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    'My neighbourhood is being destroyed to pacify his supporters': the race to complete Trump's wall

    At Sierra Vista Ranch in Arizona near the Mexican border, Troy McDaniel is warming up his helicopter. McDaniel, tall and slim in a tan jumpsuit, began taking flying lessons in the 80s, and has since logged 2,000 miles in the air. The helicopter, a cosy, two-seater Robinson R22 Alpha is considered a work vehicle and used to monitor the 640-acre ranch, but it’s clear he relishes any opportunity to fly. “We will have no fun at all,” he deadpans.McDaniel and his wife, Melissa Owen, bought their ranch and the 100-year-old adobe house that came with it in 2003. Years before, Owen began volunteering at the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and fell in love with the beauty and natural diversity of the area, as well as the quiet of their tiny town. That all changed last July when construction vehicles and large machinery started “barrelling down the two-lane state road”, says Owen.Once work on President Donald Trump’s border wall began, construction was rapid. Sasabe, a sleepy border town, located over an hour from the nearest city of Tucson, was transformed into a construction site. “I don’t think you could find a single person in Sasabe who is in favour of this wall,” Owen says.The purpose of our helicopter trip today is to see the rushed construction work occurring just south of the couple’s house, as contractors race to finish sections of the border wall before Trump leaves office. Viewed from high above the Arizona desert, in the windless bubble of the cockpit, this new section of wall stretches across the landscape like a rust-coloured scar. McDaniel guides us smoothly over hills and drops into canyons, surveying the beauty of the landscape. Here, as on much of the border, the 30ft barrier does not go around; it goes over – stubbornly ploughing through cliffs, up steep mountainsides, and between once-connected communities.“That was already a pretty good barrier,” McDaniel says of the steep, unscalable cliff in front of us. The bulldozed path of Trump’s wall creeps up over the mountain’s west side, but on the other side of the cliff there is no wall, just a large gap. As with many areas on the border, the wall here is being built in a piecemeal fashion. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, there are 37 ongoing projects, of which only three are set to be completed this month; others have completion dates as far away as June 2022.In August, at a virtual press conference with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Joe Biden told reporters that “there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”. The 37 existing construction sites, in various stages of completion, are likely to be shut down.Yet he will have to formulate a more complex policy than simple suspension. Many of the private contractors building the wall have clauses in their contracts that will trigger large payouts if the government simply stops construction. There are also ongoing legal cases brought by private landowners from whom the government seized land. The exact nature of these obligations may only be clear to Biden once he takes office.In the meantime, Trump has accelerated building in the wake of the election, with crews working flat out, late into the night. Throughout December and into January, mountainsides were exploded with dynamite and large portions of desert bulldozed, to make way for a wall that may not be finished in time.For the past four years, I have been living in New Mexico, travelling in the borderlands and documenting the ongoing impact of the wall on communities and the environment.“They started working nights six weeks ago,” says photographer John Kurc, who has been documenting construction in the remote Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona since October last year. “It’s been nonstop ever since.”This is not about protecting America. It’s about protecting President Trump’s own interestsVerlon Jose, former vice-chair of the Native American Tohono O’odham Nation, tells me he has seen the wall plough through his ancestral homeland. “We are caretakers of this land. We are responsible for these things. Has anyone ever asked for permission from the local folks to do the construction? This is about President Donald Trump. It’s not about protecting America. It’s about protecting his own interests.”When construction stops, there will be large gaps in the new wall. In some places it will join up with older barriers that the Trump administration deemed inadequate; in others it will finish abruptly. “They work as fast as they can to build walls that will just end,” says McDaniel, as his helicopter circles back toward their property over saguaro-studded hillsides just north of the Mexican border. We drop altitude and approach the landing strip – a patch of dirt just off the road – whipping up a small dust storm as we touch the ground.***After four years of daily scandals, and the shocking scenes in Washington DC last week, it’s easy to forget that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with one signature policy: to build a wall. That was the call echoed at his rallies, the embodiment of Trump’s hardline approach to immigration and his purported “America First” ideology. Trump claimed the wall would address an invasion of undesirable migrants, “bad hombres”, a nationalist rhetoric that resonated with his base. During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that included a policy for “the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border”.Construction began in 2019, mostly replacing existing fences, vehicle barriers, and other border structures, as well as unwalled sections of the border. The bollard wall, Trump’s barrier of choice, consists of a series of vertical steel posts set in concrete, with small gaps in between. While in some places it reaches a height of 30ft, it is less of a wall and more of an imposing metal fence.According to Kenneth Madsen, an associate professor in the department of geography at Ohio State University, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waived 84 laws and statutes – many enacted specifically to protect the nation’s most treasured cultural and ecological sites – in order to expedite construction.Dozens of environmental and public health laws were brushed aside to build walls through parks and wildlife areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge and Coronado National Memorial. “It has brought devastation to the environment and the communities of the borderlands,” says Scott Nicol, author of a 2018 report