunite children placed in “sponsor” homes with their actual families, since returning them, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, “would present grave child welfare concerns.”

On February 9, 1847, for example, a member of an Arkansas volunteer regiment raped a Mexican woman near the regiment’s camp at Agua Nueva in the state of Coahuila and Mexicans retaliated by killing a U.S. soldier. In response, more than 100 of those Arkansas volunteers cornered a group of war refugees in a cave. Screaming “like fiends,” according to one witness, they raped and slaughtered their victims, even as the women and children among them were “shrieking for mercy.” By the time it ended, scores of Mexicans lay dead or dying on a cave floor thick with clotted blood. Many of them had been scalped. (That’s hardly surprising since more than a few of those U.S. Army volunteers had, in the pre-war years, made their livings on those same borderlands by scalping Apaches for bounty money, or “barbering” them, as one Texan scalp-hunter put it.)

Even before that massacre, General Winfield Scott, commander of U.S. forces, wrote Washington to complain of other atrocities being committed by such volunteers, organized under the command of future president Zachary Taylor. The crimes of Taylor’s men, Scott said, were so heinous they would “make Heaven weep.”

When the war ended, Washington had taken all of Mexico’s northern territories, including all or parts of present-day Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, western Colorado, Utah, and southwestern Wyoming. About 500,000 square miles, home to an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people, had been added to the United States.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Chief Pimp

Sexual violence only continued, committed by members of the Border Patrol (founded in 1924) and other security forces like the Texas Rangers.

Starting in the 1970s, ever more middle-class families in the U.S. began hiring undocumented Mexican women as live-in servants, cooks, maids, and nannies. Many of them found themselves far from home in peonage-like conditions, unable to leave the houses in which they worked. Some of those women quickly found themselves not just trapped, but sexually and emotionally battered. One was locked in a house in Nevada for months, according to a witness: “She worked from sunup to way after dark. She requested that her wages be sent to her father in Mexico. No money was ever sent to her father. This went on for about a year and a half. Then she flipped -- she became insane, broke out of the house and ran down the street. That’s when the Border Patrol got her.”

Others were raped by their employers and, if they complained, beaten or told that they would be handed over to the Border Patrol, which came to double as a labor procurement service for wealthy households and large ranchers. During those years, in fact, the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were notoriously corrupt, violent federal institutions. In Texas, Border Patrollers worked closely with ranchers, delivering workers to their properties (including one owned by Lyndon Johnson when he was still president), then raiding those properties just before payday and deporting the same workers. “The ranchers got their crops harvested for free, the INS men got fishing and hunting privileges on the ranches, and the Mexicans got nothing,” a New York Times reporter, John Crewdson, wrote.

An investigation into INS corruption revealed that agency officials traded young Mexican women caught at the border to the Los Angeles Rams for season tickets. One such official was known within the INS as the service’s “chief pimp.” Part of his job was to help other officials and politicians, including New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino (who presided over Richard Nixon’s impeachment in the House of Representatives), “get laid” by arranging visits to Mexican brothels.

In his memoir, a former guard, Tony Hefner, described the INS detention center in Port Isabel, Texas -- overflowing in the 1980s with refugees from President Ronald Reagan’s Central American wars -- as essentially a rape camp. There, underage Salvadoran women, summoned by the center’s guards and wardens, were forced to dance, watch gore films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and submit to sexual demands. They were given abortion pills in case such encounters resulted in pregnancy.

Human Prey

For decades, the border also gave liberty to nativist fantasies, as vigilantes of one sort or another ran wild there.

In the era after the United States lost its war in Vietnam and began to make its fast turn toward deindustrialization, such fantasies became ever more sadistic. In 1990, for instance, a group of San Diego high school students fashioned themselves into a neo-Nazi paramilitary group, calling themselves the Metal Militia, and began staging “war games” on the border, hunting down and robbing migrants. The spree was notable in that it was covered by a new broadcasting network, Fox, on a show called The Reporters.

Racism and nativism would become Fox News' bread and butter, but here it went for sensationalism, titling the episode “Human Prey.”  Its host, former Newsday investigative journalist Bob Drury, depicted migrants sympathetically. In a wide-lapelled white blazer, he interviewed one vigilante who estimated that there were about 10 militant groups in the San Diego County area who would “hunt, track, and stalk” migrants for sport. The film crew accompanied one such group as they captured a family, including a baby and a terrified grandmother.

Drury linked this upsurge in border extremism to the end of the Vietnam War: many of the vigilantes were veterans of that war. Others were teenagers who modeled their tactics, including the setting of booby traps, on Vietnam War movies they had seen. The most disturbing portions of Drury’s report were his interviews with vigilantes. Disguised so as not to be recognizable, they expressed unalloyed hate. “Grab a kid,” one said, discussing his favored method of terrorizing migrants, and “nobody is going to do anything.”

