The Bipartisan Border War is Turning America into a Prison

Nicky Reid

 November 5, 2024
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Image by Barbara Zandoval.

I write this screed during the waning hours of an election season that has made me thirst for the taste of a blue steel shotgun barrel like a newborn craves mother’s milk. I hate all of you people so fucking much and I will never forgive you for doing this to me every four years. But I digress…

Chances are that by the time you read this you will have done one of two hideous things which will likely end in the same tragic outcome. You will have voted for Donald Trump for some stupid fucking reason or another, which will give him the mandate to carry out the largest mass deportation since Josef Stalin, or you will have voted for Kamala Harris to stop him even though she has more or less promised to do the same goddamn thing in slow motion with a side of joy as displayed by her administration’s recent attempts to slam the border shut like the jaws of life.

All of this is fucking insane and what makes it even crazier is that it is driven by tabloid stoked popular demand. Around the country, Republicans and Democrats alike are flipping out over the border. Why, most of my neighbors in rural Pennsyltucky have never even seen a Venezuelan and yet they still seem to believe that scores of them are coming scuttling down the chimney for their daughter’s virginity with freshly sharpened knives in their teeth.

All of this hysteria, what we now call the “border crisis”, is built on the fundamental lie consistently embraced by both parties that more “border security” aka “police state” equals less immigrants and a more orderly border. This is total bullshit, and it is easily disproven with pretty basic statistics.

Tax funding for a wide range of border security experiments has pretty consistently increased in this country over the last several decades with funding for the Department of Homeland Security between 2001 and 2020 more than six times as high as the previous twenty years.

This spending spree continued to increase under Biden and Kamala, with their 2024 budget for border and immigration enforcement breaking Trump’s record at $30.2 billion dollars, which is nearly double what it was in 2012. In fact, the “open borders” administration has forked over $28.1 billion dollars in private contracts for border and immigration enforcement since 2021 which is $8.2 billion more than Donald Trump’s $20.9 billion between 2017 and 2021.

Meanwhile, the border has only became increasingly ungovernable during this time. The undocumented population has more than doubled since the mid-nineties, growing from 5 million in 1996 to nearly 12 million in 2024. And this trend only continued during Trump’s reign of terror.

While that loud-mouthed terrorist sent children to concentration camps, illegal entry measured by apprehensions doubled between 2016 and 2019. In fact, the Cato Institute actually estimates that the number of immigrants who have gotten into this country without being caught increased during every year of Orange Man Bad’s first term.

So, what does all this bewildering math mean? Well, for starters it means that border security, at least over an area as vast and unpopulated as the Rio Grande is a fucking flop. It doesn’t work. It never worked. But we all keep shoving money into it anyway and the Democrats are far from a lesser evil on this scam. They fucking started it.

Bill Clinton’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act aka IIRIRA, unleashed with overwhelming bipartisan fanfare in the wake of his similarly fascistic Crime Bill, essentially created the modern-day deportation apparatus. Before IIRIRA deportations were actually pretty rare in this country. After it, they became a veritable cottage industry. Billions were pumped into migrant detection and removal with an army of heavily armed guards whose jurisdiction now includes any patch of dirt within 100 miles of either border.

As stated above, none of this worked. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Before 2014, your average border crosser was just some dude going back and forth across an invisible line for his day job. When the border became militarized, those dudes simply stayed where the work was and brought their families with them. In other words, IIRIRA only succeeded in making the border more chaotic and every administration that followed Clinton simply decided to double down and make it worse.

Despite the fact that every single one of the 9/11 hijackers was a green card holder who came through a legal port of entry, Bush used those attacks to move the flailing border Cthulhu from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security and juiced it up like Schwarzenegger with militaristic surveillance paraphernalia like drones and aerostats. And Barack Obama still holds the title belt for deporter in chief, building the concentration camps and turning ICE into the dick swinging gestapo that Trump used to raid kindergartens and children’s hospitals to fill them.