for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about the impact of the wall, and a resident of the Rio Grande valley in Texas.Nicol believes the wall’s charted course has been determined by ease rather than efficacy. Construction has been much busier on federally owned land, not because that’s where there are likely to be more border crossings, but because building on private property is a lengthy process. “Texas has the most border but the least wall mileage to date because the Texas borderlands are mostly in private hands,” says Nicol.According to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, 452 miles of border wall have been constructed under the Trump administration, at an estimated cost of $15bn, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in US history. In September 2019, Trump promised to build between 450 and 500 miles of wall, so he has reached this goal – even if the vast majority of it is replacing existing barriers.On Tuesday, days after the violent insurrection at the White House, Trump made a final visit to the border in Texas to celebrate reaching this target. During a short speech, he skirted any responsibility for the capital siege, and instead remarked on his successes in halting illegal immigration and securing the border.“When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border,” he said. “We reformed our immigration system and achieved the most secure southern border in US history.”Has it had any impact on immigration? According to attorney David Donatti, from the ACLU of Texas, the answer is no. In recent months, according to CBP data, the number of people trying to cross has increased. “The wall as a whole is unlikely to have any discernible impact,” says Donatti. “In a race to construct, the administration is building where it’s easier as opposed to where most people cross.”And while the wall may be an impressive barrier, it is far from impregnable. Just after Christmas, Nicol visited a new section in the Rio Grande valley between Texas and Mexico and found numerous ladders scattered on the ground. “You can always go over,” he says.You can also go through. John Kurc started using drones to photograph and video the construction of the wall. The last time he was in the border town of Sonoyta, Mexico, he saw two young men with “yellow, handheld angle grinders” cutting through the wall while a lookout with a radio watched for Border Patrol. “They would put the section back with a special bonding agent and then use paint that oxidizes the same colour as the bollards,” says Kurc. “Then they just go in and out.”Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama-appointed former commissioner of the CBP, says there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for border security: “There are places where the environment is difficult and so remote you don’t need any barrier at all.” In these areas, surveillance and detection technologies would be more useful and cost-efficient, he argues. “It is such an unbelievably complex problem. When someone proposes a simple solution to a complex problem, you can be sure that’s the wrong solution.”***That’s not to say Trump’s wall has had no impact. Back on the ranch, cameras set up by Melissa Owen have captured passing wildlife – mountain lions and javelina, pig-like mammals, the skulls of which can also be found around the house. “There were no environmental surveys, no groundwater surveys, none of that,” says Owen. Once contractors arrived in town last summer, they began “pumping enormous amounts of water out of the ground” in order to mix concrete for the border wall’s foundations.Residents in Sasabe began complaining of reduced water pressure. At San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, groundwater pumping for concrete began draining a crucial wetland and endangering four threatened species of fish. Similar concerns were raised when the Quitobaquito Springs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, home to the endangered desert pupfish began to dry out as contractors pumped water from the ancient aquifer that fed it. “That’s our water – that’s what we depend on,” says Owen, looking out towards arid ranchland that is suffering from a long drought.We had three different jaguars in 2016 – we haven’t seen signs of any since construction beganMyles Traphagen, borderlands coordinator of the Wildlands Network conservation group, has called Trump’s wall the “single most damaging project” to the ecology of the mountainous Sky Islands region and the animals that call it home – especially the jaguar, which has made a remarkable comeback in the US after being hunted to extinction by the late 1960s.“We had three different jaguars in 2015 and 2016, which hadn’t happened since the 1930s,” says Chris Bugbee, a senior researcher at Conservation CATalyst, an organisation dedicated to the world’s 38 wild cat species.“If this border wall hadn’t started, we expected a female to eventually arrive and have breeding jaguars again,” adds Aletris Neils, Conservation CATalyst’s executive director.The jaguar is one of numerous species – such as the endangered ocelot and the Mexican gray wolf – found in a region that extends from south-western New Mexico into western Arizona and far down into Mexico. If current border wall construction is completed, says Traphagen, “93% of jaguar habitat will have been walled off”.Only males have been seen in the US since the 60s. They have huge ranges and some travel north where there is plenty to eat, before returning south to find a mate. There is currently one jaguar (whose location cannot be shared due to poaching concerns) on the US side, cut off from Mexico because of the wall.Bugbee has spent years tracking the famous “El Jefe” jaguar, one of the few sighted recently in the US, with his dog Mayke. “We haven’t seen signs of any jaguars since construction began,” he tells me when we meet at the Coronado National Forest, where he previously tracked the cat. A mile or so away, construction workers have been blasting and bulldozing over the steep Montezuma Pass, where another jaguar, known as Yo’oko, once roamed.Owen and McDaniel are far from open-border liberals. The entrance to their ranch has a sign that reads: “Border Patrol always welcome”. Owen’s two horses, Rocker and Kiowa, are retired Border Patrol horses – “the best”, she says of their temperament. In her early years on the ranch, Owen says, undocumented migrants and smugglers were coming across the border in large numbers. She would frequently encounter migrants on her property. One morning someone broke into her house. “I don’t want it to go back to then,” she says, but adds that the economic downturn