Rome at the Colosseum

“Human Prey” helped launch a genre of TV “border patrol porn.” Even before Trump came on the political scene, the National Geographic channel ran five seasons of Border Wars. Since then, more such shows have aired, including Discovery Channel’s Border Live and Netflix’s Border Security. Copying the style of law-and-order series like Cops, these shows offer viewers ride-alongs with Border Patrol agents as they guard the country’s frontier. The set-up is familiar: greenish night-goggle cinematography, Black Hawk helicopters, battered-down doors, and sunrise jeep runs through mesquite scrub. While driving, Border Patrol agents in dark sunglasses hold forth on life, duty, manhood, and their occasional doubts, as an unseen camera films them from the passenger seat or back seat.

One episode from season two of Border Wars, “Lost in the River,” reveals a common, often deadly Border Patrol practice: the use of helicopters and all-terrain vehicles to scatter border crossers, forcing them ever deeper into the dangerous desert or fast-flowing rivers. It’s a game -- patrollers play scatter, chase, catch; migrants surrender or die -- that pits desperate people with next to no resources against one of the best-funded, high-tech, armed-to-the-teeth law enforcement agencies on earth. “We’ll let him tire himself out. If he wants to run, we’ll let him run,” says one agent. “You kind of have to pick your battles, and I usually pick the one who runs the most... We’ve got bodies running all over the place... It’s a never-ending game for us.”

Some of those migrants are chased back into Mexico, others caught, but many simply disappear and die, either from drowning or dehydration. Those that do make it to the United States go on to work at some of the lowest-paying but essential jobs around: they pick crops, slaughter and pack meat, clean houses, tend to the sick, watch kids -- and for the privilege of all this, the federal government has put them through a dystopic death race, which is then transformed into reality-show entertainment for the masses. Watching such spectacles on cable TV, it’s hard not to feel that the United States is now ancient Rome -- an empire that, in its later years, held compassion to be a vice -- and the whole of that southwestern desert our Colosseum.

Occasionally, these shows humanize immigrants, but only long enough to super-humanize their pursuers. In one Border Wars episode, a group of 24 detained migrants sit around in the cold morning desert air, looking alternately scared and bored. “It tugs at your heart string[s],” says one of the Border Patrollers who chased them down. “When you see people that are in a bad position, you know, it’s tough, it plays on you emotionally as an agent, even though you have a job to do. To keep America safe.” None of these shows, however, reveal what happens off screen, including reports that Border Patrollers gratuitously tackle non-resisting migrants, beat those they catch, piss on their belongings, destroy their sources of drinking water, and deny them humanitarian aid.

If the images that do appear on screen sooner or later come to numb the moral senses and if viewers need to up the ante, they can always click on PornHub, which offers a whole subgenre of actual Border Porn, including actors dressed as border agents and as migrants: “If you are caught, you are fucked,” is the title of one video.

“Like the Sabine virgins,” the New York Herald wrote a century and a half ago about how Mexicans would come to enjoy being ruled by Washington, Mexico “will soon learn to love her ravishers.”

Trump’s Necromancers

Maybe there’s a better metaphor than describing the United States as decadent Rome. Maybe Trump’s wall, whether built or not, is psychologically refashioning the country into a besieged medieval fortress, complete with its own cult of martyrs. As a candidate, Trump campaigned with the victims (or the families of victims) of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, using their grief to stoke grievances. As president, one of his first acts was to establish a government office charged with providing support services to “victims of crimes committed by removable aliens.” (Never mind that such aliens have a lower crime rate here than the general population.) Trump’s never happier than when, at one of his rallies or speeches, he’s able to call the name of someone who had a family member killed or raped by an undocumented immigrant.

A few years before Trump’s election, as Robin Reineke of the Colibri Center for Human Rights has reported, the sort of men who would later become Trump’s followers began showing up at Tea Party conventions with binders full of photographs of migrant corpses, gruesome images of the desiccated remains of those who had died in the desert trying to enter the United States. The anti-migrant activists who displayed such books of the dead claimed they were humanitarians, trying to raise support to build a wall to stop poor migrants from crossing over and so dying. But really they, like the president today, were necromancers, a kind of American priesthood of the lost frontier, offering a new litany of hate and using the fetish pornography of death to reassure racists that their cruelty was actually kindness.

Greg Grandin, a TomDispatch regular, teaches history at New York University. His newest book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Metropolitan Books), has just been published. He is the author of Fordlandia, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft Prize in American history, and Kissinger’s Shadow.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Coming for Your Hamburgers!

