A Border Patrol agent shot and killed a 14-year-old Mexican boy on June 7. At RaceWire, Julianne Hing reports that "Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca [was] on the Mexican side of the El Paso-Juarez border [and] was shot and killed by a Border Patrol officer, who was on the U.S. side." The incident has been condemned by the Mexican government and sparked investigations by the Customs and Border Protection agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The exact details are still being investigated. The Border Patrol claims that the teen was throwing rocks at agents, but eye-witnesses on the Mexican side of the border say otherwise.
President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday that he would be deploying 1,200 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to beef up security along the Río Bravo. This surprise move has garnered criticism from immigrant rights supporters, who argue that it will dehumanize and endanger immigrant and Latino communities.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), started a hubbub among comprehensive immigration reform advocateslast week when he expressed to members of the Capitol press corps that progressive immigration legislation was "dead" for 2010 due to the contentious passage of health care reform. But the battle isn't over yet. In an interview with Sandip Roy at New America Media, Frank Sharry, the executive director of DC-based immigration organization America's Voice, says, "I think we have a good chance of seeing a bipartisan bill being introduced in April."
Graham's declaration mirrors similar antics that happened around the health care debate-where insurance reform was pronounced dead countless times by a wide array of pundits and lawmakers. In fact, Seth Freed Wessler of ColorLines reports that Graham, who has been working with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on an immigration reform bill for a year later changed his tune, stating that he would continue to craft a bipartisan bill.
The Battle in the Senate
Gabriel Arana with The America Prospect questions just how the GOP lawmakers will react to the upcoming immigration debate, arguing that, "Even for those Republicans who are willing to publicly support immigration reform, partisan rancor all but ensures it won't go anywhere."
And outside the Capitol? As Laura Flanders of GRITtv points out, the immigration debate, "has the potential to be far, far messier-and more violent-than the health care battle," and will likely galvanize those with xenophobic tendencies on the far Right to become even more unhinged.
On top of that, providing a pathway to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States will most likely be dead in 2010 if a bill isn't proposed in the Senate this Spring. There needs to be time to debate the issue before the end of the year, and more importantly, before election season kicks off in the Fall. While there's already an immigration bill in the House of Representatives, a timeline for when one will actually be introduced in the Senate is unknown.
Immigration agents go rogue
Combined with the uphill battle for immigration reform, AlterNet reports on a government memo revealing that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has set quotas to initiate more deportations of undocumented immigrants, targeting those who had committed no crimes. The memo was in stark contrast to the Obama administration's stated goal to focus on deporting criminal offenders with violent histories, and prompted immigration rights groups to question the White House agenda.
At the same time, anti-immigration activists are also trying to label all immigrants as criminals. As the Colorado Independent documents, the shooting death of an Arizona rancher near the Mexican border has influenced former Colorado lawmaker Tom Tancredo and his followers to demand that the National Guard be sent the border-even though the death has not even been tied to an undocumented immigrant at this time. (The Department doesn't have jurisdiction over the National Guard to begin with.)
The Inter Press Service also reports on the results of such criminalization, as human rights abuses in immigration detention continue to increase each day. "More abuses in the U.S. immigration detention system came to light last week," notes the media outlet, writing that "It was revealed that two mentally disabled men continue to be held in detention while facing possible deportation for criminal assault convictions, despite having already served their time." The inmates were later released after the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California filed legal petitions against federal government.
Veterans For America has long been focused on issues surrounding our National Guard soldiers and assessing the problems that they face when returning home from Afghanistan and Iraq. Through VFA's nonpartisan National Guard efforts, the group has conducted reports and examined National Guard units on a state-by-state basis to determine their needs and analyze the issues they face.
*Titles and affiliations of each individual are provided for identification purposes only.
Governor Palin's cavalier approach to learning about U.S. national security policy is offensive, given that she is well aware of the horrific impact that the war in Iraq has had on the Alaska National Guard.
When I read the preliminary findings from Veterans for America National Guard Program's work in Alaska, I was outraged. It is unconscionable to think that the citizens of Alaska are suffering in part from her neglect while she - and others associated with the McCain-Palin campaign - uses them to boost her own national security policy credentials.
I have spent the better part of a year trying to get our presidential (and now, vice presidential) candidates to recognize the unprecedented sacrifices that have been asked of our National Guard, but, to date, the response has been inadequate.