of 2008 has slowed immigration considerably. “No one wants a secure border more than I,” she says. “But a 30ft-tall, poorly constructed barrier is not the answer. It’s a campaign gimmick. My neighbourhood is being destroyed because a megalomaniac wants to pacify his supporters.”During his election campaign, Trump claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall. Once he was in office, Congress provided some $1.37bn a year for construction, but each year the president demanded more, ultimately declaring a national emergency in order to divert military funds to pay for the wall. It’s estimated by the US Army Corps of Engineers that Biden will save about $2.6bn if he stops construction on the border wall in his first day in office.Trump, and some within CBP, have maintained that the wall is a crucial means of halting smuggling. “Illegal drug and human smuggling activities have decreased in those areas where barriers are deployed. Illegal cross-border traffic has also shifted to areas with inferior legacy barriers or no barriers at all,” said a DHS spokesperson in a recent email to the Guardian.Kerlikowske, who also served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2009 and 2014, admits that drug trafficking is a problem. However, he points out that the vast majority of illicit substances, such as fentanyl, cocaine and heroin, are smuggled through legal ports of entry where elaborate walls and security systems already exist. “During my time as commissioner, I met with hundreds of border patrol agents. No one in the border patrol says we really need a wall,” he says.As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areasDonatti from the ACLU of Texas says there is little evidence that walls deter either drugs or undocumented immigration, which is being driven primarily by so-called push factors (war, poverty, desperation) in other countries. “The US federal government has tried to study this several times and has never found support that a border wall stops the flow of undocumented immigration,” he says.One thing border walls are effective at is increasing the number of migrant deaths. As the US has walled off more of its border, the risk to migrants crossing illegally has increased. Since 1998, around 7,000 people have died along the US-Mexico border, the majority in Arizona’s rural deserts and, in recent years, the Rio Grande valley. “As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areas,” says Donatti.“It’s a humanitarian disaster,” agrees Eddie Canales, of the South Texas Human Rights Center, who has spent the past decade operating hundreds of water stations in the Rio Grande valley in Texas to save migrants. “We do what we can,” Canales told the Guardian in early 2020. “But people keep dying.” The wall funnels people into more dangerous crossing points, where physical barriers do not yet exist. Summer temperatures in the Arizona desert are brutal; 2020 became the deadliest year since 2010 for those who crossed the border there.***“It’s hard for people to understand what this means to us, as O’odham and Native Americans. What it means to us as the original indigenous peoples of this land,” says Verlon Jose.When I visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a pristine tract of Sonoran desert, earlier this year, contractors are busy dynamiting Monument Hill, a sacred mountain and burial site for the Tohono O’odham people. Uprooted saguaros, the huge, tree-like cacti sacred to the tribe, dot the path of the wall. “It was like, ‘Tell me where your grandparents live, and I’ll put a wall through there,’” says Jose.“In certain areas, we won’t be able to continue our traditional practices,” says Jose, whose tribal members span both sides of the border. “We spent billions of dollars on the wall. Why don’t we invest it in our border cities and towns?”According to Norma Herrera, a border resident from McAllen, Texas, the wall’s $15bn price tag is an insult to one of the county’s most impoverished regions, where critical infrastructure is often lacking. This issue was laid bare during the pandemic, when places such as the Rio Grande valley in Texas, a centre of border wall construction, was devastated by Covid. Hospitals reached capacity, deaths mounted, and all the while, the wall continued to rise.“We had more deaths in the region than the entire state,” says Herrera, community organiser at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, which advocates for marginalised groups in the area. “To see the wall going up, to see resources used on useless steel and concrete, it’s senseless.”According to Donatti, whose parents originally emigrated from Argentina to the US, the wall should be seen in the context of broader exclusion policies – such as the Remain in Mexico programme enacted by Trump, under which asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry are returned to Mexico to wait for their US immigration proceedings. “It’s this idea that there is a fundamental Americanness, and either you’re inside, or you’re out,” he says.That idea was evident in late 2019, when I visited a shelter in Tijuana. The two-storey building in the neighbourhood of Benito Juárez was packed with families, with mattresses sprawled over every inch of open floor. At that time in Tijuana, nearly 10,000 asylum seekers were waiting for their immigration hearings after being turned back at the border and sent to one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.Many are hopeful that under the Biden administration the approach to migrants and the borderlands will change; that policies such as Remain in Mexico will be undone; and even that sections of the border wall will be removed. A week after inauguration day, a coalition of groups across the borderlands will begin a monitoring project in order to assess the damage, and to see what needs to be done. Some hope certain sections can be removed in order to reconnect critical habitats and communities.Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’odham has a “sliver of hope” that some of the walls will come down. “I believe Biden will not build another inch,” he adds.Others are not so sure. “Optimism? No,” says Donatti of the prospect of the wall coming down. “He hasn’t committed to as much. But there is a strong coalition along the border that will be fighting for it.”John Kurc, who has spent thousands of hours watching the destruction of Guadalupe Canyon, sees the scale of the challenge. “The Trump administration has caused so much damage to these environments,” he says, peering through a set of binoculars as a crane hoists up an isolated section of wall, with huge gaps on each side. “We have a lot of work to do.” More

