The Border Crisis on Steroids

[gwb-trading]

A Democrat Invited Migrant Kids to a Notorious Florida Facility. It Did Not Go Over Well.
NEVER TWEET
Rumors and reports were swirling. Then Rep. Frederica Wilson went on Twitter.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/democ...torious-florida-facility-homestead?ref=scroll

MIAMI— On Monday afternoon, Carrie Feit paced the sidewalk along the perimeter of a sprawling federallyowned complex across the street from an air force base in Homestead, Florida. It’s been more than a year since the property was last used to detain more than 2,000 immigrant children who crossed the border without an adult or who had been separated from their family members. The site was shut down during the Trump era amid an avalanche of scandals, including allegations of sex abuse involving the kids housed there.

But as talk of a “surge” of migrants at the border has picked up steam in recent weeks, speculation has swirled around whether the Biden administration will reopen the controversial detention center. That inspired Feit and other immigration-reform activists to mount a stake-out operation outside the facility to monitor if any immigrant children were transported in.

“We needed to start seeing again what was happening; if there were any preparations taking place,” the 47-year-old Miami-based activist said. “And also to resist and have a presence so we can send a clear message that we don’t want a child migrant facility reopened here.”

So far that hasn’t happened, but human activity on the site is picking up, Feit told The Daily Beast. Then, on Saturday, a Democratic member of Congress sent Feit and other immigration advocates into a panic with a tweet suggesting the facility might be a solution to the problem. The episode points to the perilous path facing Biden as his administration battles both humanitarian chaos on one hand and the bogus perception of an open border on the other.

“The Homestead facility is empty! Bring the immigrant children,” read a tweet directed at the official accounts of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris and sent by Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson. "Send us the girls. Bring them now and hold me and my community responsible for their humane treatment. We will visit often and monitor their care! Miami-Dade is opening its arms!”

As the number of migrants, and especially children, in U.S. custody has shot up in recent weeks, the feds have stood up new facilities at a Dallas convention center and a former oil workers’ camp converted into an emergency housing facility for immigrant kids. But the apparent endorsement of a new version of the notorious facility in Homestead—from a prominent Democrat in power, no less—has advocates fearing the worst.

Thomas Kennedy, a Miami-based activist on immigration reform and other progressive issues, retweeted Wilson by linking to a video clip of Vice-President Harris condemning the site while on a campaign stop near the Homestead facility when she was still a Democratic presidential contender. At the time, Harris promised to shut down for-profit detention centers like the Homestead one for good.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1376212050041520129

In a phone interview, Kennedy told The Daily Beast he was taken aback by Wilson’s tweet, noting one reason progressive voters elected Biden and Harris was because they promised not to replicate Trump-era immigration policies. “Literally doing the exact same thing at the same facility is not acceptable,” Kennedy said. “If they reopen that site, it is quite frankly disturbing. It’s also a political liability for Democrats. They will look like hypocrites.”

(More at above url)

 

[FortuneTeller]

Biden* is the Greatest Human Smuggler and Sex Trafficker of All Time.

What an accomplishment!

Biden is a disgrace to the USA.

 

[Cuddles]

CNN got played

https://prospect.org/justice/did-cnn-air-staged-migrant-crossing-of-the-rio-grande/
Did CNN Air a Staged Migrant Crossing of the Rio Grande?
An unusual video has been flagged by activists as deliberately manufactured to present a story of a border crisis, possibly with the participation of the Border Patrol.

The scene starts out serenely, as CNN national correspondent Ed Lavandera and crew motor by boat down the Rio Grande near the city of Hidalgo, Texas, as the sun sets. But soon, the idyllic setting gives way.

“That’s when we stumble across a group of migrants loading into a raft,” Lavandera says in the clip. He’s heard speaking with the migrants in Spanish to ease the tension. In the video, shot on March 11 and aired the next day, a group of migrants, including children, board a tiny raft and are led across by a man in a black ski mask and camouflage clothing. The migrants wear clean-looking surgical masks and life vests.

“The Rio Grande Valley has been ground zero for the latest surge in migration and here you see the operation unfolding right in front of us,” said Lavandera. “After the first raft crosses, the magnitude of this moment reveals itself. Dozens of migrants emerge and walk down to the river’s edge. You can see that this is a serious operation.”

He narrates what he describes as a “highly organized system,” with the raft taking at least six trips across the river. “Scenes like this are escalating in the Rio Grande Valley,” Lavandera says.

But the scene may not be all that it appears to be. Immigrant rights advocates and others claim that the footage was staged, potentially with the cooperation of the Border Patrol. CNN was warned that the clip appeared to be a fabrication before it aired, but the network decided to run it anyway. A similar clip that appears to show the same or a similar trafficking incident from another angle was shared across right-wing media and even linked to on the social media accounts of members of Congress. This clip went viral among immigration opponents, and is helping to fuel the story of an out-of-control border. The video—legitimized on mainstream media—easily fit into that narrative. Now a series of charges and counter-charges have demonstrated the radioactive politics of immigration.

The scene appears to be just a preview of what’s to come. Yesterday’s Sunday shows centered on the border, fueling a crisis narrative as the administration continued to double down on its “border is closed” messaging.

In the CNN footage, the smuggler leading the boat wears fatigues and a black ski mask. Smugglers typically attempt to blend in with the migrants, to avoid more severe punishment should they be caught. Smugglers also don’t normally provide face masks and life vests, nor ferry six boatloads of people across in broad daylight. Migrants also don’t typically line up single file along the shore to cross.

To Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent, the smuggler’s face mask rang alarm bells. “That told me [the smuggler] knew he would be filmed and he didn’t want to be set up,” she said.

Marianna Treviño Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, pointed out that her organization goes out on the river at least four times a week and never sees any kind of trafficking operation like this.

The Guardian reported that the area of the river where the footage was taken can only be accessed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection–controlled boat slips. Wright confirmed this to the Prospect.

Wright added that a video like this is normally only distributed in right-wing media, not mainstream outlets like CNN. “They got smarter this time,” she said. “They either duped Ed Lavandera into doing this or he’s so desperate for ratings he went along with it.”

Separately, another video appears to show the same or a similar scene. Filmed by Jaeson Jones of Tripwires & Triggers, a right-wing media site that covers the border, the footage has been viewed thousands of times on social media, and has been covered by the Daily Mail, The Epoch Times, Breitbart, and others. Taken from the north shore of the river, the vertical phone footage shows migrants arriving through the trees on the American side of the river. The boat in this video and the boat in the CNN footage have the same markings, and the same ski-masked, fatigues-wearing man who appears to be steering the boat. It’s unclear if the two videos were taken at the same time on March 11, but it’s also unclear how long CNN was on the river to get the shot. It likely took hours to ferry the dozens of migrants across the river. As the migrants disembark, the men behind the camera are greeting them cordially in Spanish and laughing.


“If you’re crossing people and cross ten people, you’re begging to be caught by Border Patrol,” said Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, a volunteer who works with asylum seekers along the border. “No one is stupid enough to go back and forth. In the video, they said that they did that six times. I can’t imagine any coyote willing to risk their freedom like that. From my experience, I’ve never heard of anything like that or seen anything like that.”

At one point in the footage from the shore, the men behind the camera have a conversation. One person says to the other, “Do you ever hook those guys up?” and another person responds, “Yeah. Two or three of ’em. They’re always Grade A.” In her Medium post, Budd wrote, “As a former agent, what I hear is these men possibly talking about paying this smuggler off to gather a bunch of unsuspecting migrants and have them cross in a particular place in order to get this shot.”

Later in the conversation, one of the men says, “Oh yeah, they’re twenty-sixes,” referring to a section of the U.S. Code on re-entry of people who entered illegally. In this case, it likely means that the group includes migrants who were expelled or deported and are trying again, a growing phenomenon under the Title 42 health order which expels migrants and asylum seekers.

A third video, taken from the same boat CNN filmed from and showing the same trafficking incident, was shared by Texas GOP chair Allen West on March 12. “So we are just watching this happen? This is utterly disturbing. We had better border security in freaking Afghanistan!” West wrote. The video has more than 90,000 views.

The National Butterfly Center, a conservation organization that became involved in migration issues when the Trump administration attempted to build the border wall across its reservation, posted on Facebook and Twitter about the videos. Wright told the Prospect that she alerted CNN to the possibility that the trafficking incident may have been staged prior to the footage being aired live. “Then, we saw CNN air the same staged event, shot from the river—not the riverbank—with claims that Ed Lavandera just ‘stumbled upon’ it ‘within 10 minutes,’” the group posted on Facebook.

The Butterfly Center alleged that Tim Wilkins, “a failed, local GOP candidate running on an anti-immigration platform … arranged for CNN to be there at the appointed time and place.”

CNN has not yet responded to a request for comment. But in tweets, its head of communications Matt Dornic maintains that the two videos were not shot on the same day. In another tweet, Dornic wrote, “CNN did not participate in any type of coordinated effort to shoot a staged scene of migrants crossing the river nor have we found any credible evidence that suggests our team was unknowingly part of a set-up by Border Patrol or anyone else.”

Budd says that the Tripwires & Triggers footage often gets picked up by larger media outlets. In a March 18 Medium post titled “How Border Patrol Manipulates Media,” Budd wrote, “Republicans [are] making photo ops by visiting the border and espousing lies and by right-wing white nationalists setting up fake scenarios of smuggling for the press to capture.”

Jones’s footage from the shore was also shared by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Henry Cuellar (D-TX) on Twitter. Neither congressman has yet responded to a request for comment. “We have to understand and address the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that lead migrants to the U.S.,” Cuellar wrote in the tweet. Cuellar also showed the video at a local roundtable event, and would not respond to local reporters’ questions about the origins of the video.

Budd says that the reason right-wing outlets are pushing footage like this is to “sabotage” the Biden administration. She says that except for the rise in the number of unaccompanied children, there is no border crisis. More than 13,000 unaccompanied children are currently in government custody, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a March 16 statement that the department is on track to stop more migrants crossing the border than at any time in the last 20 years.

But the Biden administration has repeatedly said—in English and in Spanish—that the border is still closed. With few exceptions, this is true. The administration has left in place a Trump-era health authority which allows the government to deport all migrants and asylum seekers at the border, with the exception of children. The health order may be contributing to the rise in unaccompanied children, if parents are electing to send their children across without them. The rising numbers of apprehensions may also reflect higher-than-usual rates of recidivism; multiple apprehensions of the same migrant would be counted multiple times.

The allegedly staged videos come as Republicans are frantically raising alarms about the border. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently took a trip to the border to tour a migrant detention center, calling the situation “human heartbreak.” Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn recently announced another delegation to travel to the border, pressuring Biden to crack down. At a press conference on March 9, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “The Biden Administration has created a crisis at our southern border through open border policies that give the green light to dangerous cartels and other criminal activity.”