Much has been made in the past of President Bush's past 'service' in the National Guard and specifically the fact that when he joined the National Guard, he pointedly checked the box:
My earliest memory of my little cousin Billy is a summer vacation when I was nine and he was four. Our parents had bought us a magic set. I was older and bossier so I was the magician. Billy, with his big doe-eyes and innocence, was my assistant. He would squeak, "Abracadabra!" and I would make things disappear. But try as I might, it only worked on quarters, not Billy. He would always be there, standing shy and quiet and wide-eyed, by my side.
Last week Billy was sent to Iraq. He joined the Delaware National Guard just after high school because he needed support for college tuition. Then September 11th happened, National Guard enlistments skyrocketed, and the tuition benefits were cut. Already enlisted, Bill completed basic training and was sent to Saudi Arabia. At least it wasn't Iraq.
He came back home, got married, got a job and then got called up. Just a few days ago, my little cousin - now 25-years-old - kissed his family goodbye and left for war. This time, the main stage.
Billy's father, my uncle, is a Republican and was originally a fanatical supporter of the war. We got in an argument about preemption once. He told me that if another attack struck New York City where I live and I was hurt, he couldn't live with himself knowing that we could have prevented it by attacking Iraq. He wanted revenge on anyone who might have hurt me or anyone else for that matter. I couldn't agree, couldn't believe that American lives are more important than Iraqis, couldn't imagine preemptively attacking every bad guy in the world, couldn't imagine what that would mean to freedom and liberty everywhere, couldn't imagine that the real motives were anything but oil. We agreed to disagree.
But now everything's changed. Today, my uncle hates the war, more than Saddam, more than Osama, more than anything as far as I can tell. He wishes he hadn't given my mom such a hard time for the anti-war protests she joined. He wishes he'd joined them, too. Like before he couldn't see the truth about the war but now, through tear-filled eyes, it's clear.
At one point, 60% of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11th attacks. Today, according to a recent poll, 60% of Americans think the government misled us in making the case for war. I wonder if it's the same 60%.
I wish more of my friends knew people serving in the war, but most of us had parents who could afford college and our friends could afford college, and their friends, and so we don't know anyone desperate enough to enlist. I wish no one were ever that desperate. I wish the choices presented to us by our government at this point weren't either to attack or abandon but to actually aid the Iraqi people from whom we've taken so much. I wish the war on terror was really a war on poverty, not a war on Arabs and Muslims. I wish there were better options for solving our world's conflicts, that a strong United Nations could have pressured both Iraq and the United States to respect human rights and international law. I wish that a strong United Nations today could help revive and reconstruct Iraq with the credibility that America's go-it-alone shock-and-awe strategy long ago squandered.
I wish I could go to sleep at night feeling secure that war is only used as a desperate and unfortunate last resort not a blunt tool wielded casually by empire. I wish millions of Americans were blocking every intersection in every small town demanding and end to this war. I wish that President Bush and members of Congress and every one of us felt just as frightened for all the American servicemembers in Iraq as I feel for my cousin. And I wish everyone in the United States experienced as much compassion for the Iraqis, too, knowing that we're all in this world together - that with each Iraqi or American death, we would all cringe with the sorrow and fear that it might be one of our loved ones we'll never see again. I wish that everyone could look at the war with that state of mind.
But mostly, I wish that I were nine years old again holding a plastic wand with Billy by my side thinking that, with just one "Abracadabra!", I could make him reappear standing next to me. Or make this war disappear for that matter.
This is a special edition of Strategery, which usually appears every other Wednesday on OpenLeft.
One of the major reasons why Democrats have not yet been able to pass legislation slowing down or ending the Iraq War is because they have remained within their archetype (aka. the role low-information voters perceive them as reflexively playing). The strongest bills they have proposed have all been straight-up "antiwar" bills - that is, they bring the troops home to end the war and that's about it. True, that IS the antiwar movement's goal (a goal I wholeheartedly support) - but the problem with it as the stand-alone legislative strategy is that it doesn't allow Democrats to play outside their antiwar archetype on Republican turf, nor does it make the average Republican incumbent all that uncomfortable, because it doesn't force Republicans to make a choice between loyalty to Bush and loyalty to their conservative base.
Right now, the antiwar movement's strategy is a battle of attrition. Keep pushing standalone antiwar bills, and hope that public opposition to the war will force Republicans to peel off. It certainly may work - but to echo Robert Redford's famous line in The Candidate, there is a better way - at least in terms of a legislative strategy that gets our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible.