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    Trump official admits family separation policy 'should never have been implemented'

    For the first time, a senior Trump administration official who helped implement family separation has condemned the hardline immigration policy, which made it possible for the government to take more than 3,000 children, including infants, from their parents at the US-Mexico border in 2018.In response to a damning report published on Thursday by the US justice department’s internal watchdog on the “zero-tolerance” policy, which made family separation possible, the former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein said the policy “should have never been proposed or implemented”.The justice department’s Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) long-awaited report said department leadership knew the policy would result in children being separated from their families and that the former US attorney general Jeff Sessions “demonstrated a deficient understanding of the legal requirements related to the care and custody of separated children”.“We concluded that the Department’s single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations,” the report said.The OIG said justice department leadership “did not effectively coordinate” with the relevant agencies before implementing zero-tolerance, despite being aware of the challenges created by increasing prosecutions of adult asylum seekers under the policy.In a conference call in May 2018, Sessions told prosecutors: “We need to take away children,” according to notes taken by people on the call and provided to the OIG.Rosenstein, who publicly denounced the policy for the first time on Thursday, told the OIG he had known the zero-tolerance policy would result in family separations. He also told investigators he had not been involved with the formulation of the policy and had received reassurances about it that he now believed were wrong.In July 2020, the Guardian reported that Rosenstein had made comments in a conference call with US attorneys charged with implementing the policy that in effect meant that no child was too young to be separated from their parents.The call came after US attorneys on the south-west border had repeatedly raised concerns about how zero-tolerance was supposed to be operated. A month after the policy had been in place, to help attorneys, a list of questions was drafted for DHS and HHS, which included: “How does DHS deal with infants?”At that point, it was clear no agency had a master list of separated children.In a statement provide to the Guardian on Thursday, Rosenstein said he and his colleagues at the justice department “faced unprecedented challenges” compared with work he had done as a US attorney under previous presidential administrations.“Since leaving the Department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero-tolerance immigration policy,” Rosenstein said. “It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better.”Sessions, who resigned in November 2018, announced the zero-tolerance policy in April 2018. Facing intense pressure nationally and abroad, the Trump administration stopped mass family separations in June 2018, though asylum-seeking families continue to be separated today at a smaller scale.Family separation, which legal experts and doctors said constituted torture, was supported by multiple federal agencies.The homeland security department (DHS) separated families at the border and detained the parents, the health department eventually took custody of children separated from their parents and the justice department leadership provided the legal framework that made separations possible.The justice department OIG report confirms earlier watchdog reports from the other agencies’ monitors, which found inadequate tracking systems were in place.A January 2019 report from the health department OIG found the Trump administration might have separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border for up to a year before family separation was a publicly known practice.The lead attorney on an ongoing family separation lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lee Gelernt, said: “This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can’t sink any lower, it does.“The Biden-Harris administration will inherit the legacy of family separation, and we don’t doubt that more horrific details will continue to emerge,” Gelernt said. “We need them to act with urgency – every day without action makes it harder to find and reunite families.”Dick Durbin, a Democratic US senator from Illinois, said he would hold the justice department officials responsible to account as the incoming chair of the US Senate judiciary committee. “Those who planned and executed the zero-tolerance policy will have to live with the knowledge that their cruelty and cowardice are responsible for the scars these children will carry for the rest of their lives,” Durbin said.Despite being the driving force behind the zero-tolerance policy, Sessions refused to be interviewed by OIG investigators.The report said Sessions told US attorneys on the south-west border that families would be quickly prosecuted and reunited, even though doing so was, “in most cases, a practical and legal impossibility”. The former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has repeatedly defended her decision to enforce the zero-tolerance policy, which was announced in April 2018. More