Alongside the governor was Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the border patrol agents’ union. The union endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020, and has featured the former president on its weekly podcast, The Green Line, which is sponsored by Breitbart. Andrew Feinberg of The Independent reported yesterday that there appears to be coordination between agents who are unhappy with Biden changes and Republicans eager to hype chaos at the border and make it harder for Biden to govern. Budd also alleges that Border Patrol officers help right-wing, anti-immigrant groups gain access to the border.

The union and Border Patrol have not yet responded to a request for comment. In the week after the trafficking incident, the Biden administration has implemented an informal “gag order,” restricting what agents can say to the media and requiring all inquiries to go through Washington.

The National Butterfly Center posted on its Facebook page that when a local reporter shared the Jones footage from the shore with them, they recognized it as a “psy[chological] op by U.S. Border Patrol” designed to mislead or misinform the public about the border.

“I mean this is exactly the kind of stuff they are taught at West Point and the Homeland Security and Defense college for psychological operations that are deliberately intended to sway public opinion, influence public policy, win or lose elections,” explained Wright. “I do not believe this could have been done without Border Patrol approval,” Budd added in her Medium post. She told the Prospect, “If it’s true that it was staged, that’s a pretty big crime. They just filmed themselves aiding and abetting smuggling.”

It’s also unclear why Border Patrol appears to have never apprehended the migrants who crossed in the two videos, nor made any public announcements since the videos aired that they had apprehended these migrants. Budd explained that foot traffic and vehicle traffic on the north shore of the river would have triggered censors monitored by CBP. Budd also said that agents are most heavily deployed near ports of entry, and this footage was taken within a mile of a port of entry. If it wasn’t staged, there have been no announcements of any investigations into why Border Patrol failed to stop this major crossing or apprehend the migrants. “Either it’s a setup or it’s an ungodly amount of just incompetence on the part of the Border Patrol,” Budd said.

In a Facebook post responding to the Butterfly Center’s allegations, Wilkins said that he spoke to the Border Patrol union representative who handles media and said that he only wanted to raise media awareness of the situation at the border. To Budd, this makes it seem like “the [Border Patrol] chief is running a separate media campaign through the union to separate himself from these dirty tactics,” she wrote in a text to the Prospect.

Even if the two videos were taken at different times, it’s clear that CNN did work with Tim Wilkins, the local Republican candidate in McAllen, Texas, to take the boat out. Facebook screenshots indicate that Wilkins planned the outing for CNN on March 10, the day before the first footage of the trafficking incident appeared. Following the outing, Wilkins and the others in the boat posted photos of the trafficking incident and a video in which Lavandera can be heard narrating his CNN clip. Since the controversy began, Wilkins has threatened the Butterfly Center and its director with legal action, according to screenshots of his lawyer’s letter posted on Facebook.

Wilkins has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Budd maintains that CNN may not have known Wilkins and his associates’ affiliations, and Wilkins maintains that he doesn’t know Jones, who filmed from the riverbank. If that’s true, CNN really may not have known that the scene may have been staged. “If CNN got duped that’s bad, and then on top of it, they’re made to look fake by the very people who say that they are fake,” Budd added. “It’s diabolical.”

 

[TreeFrogTrader]

CNN got played

https://prospect.org/justice/did-cnn-air-staged-migrant-crossing-of-the-rio-grande/
Did CNN Air a Staged Migrant Crossing of the Rio Grande?
An unusual video has been flagged by activists as deliberately manufactured to present a story of a border crisis, possibly with the participation of the Border Patrol.

The scene starts out serenely, as CNN national correspondent Ed Lavandera and crew motor by boat down the Rio Grande near the city of Hidalgo, Texas, as the sun sets. But soon, the idyllic setting gives way.

“That’s when we stumble across a group of migrants loading into a raft,” Lavandera says in the clip. He’s heard speaking with the migrants in Spanish to ease the tension. In the video, shot on March 11 and aired the next day, a group of migrants, including children, board a tiny raft and are led across by a man in a black ski mask and camouflage clothing. The migrants wear clean-looking surgical masks and life vests.

“The Rio Grande Valley has been ground zero for the latest surge in migration and here you see the operation unfolding right in front of us,” said Lavandera. “After the first raft crosses, the magnitude of this moment reveals itself. Dozens of migrants emerge and walk down to the river’s edge. You can see that this is a serious operation.”

He narrates what he describes as a “highly organized system,” with the raft taking at least six trips across the river. “Scenes like this are escalating in the Rio Grande Valley,” Lavandera says.

But the scene may not be all that it appears to be. Immigrant rights advocates and others claim that the footage was staged, potentially with the cooperation of the Border Patrol. CNN was warned that the clip appeared to be a fabrication before it aired, but the network decided to run it anyway. A similar clip that appears to show the same or a similar trafficking incident from another angle was shared across right-wing media and even linked to on the social media accounts of members of Congress. This clip went viral among immigration opponents, and is helping to fuel the story of an out-of-control border. The video—legitimized on mainstream media—easily fit into that narrative. Now a series of charges and counter-charges have demonstrated the radioactive politics of immigration.

The scene appears to be just a preview of what’s to come. Yesterday’s Sunday shows centered on the border, fueling a crisis narrative as the administration continued to double down on its “border is closed” messaging.