Think for a moment about which issue Republicans have been trying to one-up and out-conservative each other on...Got it in your head? Right - it's illegal immigration. On that issue, the least offensive Republican proposal from a racist/xenophobic perspective has been the effort to beef up border security. A look at recent congressional votes shows that beefing up border security has the widest bipartisan support among all the immigration-related proposals being considered.
So here's the concept (which, though I'm not 100 percent sure, I don't think has been tried yet in Congress): How about when Congress reconvenes in September, Democrats bring a bill to the floor of the House and Senate mandating that, say, 25,000 National Guardsmen be taken out of combat in Iraq and be immediately redeployed to guard America's porous domestic borders - both southern and northern? If Democrats wanted to get even more creative, they could additionally mandate that some of these National Guardsmen being redeployed be immediately sent to forest fire emergency zones - many of which are in Republican states right now.
Think this through for a moment. All of a sudden, the illegal-immigration-obsessed Tom Tancredo wing of the Republican Party, which also happens to be the most reflexively pro-war wing of the GOP, would be forced to choose either the Iraq War or beefed up border security. All of a sudden, we would be having a debate about two very real, very pressing priorities, rather than theoreticals and hypotheticals, and we would be discussing exactly how the misuse of our National Guard as a wing of the regular Army harms our ability to deal with the domestic challenges the National Guard was originally established to deal with.
With the war so unpopular, far-right, law-and-order, "tough on immigration" conservatives would be hard-pressed to vote against this kind of bill, potentially providing a veto-proof majority in support of it. And if they didn't vote for it, Democrats would have a flip-flop campaign ad all set for 2008. You can just hear the voiceover: "The Republicans who told us they support border security voted against Democrats' bill to secure our borders."
Obviously, this is not an ideal way to end the war. As Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said, there are very legitimate concerns about the downsides of militarizing our domestic borders. But Durbin has also said that "Democrats are willing to support any reasonable plan that will secure our borders, including the deployment of National Guard troops." And most if not all would be willing to accepting the potential downsides of an increased military presence at our border (downsides which could be minimized if managed properly) as the price to end the war in Iraq.
And that is precisely what this bill would do. With Bush having recklessly stretched the military so thin, taking 25,000 national guardsmen out of the Iraq deployment rotation would compel an end to the war.
In the legislative arena where making law is making imperfect sausages, this is a strategy designed to break apart the Republican coalition by playing offense on their archetype as "tough on immigration" conservatives. Rather than pursuing only the attrition strategy of digging in on the antiwar archetype and hoping public pressure converts a few Republicans (a strategy that could take months of even years), Democrats have to target one GOP weak point that will make Republicans decide between Bush and their base. This strategy laid out here does precisely that, and would have the very real potential of getting a wave of Republicans to vote yes, thus getting our troops out of Iraq right now.
UPDATE: For the record, I feel it is important to reiterate that this is not ideal, but it is a legislative strategy that tries to use the imperfect world within Congress to get something done on the most pressing national security issue of our generation - and in a way that leverages the most bipartisan piece of the divisive immigration debate to make it happen. There is no doubt that the Tancredos of the world use the border security issue to mask their underlying and deplorable racism, and thus I think we all understand why many immigrant rights advocates now hear the term "border security" and automatically think that the person saying it is just trying to shroud a racist instinct in something more politically palatable. But I think this is a very important point: I think, for instance, taking money from racists, surrounding yourself with racists makes you a racist, and proves that you are using talk of "border security" as a way to shroud a racist agenda. But I don't think that simply being for better border security at all of our ports and borders means you are automatically racist. That alone does not make you a racist - it just makes you concerned about national security. You can quite legitimately be for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are currently here, for increased legal immigration, and against the growing anti-Hispanic racism in this country while also believing it's a problem that thousands of miles of our northern and southern borders are completely unsecured. Furthermore, I think if people are automatically accused of racism merely for bringing up the concept of improved border security at ALL of our borders - I think that hurts not only the ability of us to discuss these issues rationally, but hurts the credibility and the case of those who are very courageously trying to fight racism.
The art of the legislative arena - an imperfect arena at best - is to find a way to stay true to your own ideals, while wedging the other side into the position of feeling like they HAVE to support you. The least offensive thing that the Tancredo wing has hung its hat on is better border security. Now, we all KNOW that this wing uses border security to SHROUD its racist motivations - no one denies that. But what I'm proposing is calling their damn bluff. They say they aren't racists and really just for "controlling the borders?" Well, OK, here's what they publicly say they want - now are they going to vote for it or not? Cross-posted from Working Assets
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