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    'We tortured families': The lingering damage of Trump's separation policy

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    The US government’s policy of separating migrant families at the border has continued to wreak havoc and inflict suffering in the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, with parents still missing, reunifications blocked and reunited families struggling to pick up the pieces of their lives.
    Righting the wrongs of Trump’s globally condemned separations policy is one of the most urgent and challenging tasks that lies ahead for the incoming administration. Civil rights groups that have been fighting for years to reunite thousands of families are now pushing for a bold and speedy response from Joe Biden – one that reunifies victims, grants them protection in the US, and provides restitution.
    “We tortured these families, we took their children,” said Carol Anne Donohoe, the managing attorney with Al Otro Lado, a group that has been working to reunite deported parents with their children. “Some parents and children haven’t seen each other in over three years. It’s an abomination, and we need immediate action … and accountability to ensure this never happens again.”
    A critical step, advocates say, will be a full accounting of the scope of family separations, and recognition by the government of the enduring consequences.
    The cruelty and chaos of ‘zero tolerance’
    In April 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute all unauthorized crossings at the border, making no exception for asylum seekers or people with children. As a result, US immigration officials forcibly separated children from their parents and guardians, filing thousands of criminal cases against migrants who had fled violence to seek asylum in America. The parents were detained while their children were taken and treated as “unaccompanied minors”, placed in jails and shelters for migrant youth.
    “It just felt like chaos,” recalled Roberto Lopez, the community outreach coordinator with the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), who was working in south Texas courtrooms where hundreds of separated parents faced criminal charges in an assembly line. “It was a mass prosecution … There was just so much pain. Many times they were asking, ‘Do you know where my kid is? When will I see them?’ And we had to tell them again and again, ‘We don’t know.’” More