In the CNN footage, the smuggler leading the boat wears fatigues and a black ski mask. Smugglers typically attempt to blend in with the migrants, to avoid more severe punishment should they be caught. Smugglers also don’t normally provide face masks and life vests, nor ferry six boatloads of people across in broad daylight. Migrants also don’t typically line up single file along the shore to cross.

To Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent, the smuggler’s face mask rang alarm bells. “That told me [the smuggler] knew he would be filmed and he didn’t want to be set up,” she said.

Marianna Treviño Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, pointed out that her organization goes out on the river at least four times a week and never sees any kind of trafficking operation like this.

The Guardian reported that the area of the river where the footage was taken can only be accessed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection–controlled boat slips. Wright confirmed this to the Prospect.

Wright added that a video like this is normally only distributed in right-wing media, not mainstream outlets like CNN. “They got smarter this time,” she said. “They either duped Ed Lavandera into doing this or he’s so desperate for ratings he went along with it.”

Separately, another video appears to show the same or a similar scene. Filmed by Jaeson Jones of Tripwires & Triggers, a right-wing media site that covers the border, the footage has been viewed thousands of times on social media, and has been covered by the Daily Mail, The Epoch Times, Breitbart, and others. Taken from the north shore of the river, the vertical phone footage shows migrants arriving through the trees on the American side of the river. The boat in this video and the boat in the CNN footage have the same markings, and the same ski-masked, fatigues-wearing man who appears to be steering the boat. It’s unclear if the two videos were taken at the same time on March 11, but it’s also unclear how long CNN was on the river to get the shot. It likely took hours to ferry the dozens of migrants across the river. As the migrants disembark, the men behind the camera are greeting them cordially in Spanish and laughing.


“If you’re crossing people and cross ten people, you’re begging to be caught by Border Patrol,” said Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, a volunteer who works with asylum seekers along the border. “No one is stupid enough to go back and forth. In the video, they said that they did that six times. I can’t imagine any coyote willing to risk their freedom like that. From my experience, I’ve never heard of anything like that or seen anything like that.”

At one point in the footage from the shore, the men behind the camera have a conversation. One person says to the other, “Do you ever hook those guys up?” and another person responds, “Yeah. Two or three of ’em. They’re always Grade A.” In her Medium post, Budd wrote, “As a former agent, what I hear is these men possibly talking about paying this smuggler off to gather a bunch of unsuspecting migrants and have them cross in a particular place in order to get this shot.”

Later in the conversation, one of the men says, “Oh yeah, they’re twenty-sixes,” referring to a section of the U.S. Code on re-entry of people who entered illegally. In this case, it likely means that the group includes migrants who were expelled or deported and are trying again, a growing phenomenon under the Title 42 health order which expels migrants and asylum seekers.

A third video, taken from the same boat CNN filmed from and showing the same trafficking incident, was shared by Texas GOP chair Allen West on March 12. “So we are just watching this happen? This is utterly disturbing. We had better border security in freaking Afghanistan!” West wrote. The video has more than 90,000 views.

The National Butterfly Center, a conservation organization that became involved in migration issues when the Trump administration attempted to build the border wall across its reservation, posted on Facebook and Twitter about the videos. Wright told the Prospect that she alerted CNN to the possibility that the trafficking incident may have been staged prior to the footage being aired live. “Then, we saw CNN air the same staged event, shot from the river—not the riverbank—with claims that Ed Lavandera just ‘stumbled upon’ it ‘within 10 minutes,’” the group posted on Facebook.

The Butterfly Center alleged that Tim Wilkins, “a failed, local GOP candidate running on an anti-immigration platform … arranged for CNN to be there at the appointed time and place.”

CNN has not yet responded to a request for comment. But in tweets, its head of communications Matt Dornic maintains that the two videos were not shot on the same day. In another tweet, Dornic wrote, “CNN did not participate in any type of coordinated effort to shoot a staged scene of migrants crossing the river nor have we found any credible evidence that suggests our team was unknowingly part of a set-up by Border Patrol or anyone else.”

Budd says that the Tripwires & Triggers footage often gets picked up by larger media outlets. In a March 18 Medium post titled “How Border Patrol Manipulates Media,” Budd wrote, “Republicans [are] making photo ops by visiting the border and espousing lies and by right-wing white nationalists setting up fake scenarios of smuggling for the press to capture.”

Jones’s footage from the shore was also shared by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Henry Cuellar (D-TX) on Twitter. Neither congressman has yet responded to a request for comment. “We have to understand and address the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that lead migrants to the U.S.,” Cuellar wrote in the tweet. Cuellar also showed the video at a local roundtable event, and would not respond to local reporters’ questions about the origins of the video.

Budd says that the reason right-wing outlets are pushing footage like this is to “sabotage” the Biden administration. She says that except for the rise in the number of unaccompanied children, there is no border crisis. More than 13,000 unaccompanied children are currently in government custody, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a March 16 statement that the department is on track to stop more migrants crossing the border than at any time in the last 20 years.

But the Biden administration has repeatedly said—in English and in Spanish—that the border is still closed. With few exceptions, this is true. The administration has left in place a Trump-era health authority which allows the government to deport all migrants and asylum seekers at the border, with the exception of children. The health order may be contributing to the rise in unaccompanied children, if parents are electing to send their children across without them. The rising numbers of apprehensions may also reflect higher-than-usual rates of recidivism; multiple apprehensions of the same migrant would be counted multiple times.

