Biden Comes Up Trumps
Border Cruelty Knows No Bipartisan Division in a US Driven by the Tanton Network
On the day I originally published this newsletter, as many as 38 people seeking safety in the United States only to be expelled to Ciudad Juarez and detained by Mexican authorities, were left by prison guards to burn to death. A fire ignited inside a locked cell and spread throughout the facility in which they’d been locked up. All too typically, governments and the media on both sides of the line are blaming the victims of the tragedy, focusing on who started the fire rather than on the policies, dictated by Washington, that sent these people into harm’s way, then left them to die a most excruciating death engulfed in the red-hot blaze.
As with the myriad lives lost to hypothermia in the Sonoran Desert, to drowning in the Rio Grande and Caribbean Sea, from falling off the 30-foot wall, or asphyxiating to death while trapped in a crowded tractor-trailer under the Texas sun, the responsibility for these lives lost lies squarely with the US government and its failed 40-year strategy of “deterrence through cruelty.”
US foreign and economic policies make whole nations uninhabitable, forcing displacement. US immigration policies kill, dehumanizing folks in search of life, forcing them to wait in dire conditions for their turn to ask for a crack at a future for themselves and their children. It is genocide against the stateless and IT MUST STOP! This tragedy is just one of the now uncountable preventable disasters that have exacted a terrible and traumatic toll on innocents, making this post all the more urgent. Please read and share.
Thank you, Sarah.
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Democrats and immigrant rights groups applauded candidate Joe Biden’s commitment to restoring humane immigration policies after the cruelty of the Trump years. But President Biden’s border management efforts have been no better. Indeed, in many ways his policies have trumped even Trump’s in their use of deterrence through measures most cruel, targeted at the world’s most vulnerable individuals: people in motion, 50% of whom are estimated to be children.
Granted, Biden’s attempts to roll back the Remain in Mexico program were met with bad-faith interventions on the part of Red-state lawyers whose arguments were upheld by bigoted Trump-appointed judges. But Biden could have ended Title 42 with the stroke of a pen. He didn’t. He could have allowed 15,000 Haitian asylum seekers corralled under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas to find safety in the US. He didn’t.
He’s restarted the process of metering asylum seekers at the southern border. Managed through an app, CBP One, he calls his metering “humane and orderly.” But the app is buggy. Rolled out before ready, it is being beta-tested on a population at grave risk of extortion and violent harm. And if you don’t have a smartphone, a strong cell signal, and the requisite language skills, you’re shit out of luck.
He’s fast-tracking the asylum review, or “credible fear,” screening process when he could add more asylum officers and immigration judges at the back end of the system — which would move the case backlog while offering folks in need of protection the legal due process we all deserve. Soon, victims and potential victims of torture and other traumas will be required to share their worst experiences with a total stranger over a telephone phone within days of completing a multi-mile, multi-month, multi-nation exodus overland, while imprisoned, sleep-deprived, hungry, and wearing the same clothes they traveled in, and without access to legal counsel. If they are determined to be ineligible for asylum, which most will be under these circumstances, they will be expelled right then and there.
"Imagine fleeing your home and loved ones, arriving at a new country to seek safety, and then being forced to present a complicated legal claim less than two days later, from jail," says Heidi Altman, the policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center, calling Biden’s rocket-docket a "mockery of justice."
More egregious and equally illogical still is Biden’s proposed “Transit Ban,” which is designed to keep asylum seekers from reaching US soil altogether. Though candidate Biden condemned Trump’s attempt to institute a similar policy — superseded by his abuse of Title 42 as a migration control tool when the pandemic hit — President Biden is wearing his “Transit Ban” like a pair of comfy slippers.
Just like Trump’s “Safe Third Country” or Asylum Cooperation Agreements, Biden’s ban states that if you don’t first request asylum — and get rejected — in a country through which you transit en route to the US, you will automatically be presumed ineligible for asylum in the US. Three things of note about that:
There are few “safe” countries south of the line. That is why so many people are running north, in fear for their lives.
Neither do such transit countries have robust asylum offices that can handle a potential surfeit of new claims.
In the global refugee protection regime, if one country denies your claim for asylum, typically the next one will too.
In his 2023 State of the Union address, President Biden invoked the same myth the US has long projected out into the world: that it is the “Beacon of Hope.” The very next day, he proved that myth a lie when his administration proposed a “Transit Ban” that is really an asylum ban and will leave thousands of vulnerable lives at heightened risk of kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder. For Indigenous Peoples, girls, women, LGBTQ+ folks, and children, especially, Biden’s asylum ban is a likely death sentence.