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    'Family detention still exists': immigration groups warn the fight is far from over

    Few people have been as closely involved with family separation and reunification as attorney Erika Pinheiro, one of the leaders of the immigration advocacy group Al Otro Lado.And though Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election puts an end to Donald Trump’s laser focus on restricting all forms of immigration, Pinheiro wants people to understand that the fight for immigrant rights in the country is far from over.“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Pinheiro, Al Otro Lado’s litigation and policy director, said. “It’s not a given that everyone will be reunified, or families, babies are going to be let out of cages – family detention still exists.”Al Otro Lado has offices on both sides of the border, where it assists immigrants with family reunification, detention, access to healthcare, asylum, deportation and other issues.It was founded in 2011 and was volunteer run until Trump won the 2016 election on an anti-immigrant platform. The group’s leaders then committed to the work as a full-time, paying job.It has been a grueling four years. Pinheiro said the Trump administration caused her to question how she could be an attorney when laws were changing each week and the government did not seem interested in following the ones which remained. “Just the baseline of being able to do our jobs as attorneys was thrown into chaos,” Pinheiro said.There was the added factor of responding to atrocities a tired, exhausted world didn’t want to, or couldn’t, process.“It felt in many instances that it was screaming into the ether about people dying at the border, people suffering all these horrific human rights violations,” she said. “And some of it got through to the public, like family separation, but a lot of it didn’t.”With Covid, the group’s work has expanded even more.“We also have had to do emergency food assistance, quarantine housing for medically vulnerable families,” Pinheiro said. “We’ve supported a dozen shelters in getting clean water and food and PPE, we have helped raise the capacity of several medical organizations here on the border to make sure our clients would have access to any care.”The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bars asylum seekers and refugees from the US under an order called Title 42. People who attempt to cross the border are returned, or expelled, back to Mexico, without an opportunity to test their asylum claims. More than 250,000 migrants processed at the US-Mexico border between March and October were expelled, according to US Customs and Border Protection data.The situation is dire. Thousands of asylum-seekers are stuck at the border, uncertain when they will be able to file their claims. The camps they wait in are an even greater public health risk that before.Outside the border, Al Otro Lado has fought for detained migrants to get PPE and medical releases. Prisons are one of the worst possible places to be when there is a contagious disease and deaths in the custody of US immigration authorities have increased dramatically this year. They have also provided supplies to homeless migrants in southern California who have been shut out of public hygiene facilities.Pinheiro said there will be improvements with Trump out of office, but some of the Biden campaign promises to address asylum issues at the border will be toothless until the CDC order is revoked. It’s a point she plans to make in conversations with the transition team.A prime concern for advocates about the Biden administration is that it will include some of the same people from Barack Obama’s administration, which had more deportations than any other president and laid the groundwork for some controversial Trump policies.While it is a worry for Pinheiro, she has hope that the new administration will build something better. “I would hope a lot of those people, and I know for some of them, have been able to reflect on how the systems they built were weaponized by Trump to do things like family separation or detaining children,” she said.Family separation, which has left 545 children still waiting to be reunited with their parents, was a crucial issue for many voters and Pinheiro hopes that energy translates to other immigration policies.“How did you feel when your government committed the atrocity of family separation in your name?” Pinheiro said. “The next step is really understanding that similar and sometimes worse atrocities are still being committed in the name of border security and limiting migration.” More