The allegedly staged videos come as Republicans are frantically raising alarms about the border. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently took a trip to the border to tour a migrant detention center, calling the situation “human heartbreak.” Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn recently announced another delegation to travel to the border, pressuring Biden to crack down. At a press conference on March 9, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “The Biden Administration has created a crisis at our southern border through open border policies that give the green light to dangerous cartels and other criminal activity.”

Alongside the governor was Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the border patrol agents’ union. The union endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020, and has featured the former president on its weekly podcast, The Green Line, which is sponsored by Breitbart. Andrew Feinberg of The Independent reported yesterday that there appears to be coordination between agents who are unhappy with Biden changes and Republicans eager to hype chaos at the border and make it harder for Biden to govern. Budd also alleges that Border Patrol officers help right-wing, anti-immigrant groups gain access to the border.

The union and Border Patrol have not yet responded to a request for comment. In the week after the trafficking incident, the Biden administration has implemented an informal “gag order,” restricting what agents can say to the media and requiring all inquiries to go through Washington.

The National Butterfly Center posted on its Facebook page that when a local reporter shared the Jones footage from the shore with them, they recognized it as a “psy[chological] op by U.S. Border Patrol” designed to mislead or misinform the public about the border.

“I mean this is exactly the kind of stuff they are taught at West Point and the Homeland Security and Defense college for psychological operations that are deliberately intended to sway public opinion, influence public policy, win or lose elections,” explained Wright. “I do not believe this could have been done without Border Patrol approval,” Budd added in her Medium post. She told the Prospect, “If it’s true that it was staged, that’s a pretty big crime. They just filmed themselves aiding and abetting smuggling.”

It’s also unclear why Border Patrol appears to have never apprehended the migrants who crossed in the two videos, nor made any public announcements since the videos aired that they had apprehended these migrants. Budd explained that foot traffic and vehicle traffic on the north shore of the river would have triggered censors monitored by CBP. Budd also said that agents are most heavily deployed near ports of entry, and this footage was taken within a mile of a port of entry. If it wasn’t staged, there have been no announcements of any investigations into why Border Patrol failed to stop this major crossing or apprehend the migrants. “Either it’s a setup or it’s an ungodly amount of just incompetence on the part of the Border Patrol,” Budd said.

In a Facebook post responding to the Butterfly Center’s allegations, Wilkins said that he spoke to the Border Patrol union representative who handles media and said that he only wanted to raise media awareness of the situation at the border. To Budd, this makes it seem like “the [Border Patrol] chief is running a separate media campaign through the union to separate himself from these dirty tactics,” she wrote in a text to the Prospect.

Even if the two videos were taken at different times, it’s clear that CNN did work with Tim Wilkins, the local Republican candidate in McAllen, Texas, to take the boat out. Facebook screenshots indicate that Wilkins planned the outing for CNN on March 10, the day before the first footage of the trafficking incident appeared. Following the outing, Wilkins and the others in the boat posted photos of the trafficking incident and a video in which Lavandera can be heard narrating his CNN clip. Since the controversy began, Wilkins has threatened the Butterfly Center and its director with legal action, according to screenshots of his lawyer’s letter posted on Facebook.

Wilkins has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Budd maintains that CNN may not have known Wilkins and his associates’ affiliations, and Wilkins maintains that he doesn’t know Jones, who filmed from the riverbank. If that’s true, CNN really may not have known that the scene may have been staged. “If CNN got duped that’s bad, and then on top of it, they’re made to look fake by the very people who say that they are fake,” Budd added. “It’s diabolical.”

Bottom line.

There is an invasion at the border and it is real.

Stupid people playing games or nor playing games does not change that one iota.

Joe Biden has a full blown crisis on his hand. Not to worry though. He deals with it daily by going out and crowing about how well it is working out to be able to hand out the Trump vaccines.

We have seen other stupid CNN videos of stupid border visits. Some will recall the stupid video of stupid Jim Acosta going to the border and videoing an area where nothing was happening and there were no illegals crossing there so therefore there was no need for the wall. Nevermind that many pointed out that the wall might be one of the reasons why no one was crossing there.

Did I say stupid?

 

[gwb-trading]

 

[WeToddDid2]

 

[elderado]

SEND THEM TO ORPHANAGES IN THEIR HOME COUNTRY!!!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...000-migrants-kids-crowded-Texas-facility.html

 

[gwb-trading]

The number of unaccompanied minors detained at the border nearly doubled in March compared with February. Total migrant arrivals passed a 15-year high.
Friday, April 2, 2021 12:21 PM EST
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/border-crossings-us-mexico.html

Altogether, border officials encountered more than 170,000 migrants in March, a nearly 70 percent increase from February and the highest monthly since 2006.

More than 18,700 children and teenagers were taken into custody after crossing the border, including at port entries, in March, nearly double the roughly 9,450 minors detained in February. Just 3,490 minors crossed in February of last year.

The unaccompanied children and teenagers detained at the border nearly doubled in March compared with the previous month, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

Altogether, border officials encountered more than 170,000 migrants in March, a nearly 70 percent increase from February and the highest monthly since 2006. Officials advised that the statistics are preliminary and an official count will likely be released next week.

More than 18,700 children and teenagers were taken into custody after crossing the border, including at port entries, in March, nearly double the roughly 9,450 minors detained in February. Just 3,490 minors crossed in February of last year.