How did we get here? When did the “Beacon of Hope” become the leader of the free world in its flagrant flouting of global refugee protection and human rights commitments?
That is a question I examine in my forthcoming book, CROSSING THE LINE: FINDING AMERICA IN THE BORDERLANDS. One answer is, of course, the rotten foundations onto which the US nation and all its institutions were built.
But how has the power of white supremacy lasted so long?
In the following excerpt from CROSSING THE LINE, I show how a little-known Michigan ophthalmologist began, all the way back in the ‘60s, the project of ushering a racist demagogue into the White House, and how that effort inculcated an entire nation to turn a blind eye to its own crimes against humanity in the process…
From Chapter 12 — The Bomb: An Ophthalmologist Takes the Long View
CROSSING THE LINE: FINDING AMERICA IN THE BORDERLANDS
The Tanton Time-bomb
The case brought by Carlos Holguín and Peter Schey in 1985 on behalf of 2,000 children detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner for the western region, Harold Ezell, would wind its way through the US legal system for more than a decade. Resistance to ensure the rights of immigrant kids came from a little-seen but already very powerful counter-movement sparked by a small-town Michigan ophthalmologist two decades before. Though it had nothing to do with eyesight, it did possess long-term vision. And in the mid-1980s, that vision was coming into focus.
The small-town Michigan ophthalmologist was John Tanton. A first-generation immigrant of English and German lineage, his father emigrated to Detroit from Canada, eventually moving his growing family to the rural wilderness of his wife’s youth: a farm in the thumb of Michigan’s mitten on the shores of Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay.
Young Tanton’s boyhood love for the surrounding countryside turned him into an early environmentalist. Fresh out of the University of Michigan in 1964, he joined the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, organizations established to advocate on behalf of wildlife and the land in the face of ever-encroaching industrialization and urban development.
But in 1968, a bestselling book caused Tanton’s activism to take a radically different turn.
Called The Population Bomb, the book regurgitated the argument of 19th-century cleric and amateur demographer, Thomas Malthus, who believed that population growth, unless controlled, would outpace agricultural growth, leading to mass starvation. “The Bomb,” as the book by Paul and Anne Ehrlich was known, took that argument to a new catastrophic end, predicting that worldwide famine due to overpopulation was imminent.
Tanton bought into the Ehrlichs’ hair-raising premise hook, line, and sinker, becoming an overnight evangelist for “zero population growth.” To that end, he helped to open Planned Parenthood clinics all over northern Michigan. His motivation, however, was not to support the beneficent cause of family planning. He did not aspire to justice for women denied access to health care and social services. Neither did he believe, as the national organization now espouses, that reproductive choice should be the right of women, not the state.
Tanton’s letters from that time reveal a greater interest in the view — straight out of the same eugenicist playbook that inspired Adolf Hitler half a century before — that a better human race could be fashioned through such practices as abortions and forced sterilizations. He worried about "less intelligent" people being allowed to have children, and he felt that "modern medicine and social programs are eroding the human gene pool" by eliminating infant mortality rates.
Critics of “The Bomb” sounded the alarm that the book’s dire projections could be harnessed to justify the oppression of minorities and marginalized groups by folks, like John Tanton, who held white supremacist views. Indeed, once in Washington, DC, as a member of the national board for the nonprofit named eponymously for the movement it represented, Zero Population Growth, Tanton directed his colleagues’ attention to another threat to the environment and, in his opinion, the likeliest cause of the coming population explosion: immigrants, especially those coming from Asia and Latin America.
“I’ve come to the point of view that for European American society and culture to persist requires a European American majority, and a clear one at that,” Tanton wrote in December 1983. Tanton’s followers and intellectual doppelgängers today have since packaged this view as the Great Replacement Theory. It argues that the “wrong sorts of people” are being allowed to emigrate to the USA — that the descendants of white-European immigrants are at risk of being replaced by people of color.
Back in the ‘60s, Tanton tried to convince conservationists and birth-control zealots, alike, that limiting immigration was the only way to curtail population growth and save the environment at the same time. The part he didn’t say out loud was that it would keep the country’s voting base English-speaking, white, and conservative. But in the era of righting the bent arc of justice in the US, stated Tanton decades later, it was a forbidden topic.
“I tried to get some others to think about it and write about it, but I did not succeed. I finally concluded that if anything was going to happen, I would have to do it myself.”
And that is just what he did.
From the wilds of upstate Michigan, a modern Johnny Appleseed, John Tanton sowed dystopian seeds of division, tended to the roots of hate, and grew “into tall oaks — guiding and shaping the public discourse in history-changing ways” — the xenophobic demonization of folks in search of safety that threatens to tear US democracy asunder today.