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    More immigrant women say they were abused by Ice gynecologist

    More women have joined an official legal petition alleging that they were medically abused by a gynecologist while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody in a move that significantly expands a case that has shocked America.The legal petition outlining these alleged abuses were filed in the Middle District of Georgia federal court late Monday night. More than 40 women have submitted written testimony attesting to claims of abuse, one attorney on their case said.These women, who have been detained by Ice at Irwin county detention center in Georgia, have alleged that they underwent invasive and unnecessary medical procedures. The women’s attorneys have also alleged that these women endured retribution for speaking out, including deportation in some cases. The petition largely echoed past legal filings and accounts by accusers.“Petitioners were victims of non-consensual, medically unindicated and/or invasive gynecological procedures, including unnecessary surgical procedures under general anesthesia, performed by and/or at the direction of [gynaecologist Dr Mahendra Amin],” the petition said. “In many instances, the medically unindicated gynecological procedures Respondent Amin performed on Petitioners amounted to sexual assault.”Officials were aware of this alleged misconduct since 2018, the petition further alleged, “but have nonetheless continued a policy or custom of sending women to be mistreated and abused by Respondent Amin … The experiences Petitioners had at the hands of Respondent Amin form part of a disturbing pattern of inhumane medical abuse and mistreatment at ICDC.”“This is an effort to protect women who have suffered horrendous medical atrocities while detained in US custody, and every effort has been made by both Ice and the contractors at this facility to cover up these medical abuses,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, a leading attorney on the case.She added: “For more than two years, both the government, and the private contractors who run this facility, have turned a blind eye to the enormous suffering and intentional harm–and intentional medical abuse – that has taken place here.”“It’s unlike anything I ever expected to see in America,” Mukherjee said.The women’s allegations emerged after a shocking whistleblower report. This report, which was submitted on behalf of a former nurse at the facility, Dawn Wooten, alleged that an alarmingly high number of hysterectomies were performed on Spanish-speaking women. Wooten and other nurses feared that these women did not understand the procedures they underwent.Wooten alleged that the doctor performing these procedures, who was subsequently named as gynecologist Dr Mahendra Amin, had become notorious for performing these operations – so much so that she called him the “uterus collector” in her whistleblower account.“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody,” Wooten stated in her complaint. “I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor, and they’ve had hysterectomies, and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going.”Wooten also said that the medical center where these procedures were performed had unsanitary conditions, as well as poor safety measures against Covid-19.Amin has denied the allegations and told the Intercept that he had only conducted “one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years”. He did not specify whether these procedures were performed on women in Irwin.The physician’s lawyer, Scott Grubman, said in a previous statement: “We look forward to all of the facts coming out, and are confident that once they do, Dr Amin will be cleared of any wrongdoing.” Ice contended that its records indicate just two referrals for hysterectomies at Irwin.The accusations have spurred comparisons with the US’s disturbing history of eugenics. From 1907 to 1937, two-thirds of US states passed laws that permitted involuntary sterilization – resulting in the sterilization of more than 60,000 people.An increase in federal funding for reproductive health procedures in the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, resulted in “tens of thousands” of women of color undergoing sterilizations. Though forced sterilization was made illegal, it has continued. From 1997 to 2013, approximately 1,400 inmates were sterilized in California prisons. More

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    Trans women in Ice custody already suffered sexual harassment and abuse. Then came Covid-19

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    It was August, and Katalina stood sobbing in the middle of the cell at the La Palma immigration detention center. She tried not to touch anything – she had seen guards escort out a man who was coughing and trembling just minutes before.
    It felt like punishment. Shortly before, she had reported being sexually harassed by another detainee in a male unit of the La Palma correctional center in Arizona where they were being held. Now, she was standing in an isolation cell.
    Katalina was worried about contracting Covid-19. The cell she had been placed in hadn’t been cleaned. After standing in the room for five hours, she withdrew her complaint. She had heard that other detainees had spent weeks in segregation after speaking up. It was a risk she wasn’t willing to take.
    When a detainee grabbed her arm and left a bruise a few months later, Katalina didn’t say anything either.
    Covid has torn through immigration detention centers across the United States. Since the start of the pandemic, at least 7,202 people held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) have been infected with the virus, and at least eight have died. LGBTQ+ populations in immigration custody have echoed the stories of other detainees who have complained that Ice has failed to institute adequate protocols to curb the spread of the virus and has not provided ample protective equipment and medical care. But LGBTQ+ people in La Palma say the pandemic has created further challenges, making it harder for them to escape the gender-based harassment and violence many of them have long faced while locked up. More