Border officials also encountered more than 53,000 migrants traveling as families in March, up from roughly 19,250 in the prior month, according to the documents, even as the Biden administration struggled to safely process thousands of minors already held in border detention centers. The pace of crossings by migrant families is similar to numbers in 2019, when the Trump administration struggled to safely process a surge of Central American families fleeing poverty and persecution.

President Biden has left a Trump-era pandemic emergency rule in place empowering agents to rapidly turn away migrants at the border without providing the chance to ask for asylum, but the administration has not applied the sweeping restriction to unaccompanied minors. Faced with criticism from Republicans that Mr. Biden has not asserted control at the border, administration officials have repeatedly cited the use of the rule against single adults and families.

But a majority of the families crossing the border are now being taken into custody and subsequently released into the United States because of restricted capacity in facilities on both sides of the southwest border, according to government documents and homeland security officials.

To relieve overcrowding in border detention facilities, border agents are now releasing many families at bus stations along the border, including some without full information for their upcoming court appearances, according to officials.

The administration has attributed the inability to expel families to a change in Mexican law that prohibits the detention of small children. Authorities in Mexico have also refused the expulsions because of restricted space in shelters where they could house the families.

 

[gwb-trading]

Migrants have heard the message from the Biden administration loud and clear -- come now, it is easy to get into the U.S. with your children.

Biden tells migrants to stay put. Central Americans hear a different message
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-messaging-insight-idUSKBN2BN1BB

LA TÉCNICA, GUATEMALA (Reuters) - Maritza Hernández arrived at this remote Guatemalan village exhausted, with two young kids in tow and more than a thousand miles left to travel. She was motivated by a simple - if not entirely accurate - story.

“I heard news they are letting children in,” said Hernández, explaining she planned to cross the U.S. border in Texas and seek asylum.

The number of immigrant families apprehended by U.S. agents along the southern border nearly tripled in February from a month earlier to about 19,000 people. Hunger and poverty are spurring their flight. So is disinformation that has rocketed across social media and by word of mouth that the U.S. border is now wide open.

Reuters interviewed nearly two dozen migrants and more than a dozen people identifying themselves as smugglers, and examined hundreds of posts in closed Facebook groups where these “coyotes” advertise their services. The review revealed pervasive myths about immigration policy changes under U.S. President Joe Biden.

“There’s 100 days of free passage across the border,” a Guatemalan smuggler told Reuters.

The truth is much more complex.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to enforce a policy, implemented by former President Donald Trump one year ago, of returning most southern-border crossers to Mexico. About 70,000 people, or 72% of such migrants - mostly single adults - were rapidly deported in February alone, according to CBP data. Some of those people were likely repeat crossers as the recidivism rate has climbed in the past year, according to U.S. officials.

“Don’t come over,” Biden said in a March 16 interview with ABC News when asked to articulate his message to hopefuls. “Don’t leave your town or city or community.”

Still, it’s true that more migrants - mainly children and families - have been allowed to enter the United States in the early days of his administration than in the final days of Trump’s. In February, more than half of the family members caught with children at the border were not expelled. Many have been released from CBP custody into the United States as they await asylum hearings.

Their success has supercharged migrant and smuggler communication channels, with many now urging travelers to head north before the door slams shut, said Andrew Seele, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington-based think tank.

“Smugglers can definitely exaggerate things and make up information, but they can’t completely sell what doesn’t exist,” Seele said.

Biden aide Roberta Jacobson, the White House’s southern border coordinator, said the administration is now more aggressively discouraging migration.

Since January, the State Department has placed more than 28,000 radio ads in Spanish, Portuguese and six indigenous languages on 133 stations in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Brazil, and it has worked with Facebook and Instagram to create advertisements to dissuade migrants, according to the department and the White House.

Whether it works remains to be seen. Trump’s anti-immigration message was loud and clear. Yet on his watch in February 2019, U.S. border agents encountered more than 40,000 people traveling in family groups, about twice as many as the Biden administration saw last month, according to CBP figures.

SMUGGLER TRADE THRIVING
The business of moving migrants is booming in the hamlet of La Técnica, deep in a Guatemalan rainforest, where Hernández and her two children stopped to rest.

In early March, Reuters witnessed motorized canoes whisking hundreds of U.S.-bound migrants across the Usumacinta River to the area’s unguarded border with Mexico.

Carlos, a smuggler who gave only his first name, chatted by phone with a colleague in the Mayan language Q’eqchi’ about an impending arrival. This transportation crossroads is also an information hub where news - both true and fake - spreads rapidly.

“Supposedly the president is letting children in,” Carlos said of Biden.

Carlos had it partly right. Biden, in a shift from the previous administration, said he would not turn away “unaccompanied minors” - kids crossing the border without parents or legal guardians. These children can now enter the United States to pursue asylum claims, in accordance with U.S. law.

The new administration has done the same for some migrant families along a limited, 230-mile stretch of the border between Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. That shift came in early February after Tamaulipas refused to continue allowing U.S. border officials to expel back into the state Central American families with children under the age of six. Biden has said his team is working to convince Mexico to take more of those families back.

Much of this nuance has been lost in Central America, a region desperate for an escape valve. Migrants are being driven by gang violence and poverty that has been exacerbated by job losses from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The situation is particularly dire in Honduras, where hurricanes Eta and Iota last November destroyed tens of thousands of homes. Nearly a third of the country’s population is now beset by a worsening hunger crisis, according to a government report published in February.