By David Remnick, The New Yorker

06 March 19

 

ebastian Gorka, late of the Trump Administration, stood before the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference last week and made plain the inner frenzy of a party that must place its hopes for 2020 on a President who had just been described before a congressional committee as “a racist,” “a con man,” and “a cheat.” Hence the rhetorical smoke bombs. Wild-eyed Democrats are coming! Gorka declared, “They want to take your pickup truck! They want to rebuild your home! They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved!”

The Stalinist nightmare that Gorka had on his mind is the Green New Deal, a still rough proposal that calls on the U.S. government to come to the belated rescue of the planet with the same sense of urgency that it displayed in rescuing the economy during the Great Depression. To Gorka, such a proposal is a communist “watermelon”: “green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside.”

The President, who dismisses climate change as “a Chinese hoax,” also waxed derisive at CPAC. “New Green Deal or whatever they hell they call it . . . I encourage it,” he said caustically, in a sweaty, two-hour rant on Saturday. “I think it’s really something Democrats should promote. . . . No planes! No energy! When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric. ‘Darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’ ”

The focus of this fear campaign, the nexus of all danger, is a member of Congress who has been in office for two months: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at twenty-nine, represents parts of the Bronx and Queens. With Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, she is a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. Because she questions our habits of fossil-fuel consumption and industrial agriculture, her opponents reason, she can’t possibly be trying to head off global catastrophe. She just wants to steal your Chevy Colorado and your Big Mac.

“Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “What’s humorous to me is that we’re finally proposing a clear, ambitious, but necessary and grounded policy on the scale of the problem. And so it’s hard for the Republicans to refute the actual policy on its substance. They resort to mythologizing it on a ludicrous level. Ted Cruz says we want to ‘kill all the cows.’ How far have we slid in our discourse? But that’s what half our political representation is up to.”

Ocasio-Cortez upset a veteran of her own party in a primary race, and came to office as an unabashed idealist. The mocking attacks have been a constant on the right ever since. There are phony memes about her clothes, her makeup, her intellect, her boyfriend, her apartment building, her childhood, her high school, her relatives, her old nickname, her dance routine from her days at Boston University. There is a creepy dimension to some of them. A nude selfie made its way through social media—until it was unmasked as a fraud.

Members of the Republican caucus have been no more welcoming. As Ocasio-Cortez rose to cast her vote for Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker, Republicans booed. In the cartoon being painted of her, Ocasio-Cortez is both ideologically monstrous and intellectually limited. “Every time she opens her mouth, I think she’s kidding,” Jerry Falwell, Jr., the evangelical leader and president of Liberty University, told the delegates at CPAC. Ed Rollins, an old Reagan adviser who appears frequently on Fox News, referred to her as a “little girl.” On Fox, mispronouncing “Ocasio-Cortez” is considered hilarious.

“It feels like an extra job,” she said of the attacks. “I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring. I’m just a normal person. I knew that I was not going to be liked. I’m a Democrat. I’m a woman. I’m a young woman. A Latina. And I’m a liberal, a D.S.A. member,” she said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “I believe health care is a right and people should be paid enough to live. Those are offensive values to them. But this ravenous hysteria—it’s really getting to a level that is kind of out of control. It’s dangerous and even scary. I have days when it seems some people want to stoke just enough of it to have just enough plausible deniability if something happens to me.”

The Trump family has attacked her from the start. Because she had the D.S.A.’s endorsement, last December, Donald Trump, Jr., posted a joke on Instagram about how in socialist countries people eat their dogs rather than walk them. (“It’s funny cuz it’s true!!!” he wrote.) Ocasio-Cortez’s office had no comment, but she did, tweeting, “Please, keep it coming Jr—it’s definitely a ‘very, very large brain’ idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month.”

In fact, last week, in her first major appearance as a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Ocasio-Cortez approached the job of interrogating Michael Cohen with care. Republicans have accused her of being a knowledge-lite performer whose only talent is a mastery of Twitter. But, while most of the Republican committee members and even a few Democrats put on laughably self-regarding performances, Ocasio-Cortez followed a line of questioning that helped tease out important facts and responses from Cohen. Thanks in part to that exchange, we can expect to hear from some essential characters from Trump Tower, Misters Weisselberg and Calamari.

Ocasio-Cortez says that she has tried to keep her focus partly by avoiding watching Trump on television: “He relies and thrives on attention, and so the less attention he’s given, even if it’s just one set of eyeballs, the weaker he is.” She said that watching Trump in the House chamber at the State of the Union address made her feel “sick” and “underwhelmed.”

“He is such a small, mediocre person,” she told me. “I grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of. But the person behind the podium was so unskilled. It was kind of sad.”