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    'Heal the damage': Activists urge Joe Biden to move beyond ‘border security’

    As Joe Biden prepares to take office, activists say the president-elect must not only take meaningful action to stabilize the US-Mexico border, but also reckon with his own history of militarizing the border landscape and communities.
    Biden has promised to end many of the Trump administration’s border policies, but has yet to unveil the kind of bold immigration plan that would suggest a true departure from Obama-era priorities. Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top immigration adviser who memorably defended the administration’s decision to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants, was recently added to Biden’s transition team.
    Biden has stated that he will cease construction of the border wall, telling National Public Radio in August that there will be “not another foot of wall”, and that his administration will close lawsuits aimed at confiscating land to make way for construction. His immigration plan will also rescind Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” on the southern border, which the Trump administration has used to siphon funds from the Department of Defense to finance construction, circumventing Congress in an action recently declared illegal by an appeals court.
    Some lawmakers along the border find these developments heartening, after Trump’s border wall construction has devastated sensitive ecosystems, tribal spaces, and communities, and has been continuously challenged in court.
    “I very much expect a Biden administration to cancel construction contracts and instruct DoJ to close eminent domain lawsuits,” says the congressman Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents the south Texas district of Laredo, where plans for construction have been met with stiff resistance from locals who say it is unnecessary and would damage their community. “My constituents feel hopeful, because they know a Biden administration is not going to waste money on a useless, destructive wall.”
    Since January 2017, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) say they have spent $15bn on “400 miles of new primary and secondary border wall system”, the vast majority of it financed by funds from the Department of Defense. Most of this consists of replacing or building on older barriers, not building on land where none existed before.
    But while weary border activists see a potential ally in the Biden administration, many say that, while his electoral victory brought them a sense of relief, they are hoping for more than a return to the status quo.
    “Stopping construction isn’t enough,” says Dror Ladin, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “There has to be planning to dismantle particularly harmful sections of this wall in a responsible way and help heal the damage that has been done, both to communities and natural spaces.”
    Donald Trump is not unique in his goal of militarizing the border, but his administration has tested the limits of executive authority in ways his predecessors did not. On 25 to 30 occasions, the Trump administration has invoked an obscure provision of the 2005 Real ID Act, which allows the secretary of homeland security to continue barrier construction without paying heed to any law that would stand in the way of expeditious construction efforts. The Trump administration has used it to bypass protections like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act. By comparison, the George Bush administration invoked the provision to waive laws five times. More

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    'Truth and lies have eroded': why an artist took over a billboard at the US-Mexico border

    The artist Stefan Brüggemann woke up at his London apartment last Wednesday to Donald Trump declaring he had won the presidency. It was, of course, a lie. “The second I turned on YouTube, I saw him and Mike Pence declare victory,” Brüggemann says.It was a moment that epitomized the political climate in which the Mexican-German artist had launched his latest project, which tackles the interchangeability of fact and deception. On the day of the US election Brüggemann unveiled two neon words – “Truth” and “Lie” – perched on a billboard at the US Mexico border.At six feet height and beaming in red, white and blue, Truth/Lie can be read in two ways. When viewed from San Diego towards Tijuana, Baja California, it spells “TRUTH”; when viewed from Mexico, the word “LIE” is framed against the backdrop of a mountainous American landscape.Brüggemann, whose career spans several decades, seeks to highlight how the meaning of two seemingly straightforward words has been diluted in an era of political polarization and ideological chaos. More