Hernández, who hails from the Honduran coastal state of Colón, said the storms wiped out the family’s chickens and inundated the farm fields where her husband worked. In February, she defied her spouse and set off for Texas with her two children, encouraged by news of other families successfully crossing the border.

The U.S. government radio spots warn migrants against such a journey. In an ad currently broadcast in Honduras, a man named “Jorge” advises “Rosita” that she could be “assaulted, kidnapped, abandoned or infected with coronavirus” - and would likely be detained or deported if she reached the United States.

But other U.S.-based sources are fueling the myth of an open border. Texas-based citizen journalist Luis Rodriguez, who was born in Honduras, has posted several videos for his 400,000 Facebook followers encouraging migrant families to capitalize.

“How long will this last? Well, no one knows,” he said in a March 7 video.

Rodriguez did not respond to requests for comment.

Some high-profile Republicans, too, are sending the message via prominent news outlets that crossing is easy. In a March 21 interview on “Fox News Sunday,” U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said “the border right now is wide open.”

Cotton repeated the exaggeration when contacted by Reuters.

SOME LUCKY, OTHERS NOT
Back in La Técnica, migrant Enrique Gallean shouted a warning to families gathered on the dock as he stepped off one of the rare boats bearing migrants back into Guatemala.

“They’re not letting children in!” he said.

Clutching his 8-year-old son’s hand, the Honduran native told Reuters he had recently crossed the U.S. border near Roma, Texas, and surrendered himself to CBP in the hopes of being allowed to pursue asylum. Instead, Gallean said, they were rapidly expelled to Mexico.

It was much the same for Hector Ruiz. A resident of El Salvador, he and his wife and three young children passed through La Técnica in early March with high hopes. He said he paid $20,000 to smugglers to get his spouse and kids to the Texas border to claim asylum. Ruiz, who had a previous deportation order, didn’t intend to cross, but he accompanied his family much of the way to ensure their safety.

Just over a week later, Ruiz told Reuters his wife and children had been expelled to Mexico.

“We went because we heard the news that there were 100 days of free passage!” Ruiz exclaimed by telephone. “Now we’re screwed.”

Hernández and her two children were luckier. She said that on March 19 her family turned themselves in to CBP in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, only to be released two days later to start the journey to Maryland, where her mother resides.

“We’re free!” she told Reuters by phone.

The news organization could not determine why the three were admitted while other families were not. CBP said it could not comment on the case due to security and privacy reasons.

Hernández’s WhatsApp profile now features a photo of her, the children and their grandmother beaming with happiness following their reunion. That portrait of success travels with each message she sends to friends and family back in Honduras.

 

[TreeFrogTrader]

Migrants have heard the message from the Biden administration loud and clear -- come now, it is easy to get into the U.S. with your children.

Biden tells migrants to stay put. Central Americans hear a different message
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-messaging-insight-idUSKBN2BN1BB

LA TÉCNICA, GUATEMALA (Reuters) - Maritza Hernández arrived at this remote Guatemalan village exhausted, with two young kids in tow and more than a thousand miles left to travel. She was motivated by a simple - if not entirely accurate - story.

“I heard news they are letting children in,” said Hernández, explaining she planned to cross the U.S. border in Texas and seek asylum.

The number of immigrant families apprehended by U.S. agents along the southern border nearly tripled in February from a month earlier to about 19,000 people. Hunger and poverty are spurring their flight. So is disinformation that has rocketed across social media and by word of mouth that the U.S. border is now wide open.

Reuters interviewed nearly two dozen migrants and more than a dozen people identifying themselves as smugglers, and examined hundreds of posts in closed Facebook groups where these “coyotes” advertise their services. The review revealed pervasive myths about immigration policy changes under U.S. President Joe Biden.

“There’s 100 days of free passage across the border,” a Guatemalan smuggler told Reuters.

The truth is much more complex.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to enforce a policy, implemented by former President Donald Trump one year ago, of returning most southern-border crossers to Mexico. About 70,000 people, or 72% of such migrants - mostly single adults - were rapidly deported in February alone, according to CBP data. Some of those people were likely repeat crossers as the recidivism rate has climbed in the past year, according to U.S. officials.

“Don’t come over,” Biden said in a March 16 interview with ABC News when asked to articulate his message to hopefuls. “Don’t leave your town or city or community.”

Still, it’s true that more migrants - mainly children and families - have been allowed to enter the United States in the early days of his administration than in the final days of Trump’s. In February, more than half of the family members caught with children at the border were not expelled. Many have been released from CBP custody into the United States as they await asylum hearings.

Their success has supercharged migrant and smuggler communication channels, with many now urging travelers to head north before the door slams shut, said Andrew Seele, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington-based think tank.

“Smugglers can definitely exaggerate things and make up information, but they can’t completely sell what doesn’t exist,” Seele said.

Biden aide Roberta Jacobson, the White House’s southern border coordinator, said the administration is now more aggressively discouraging migration.

Since January, the State Department has placed more than 28,000 radio ads in Spanish, Portuguese and six indigenous languages on 133 stations in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Brazil, and it has worked with Facebook and Instagram to create advertisements to dissuade migrants, according to the department and the White House.

Whether it works remains to be seen. Trump’s anti-immigration message was loud and clear. Yet on his watch in February 2019, U.S. border agents encountered more than 40,000 people traveling in family groups, about twice as many as the Biden administration saw last month, according to CBP figures.

