Al Otro Lado’s Tijuana-based litigation and policy director examines the border, past, present, and future, through the lens of the invasive and futuristic surveillance apparatus that is already here.
This interview well sets out the current applied foreign and immigration policies of the Biden Administration at the US Mexico Border, by Al Otro Lado attorney, Erika Pinheiro. The Biden administration, we are told, is now fully embracing technology to bio-metrically screen and expel immigrants who are legally seeking asylum. By allowing in some nationalities and denying others, the Liberal Administration is selectively using asylum for direct foreign policy goals. This is an anathema to the purpose of asylum.
Given that asylum quotas before WWII were often used against non-Europeans, and now they are again, the specter of a widening war in Europe spilling out of Ukraine at Russia's hands, will provoke a new crisis around international standards for asylum. The 1980 Refugee Act is the US legislation that enshrined the Post WWII standards. The Biden Administration has willfully incorporated Trump policies of the "Migrant Protection Program" and Title 42 as bureaucratic justifications for denial of the right to asylum. Since the start of those policies, the governments of Mexican , Honduran, Guatemalan, and El Salvadoran have acquiesced to security measures, first with and then without bilateral agreements.
Any country's citizen in a different country's custody obliges the custodial country to report their presence. On a daily basis, the Biden Administration is in violation of the Vienna Accord in the Arizona Border Region DHS is not informing foreign Consulates before forcing their nationals onto planes and deporting . . . er . . . "expelling" . . . them. Expelling nationals via bio-metric "paperless" departures s a technical work around the fact they are deporting immigrants without legally processing them for asylum. The terminology is both cynical and an attempt to obscure their dirty border policies.
Unfortunately, liberal organization like the ACLU bought into the Biden administration's initial overtures providing political cover for their hard tactics and denial of asylum. According to a well documented report from Human Rights First, over 8,000 acts of violence against immigrants in Northern Mexican border towns have been carried out , as the predicted result of the Trump cum Biden Border Policies.
The Conservative Right uses the border as a whipping boy for its campaign coffers. The Liberal Left Biden Administration uses immigration to garner votes for its interior politicians. Neither camp spends any time in the Mexican border towns' bus stations, highways, public plazas, grave-sites, or at migrant death fields in Brooks Co., Texas nor in Pima County or on the Tohono O'odham Nation in Arizona, nor in the Ports of Entry, nor do they visit immigrant shelters there.
They dare not - lest their failed national security model - fails them too.
This interview well sets out the current applied foreign and immigration policies of the Biden Administration at the US Mexico Border, by Al Otro Lado attorney, Erika Pinheiro. The Biden administration, we are told, is now fully embracing technology to bio-metrically screen and expel immigrants who are legally seeking asylum. By allowing in some nationalities and denying others, the Liberal Administration is selectively using asylum for direct foreign policy goals. This is an anathema to the purpose of asylum.
Given that asylum quotas before WWII were often used against non-Europeans, and now they are again, the specter of a widening war in Europe spilling out of Ukraine at Russia's hands, will provoke a new crisis around international standards for asylum. The 1980 Refugee Act is the US legislation that enshrined the Post WWII standards. The Biden Administration has willfully incorporated Trump policies of the "Migrant Protection Program" and Title 42 as bureaucratic justifications for denial of the right to asylum. Since the start of those policies, the governments of Mexican , Honduran, Guatemalan, and El Salvadoran have acquiesced to security measures, first with and then without bilateral agreements.
Any country's citizen in a different country's custody obliges the custodial country to report their presence. On a daily basis, the Biden Administration is in violation of the Vienna Accord in the Arizona Border Region DHS is not informing foreign Consulates before forcing their nationals onto planes and deporting . . . er . . . "expelling" . . . them. Expelling nationals via bio-metric "paperless" departures s a technical work around the fact they are deporting immigrants without legally processing them for asylum. The terminology is both cynical and an attempt to obscure their dirty border policies.
Unfortunately, liberal organization like the ACLU bought into the Biden administration's initial overtures providing political cover for their hard tactics and denial of asylum. According to a well documented report from Human Rights First, over 8,000 acts of violence against immigrants in Northern Mexican border towns have been carried out , as the predicted result of the Trump cum Biden Border Policies.
The Conservative Right uses the border as a whipping boy for its campaign coffers. The Liberal Left Biden Administration uses immigration to garner votes for its interior politicians. Neither camp spends any time in the Mexican border towns' bus stations, highways, public plazas, grave-sites, or at migrant death fields in Brooks Co., Texas nor in Pima County or on the Tohono O'odham Nation in Arizona, nor in the Ports of Entry, nor do they visit immigrant shelters there.
They dare not - lest their failed national security model - fails them too.
Juarez is not Cancun.
Blake Gentry (Cherokee)