Tanton spent the remainder of his days, from the mid-60s to his death in 2019, conducting skirmishes in service of a wider war. He founded so-called “think tanks” with money raised from a handful of ridiculously wealthy donors, like the Mellon family heiress, Cordelia Scaife May. He had her Colcom Foundation funnel millions of dollars to elect politicians with known links to the KKK, like Alabama son Jeff Sessions and Kris Kobach of Kansas. He funded anti-immigration activists to release position papers at the local and national levels. With arguments based on pseudoscience and questionable research methods, they championed the end of birthright citizenship; pushed for limits on asylum eligibility, a reduction in legal immigration through refugee caps, the building of a wall on the US-Mexico border, and the criminalization of all those daring to enter the US without authorization. They also lobbied hard for punitive federal opposition to adherents of the Sanctuary Movement.
Sound familiar?
Rise of the US Disinformation Machine
By 1985, when Holguín and Schey filed Flores v. Meese on behalf of the rights of unaccompanied migrant youth, John Tanton had already founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (1979), whose acronym, FAIR, suggests it is the opposite of what it really is: a hate group. He had also birthed The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), whose mantra has always been that immigrants are criminals and perverts and a burden on the US economy, and whose statisticians will torture any data set to make sure that belief appears true.
He had set up US English, whose Proposition 63 kicked off the English-Only movement in 1986. He had established a publishing wing, The Social Contract Press, through which he reissued a translation of The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 French novel that has become the Bible of white supremacists and Great Replacement conspiracy theorists worldwide.
Tanton’s many-tentacled network was by then in bed with local and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as members of Congress, fueling and funding electoral propositions that harnessed blatantly racist tropes and fear-mongering tactics to transform issues of equal justice under the law into wars about culture and identity. Indeed, this tactic led to one of Tanton’s most foundational successes of all…
In 1994, the godfather of the US anti-immigration movement, John Tanton, guided and funded INS Commissioner “if you catch ‘em you should clean ‘em and fry ‘em yourself” Harold Ezell’s foray into politics as the co-author of the California state ballot initiative, Proposition 187. Prop 187 sought to deny public benefits, like health care and education, to anyone living in the state without legal authorization. It directed teachers and healthcare professionals to tattle on their students and patients, respectively, and turn them into the INS.
Tanton money flowed to the white suburbs of Orange County and the San Fernando Valley in Get-Out-The-Vote for Prop 187 campaigns, which proved instrumental. The measure won the day by a 59-41% margin, prompting then-Republican California Governor Pete Wilson to order the referendum’s immediate implementation.
Fortunately, Prop 187 was also immediately challenged and immediately found unlawful. But Tanton was undaunted. Why?
Because he’d finally managed to turn a “forbidden topic” into a national bogeyman. What’s more, first winning, then losing, the battle for Prop 187 taught the Tanton Network of anti-immigration hate groups how to better fight for their cause.
A blueprint emerged that the organization replicated nationwide:
fund citizens groups to drum up populist anger against foreign nationals, especially non-whites;
help craft legislation and laws for state and local governments;
inspire a pipeline of true believers to enter politics and, in the process;
transform them into a powerful lobbying force whose influence would eventually reach all the way to the White House.
FAIR’s president since 1988, Dan Stein, has publicly stated that Proposition 187 has “a direct lineage to Trump.” In his words, the initiative provoked “an escalating curve, from 1994 all the way to 2016,” when it became a key policy plank for Trump & Co: a literal Who’s Who of Tanton Network insiders, including Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr; FAIR pollster Kellyanne Conway; Trump’s ICE Senior Advisor Jon Feere; acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli; Gene Hamilton, who held prominent positions in the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice; and, of course, immigration czar Stephen Miller.
Circling back to Biden’s “transit,” aka asylum, ban…
“The Biden administration’s decision to pursue a policy that advances the agenda of the Trump administration and anti-immigrant hate groups is a horrible humanitarian, legal, and political mistake,” states Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First. “Americans support the right to seek asylum, but this policy will deny refugees asylum, turn many away to danger, and separate others from their families. The anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) praised the Biden administration’s announcement of an asylum ban. On the heels of two congressional hearings riddled with extremist rhetoric, the last thing the Biden administration should be doing is playing into the hands of the perpetrators of anti-immigrant fear-mongering.”
The cancer of division and hate runs so deep in US veins today that even a so-called “humane and orderly borders” president seems blind to how he’s being played by white supremacists, many of whom maintain top jobs in the largest and most troubled law enforcement agency in the land: the Department of Homeland Security. More on that in a subsequent newsletter.