SMUGGLER TRADE THRIVING
The business of moving migrants is booming in the hamlet of La Técnica, deep in a Guatemalan rainforest, where Hernández and her two children stopped to rest.

In early March, Reuters witnessed motorized canoes whisking hundreds of U.S.-bound migrants across the Usumacinta River to the area’s unguarded border with Mexico.

Carlos, a smuggler who gave only his first name, chatted by phone with a colleague in the Mayan language Q’eqchi’ about an impending arrival. This transportation crossroads is also an information hub where news - both true and fake - spreads rapidly.

“Supposedly the president is letting children in,” Carlos said of Biden.

Carlos had it partly right. Biden, in a shift from the previous administration, said he would not turn away “unaccompanied minors” - kids crossing the border without parents or legal guardians. These children can now enter the United States to pursue asylum claims, in accordance with U.S. law.

The new administration has done the same for some migrant families along a limited, 230-mile stretch of the border between Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. That shift came in early February after Tamaulipas refused to continue allowing U.S. border officials to expel back into the state Central American families with children under the age of six. Biden has said his team is working to convince Mexico to take more of those families back.

Much of this nuance has been lost in Central America, a region desperate for an escape valve. Migrants are being driven by gang violence and poverty that has been exacerbated by job losses from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The situation is particularly dire in Honduras, where hurricanes Eta and Iota last November destroyed tens of thousands of homes. Nearly a third of the country’s population is now beset by a worsening hunger crisis, according to a government report published in February.

Hernández, who hails from the Honduran coastal state of Colón, said the storms wiped out the family’s chickens and inundated the farm fields where her husband worked. In February, she defied her spouse and set off for Texas with her two children, encouraged by news of other families successfully crossing the border.

The U.S. government radio spots warn migrants against such a journey. In an ad currently broadcast in Honduras, a man named “Jorge” advises “Rosita” that she could be “assaulted, kidnapped, abandoned or infected with coronavirus” - and would likely be detained or deported if she reached the United States.

But other U.S.-based sources are fueling the myth of an open border. Texas-based citizen journalist Luis Rodriguez, who was born in Honduras, has posted several videos for his 400,000 Facebook followers encouraging migrant families to capitalize.

“How long will this last? Well, no one knows,” he said in a March 7 video.

Rodriguez did not respond to requests for comment.

Some high-profile Republicans, too, are sending the message via prominent news outlets that crossing is easy. In a March 21 interview on “Fox News Sunday,” U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said “the border right now is wide open.”

Cotton repeated the exaggeration when contacted by Reuters.

SOME LUCKY, OTHERS NOT
Back in La Técnica, migrant Enrique Gallean shouted a warning to families gathered on the dock as he stepped off one of the rare boats bearing migrants back into Guatemala.

“They’re not letting children in!” he said.

Clutching his 8-year-old son’s hand, the Honduran native told Reuters he had recently crossed the U.S. border near Roma, Texas, and surrendered himself to CBP in the hopes of being allowed to pursue asylum. Instead, Gallean said, they were rapidly expelled to Mexico.

It was much the same for Hector Ruiz. A resident of El Salvador, he and his wife and three young children passed through La Técnica in early March with high hopes. He said he paid $20,000 to smugglers to get his spouse and kids to the Texas border to claim asylum. Ruiz, who had a previous deportation order, didn’t intend to cross, but he accompanied his family much of the way to ensure their safety.

Just over a week later, Ruiz told Reuters his wife and children had been expelled to Mexico.

“We went because we heard the news that there were 100 days of free passage!” Ruiz exclaimed by telephone. “Now we’re screwed.”

Hernández and her two children were luckier. She said that on March 19 her family turned themselves in to CBP in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, only to be released two days later to start the journey to Maryland, where her mother resides.

“We’re free!” she told Reuters by phone.

The news organization could not determine why the three were admitted while other families were not. CBP said it could not comment on the case due to security and privacy reasons.

Hernández’s WhatsApp profile now features a photo of her, the children and their grandmother beaming with happiness following their reunion. That portrait of success travels with each message she sends to friends and family back in Honduras.

Reuters titled the article in a way that covers for Biden more than he deserves. It gives the impression that Joe said one thing but that the migrants misunderstood it.

NEGATORY!!! He said they should come and that NO ONE would be deported in this first 100 days and they heard exactly what they said. There is a certain racism in these articles that treats the migrants as though they are too dumb and uneducated to understand to understand what was really being said. I have been to the white man's schools and understand English moderately well and heard Joe Biden exactly the same way they did as did most other Americans and immigrants all over the rest of the world, not just hispanics.

The truth is that Joe just got an immediate lesson in how it is easier to campaign than it is to govern so he changed his position and his message. If Reuters and others wanted to report it in terms of the migrants not having found out that Joe has flip-flopped and cut and run from his previous position then that would have been the truth, and more respectful to the migrants rather than portraying them as a bunch of dumphuks. Joe said some stupid-arse bullshit and made some stupid-arse promises and they heard him 100% correctly. And it was upon those words that they brought their women and children to be raped many times while making the journey.

I don't like it. Such articles try to shift the blame to the migrants. Many of the migrants are or have been bad actors, we know that. But some of the ones honestly heard the President of the United States tell them to come. Many of the migrants coming now are crossing over and immediately asking where the border patrol is because they want to sign in. Obvious the drug smugglers and child traffickers are not in that category but Biden has created a whole new class of people who honestly think they have been invited.