Ocasio-Cortez has proposed a set of left-leaning ideas: Medicare for All, a seventy-per-cent tax rate on income above ten million dollars, a guaranteed living wage. At first, she seemed to unnerve Democratic leaders. She supported and appeared at a sit-in outside Nancy Pelosi’s office with an environmental group, the Sunrise Movement. Pelosi was unamused and later referred dismissively to the Green New Deal as a “dream.”

But that was weeks ago. Pelosi has found a modus operandi with Ocasio-Cortez, and posed with her (along with Representives Jahana Hayes and Ilhan Omar) for the cover of Rolling Stone. The idea of a Green New Deal has won endorsement from Democratic Presidential candidates (Harris, Warren, Sanders, Booker, Klobuchar, Gillibrand, Inslee) and a growing number of senators and congressmen. Of course, it is not entirely clear, in detailed legislative terms, what exactly they are endorsing. In general, the idea is to pour government money into transforming the economy in ways that might head off the worst of climate change. At this point, the most salient feature of the proposal is a sense of urgency, its conversation-changing radicalism.

There is enormous value in that. So far, moderation has done nothing to override denialism. In an interview after her primary win, Ocasio-Cortez told me that one of the books she read in college that influenced her most was Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “Why We Can’t Wait,” which includes his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” There King wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”

“I think King had a point,” she told me.

Moderation, to say nothing of science denial on the right, has certainly done far too little to head off the catastrophic effects promised by climate change in our time. Just before Ocasio-Cortez won her seat, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that, if carbon emissions continue to rise as they are, the world will soon experience immense destabilization, with cities and regions with intolerable temperatures creating tens of millions of “climate refugees” forced to escape spreading deserts. Unique ecosystems and entire species will vanish. The Great Barrier Reef, already in dire condition, will die. Whole industries, like fishing, will diminish enormously. We have already seen the rise of extreme storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires. The window for meaningful change is closing. “The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” Debra Roberts, the co-chair of one of the I.P.C.C.’s three working groups, has said.

There is no question that the Green New Deal is more substantial in its sense of urgency and ambition than it is in its fine-grained detail. But what has the Republican Party offered, other than a phony restitution of a coal economy and a withdrawal from the Paris climate accord? The recent spectacle of a powerful Democrat like Dianne Feinstein dismissing a group of earnest schoolchildren and students imploring her to support a Green New Deal was maddening to watch. “I know what I’m doing!” she told the kids.

Agree with Ocasio-Cortez’s solutions or not, it’s to her credit that, in such a short time, she has helped change the terms of the debate. “Radicalism pushes the bonds of what liberals will jump on board with,” Saikat Chakrabarti, the representative’s chief of staff, said. “Every major social movement has worked that way.”

The Republican strategy—to brand the Democratic Party and its 2020 nominee, no matter who it is, a harebrained revolutionary—comes from a familiar playbook. Obama was routinely branded a socialist, even a Kenyan socialist, by the far-right opposition. This time around, Donald Trump, as he made clear in his State of the Union Address, will try to hang “socialism” around the neck of the Democratic Party and describe the Democratic candidate as the second coming of Kim Jong Un. But wait! The President “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un. Whatever. That will surely be the move, and Ocasio-Cortez, who is six years short of eligibility for the Presidency, will surely be a focal point of Trump’s tantrums.

Why? Well, first of all, she comes from New York, but not Trump’s New York. She grew up without great privilege. She is a person of color. And she is a woman. And, “In politics,” as Ashley Reese wrote for Jezebel, “women are often either characterized as hideous harpies like Hillary Clinton or pretty idiots whose ‘craziness’ is bound up with their sex appeal. . . . To her critics, Ocasio-Cortez is firmly in the pretty idiot category.”

When I read that to Ocasio-Cortez, she could only agree. “I feel like I predicted it from day one,” she told me. “The idea that a woman can be as powerful as a man is something that our society can’t deal with. But I am as powerful as a man and it drives them crazy.”

Was that the case with Trump? I asked.

“I can see Trump being enormously upset that a twenty-nine-year-old Latina, who is the daughter of a domestic worker, is helping to build the case to get his financial records. I think that adds insult to injury to him.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s staff members say that they often debate whether she is overexposed—if she is taking on too much or getting too far out ahead of the debate. So far, despite the occasional stumble and the endless attacks, she’s decided that the time demands a headlong direction. “When there is a fire, there are the people who run toward the fire and people who run away,” she told me last year. “I want to be with the people who run toward it.”

When I recalled that line, Ocasio-Cortez said, “It still feels terrifying every time. I am trying to pick my battles, but, until there are more people running toward the fire, it’s hard to take a break. The good news is that there seems like more people are running toward the fire. It’s scary running into a burning building. But what is the choice? It can’t be understated how imperilled our democracy is right now.”