Welcome new subscribers! I hope you’ll listen and share today’s video of the May meet up of the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series. Talk about timely! Even my co-facilitator Dora Rodriguez and I could not have anticipated that our discussion topic would become a reality in Los Angeles just two weeks later. Click the button below if you’d like to learn more about our monthly series. Next event: June 22, 2:30-4:00 pm ET.
In Chapters 9 and 16 of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, I warned that Trump & Co, if elected again, could harness the enforcement entities of the Department of Homeland “Security” — ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes Border Patrol — to drive our democracy into crisis and toward authoritarian rule. These forces know no transparency. They suffer little accountability. They are trained in counterinsurgency tactics. They hunt, subdue, disappear, even kill, without worry about human rights and constitutional protections.
If you ask them why, they will tell you: We’re just doing our jobs.
While they are being, and have been, deployed like an army by the Trump regime, they are forces that were allowed to metastasize under administrations on both sides of the political aisle — for decades. Under orders now to deport 3,000 people a day, they are hunting and disappearing parents attending elementary school graduation ceremonies, families following the rules from their immigration court hearings, working people at Home Depots, in restaurants, at hotels, and on construction sites.
Trump & Co are committing this violence against unarmed, non-criminal offenders with a purpose:
to provoke a citizen backlash, so they can
invoke the Insurrection Act, in order
to side-step the Posse Comitatus Act, so they can
turn US forces against all of us.
And that, my friends, is martial law.
The MAGA-party regime — let us be clear, it is neither “Republican” nor an “administration” — built their entire messaging machine on whipping up fears about an “invasion” at the US southern border. Well, I crossed the US-Mexico line from 2020-2024, researching my book. I saw no tanks or uniformed troops bearing arms.
I saw only fathers and mothers bearing children in their arms, and all that they own on their backs.
The only places that I’ve witnessed uniformed troops bearing arms in the US today is in our cities, both in the borderlands as well as in the interior. First it was balaclava-clad ICE cops and Border Protection cowboys hunting and disappearing fathers and mothers and children, shamefully zip-tying behind their backs the arms of school-aged US citizens. Now federalized National Guard troops and Marines have joined ICE and CBP’s wretched band, and with them has come not calm but more chaos.
Let us be clear: The only invasion in the US today is the stepped-up southward-moving federal militarization of the borderlands, and the logarithmic escalation of the US Border Industrial Complex nationwide.
Here’s what too few US residents understand: The whole of the US is encircled in a 100-mile policing zone, which is the jurisdiction of CBP. This area is home to 2/3rds of the US population; nine of our 10 largest cities, including Los Angeles; as well as six whole states and DC. Owing to a series of dubious 1970s Supreme Court decisions, our Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful searches and seizures no longer apply here, especially if you're a person of color.
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Trump & CO harnessed CBP forces, along with their interior counterpart, ICE, to clear DC’s Lafayette Park of peaceful protestors and disappear demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, into unmarked vans. With fascism now ascendant in the USA, we should be horrified, especially as we see the made-for-Fox-TV US military invasion play out on the streets of LA.
My co-facilitator of the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series, Dora Rodriguez, and I saw this coming, as have borderlanders from Texas to California — for decades. Indeed, a 2021 ACLU-Michigan report found that the expansion in Homeland "Security" policing and surveillance at the US northern border is only about 10 years behind the southwest.
Just days before Trump & Co’s invasion of LA, we assembled an august panel to ask:
What does the stepped-up militarization of the borderlands augur for the future?
And what does it mean? Is it a prelude to martial law?
We hope you’ll click the play button above and listen to the conversation in full.
We hope, too, that you’ll share it far and wide because what’s happening in LA today could be coming to your town tomorrow, especially if you, too, are in the 100-mile policing perimeter that is the militarized US borderlands.
With big gratitude to:
Dylan Corbett, Executive Director, Hope Border Institute, El Paso, Texas
Amerika Garcia-Grewel, Border Vigil, Eagle Pass, Texas
James Holeman, Battalion Search and Rescue, Silver City, New Mexico
Dora Rodriguez, Salvavision, Tucson Samaritans, Hope Knows No Borders Book Club & Webinar Series, Tucson, Arizona
URGENT Call To Action:
Contact your senators today. Tell them to VOTE NO to Trump & Co’s “Bill, Beautiful Bill,” aka the “Mass Murder Bill” (Anat Shenker-Osorio), aka the “Terrible, Tyrannical Bill” (Stacy Abrams). It is an abomination, seeking to give more power to ICE and CBP. And that is a genie that cannot be rebottled.
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