Of course, everything got way more complicated in 2014 when Central American women and children seeking sanctuary began to outnumber Mexican men looking to make a paycheck. The root causes behind this migrant sea change are not particularly hard to figure out when you consider that most of those families were fleeing from the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

All three of those poverty racked nations has been subjected to decades of American funded death squads and juntas, including the one that Obama put in charge of Honduras in a 2009 coup which pretty much openly colluded with local gangsters and Mexican cartels. However, by the end of Trump’s first executive killing spree, this deluge became just one small piece of a massive international refugee crisis, exacerbated by the Pandemic but largely born from the wreckage of two other disastrous American experiments known as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

And this is actually how America’s border crisis can probably be best understood. Just like the war machine and the prison state, the American border is a failure industrial complex. Nobody has ever been made safer by any of those rackets, but a very small group of corporations and federal bureaucracies have gotten very rich, and the sickest part of the con is that the worse the blowback from its fascist adventures gets, the more money the scumbags behind them get to clean up their own mess or fail trying.

Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans have taken this industry to new lows and they’re still digging. Whether that dayglow corporate crybaby wins or not, his party is now defined by an insane conspiracy to use war powers to evict 3% of this country’s population, and if Kamala has proven anything with her long miserable career as a glorified deadbeat cop it’s that her only real ideology is ‘just following orders’ unburdened by what has been. Either way, the border police state wins and no one should feel safe.

The federal government detains and deports thousands of American citizens every year and federal policy permits the use of racial and ethnic profiling to enforce migration restrictions in so-called “border areas”, which thanks to Bill Clinton and his Democrats now legally includes two-thirds of American territory. And for every honky sitting pretty on a porch swing saying, ‘not my problem’, let me remind you of the increasing diversity of the refugee crisis and the expanding battle lines of NATO’s proxy apocalypse in Ukraine. In other words, what’s going to stop the ATF from sending your pale ass back to the old country when Kamala comes to take your guns away, Jethro?

This is how borders work, especially when applied arbitrarily on a massive scale to govern nebulous colonial territories. They don’t do jack shit to keep people out because they aren’t designed to. They’re designed to police and control the people trapped between them and when imperialist maniacs in decline are manning the guard towers that nation in question might as well be a prison.

Happy Election Day, morons. Regardless of which asshole wins, we’re already fucked.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

MARYLAND

Larry Hogan and Race: It Ain’t Pretty

Pete Tucker

 November 4, 2024
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Maryland Governor Larry Hogan giving the State of the State address in 2016. Photo: Maryland Governor’s Office.

Maybe it’s a small thing but I still can’t get over a line from Larry Hogan’s 2020 memoir. It’s about the first covid death to occur on Hogan’s watch as Maryland governor, the job he held from 2015 to 2023.

“[It was] a Prince George’s County man in his sixties who had underlying medical issues,” Hogan writes. “Terrible news, but you couldn’t exactly call it a surprise.”

It’s those last words – you couldn’t exactly call it a surprise – that disturb me.

This man was a constituent of Hogan’s and likely suffered a painful death, yet Hogan can do little more than shrug his shoulders. And I wonder if that has something to do with this man having been from Prince George’s, a majority Black county. (I wasn’t able to confirm the man’s race or name.)

If this line from Hogan’s memoir was a one-off it wouldn’t have stuck in my craw. But it’s all too consistent with Hogan’s troubling record on race, which has received scant attention over the years.

The election is Tuesday and Hogan is back on the ballot – this time as a candidate for Senate. If he wins, it’ll ensure Republican control of that body.

Since time is tight, I’ll limit my focus to Hogan’s record on race as it pertains to his covid response (which was also scandalous for other reasons).

Anne Arundel ‘Throwback’

From nearly the moment covid struck, it was clear that Black and Brown communities would be hardest hit. With thoughtful and robust interventions, however, the damage could have been lessened. But from the jump, Hogan made clear that he was taking a different approach.

Hogan could’ve tapped a Black official or a sophisticated white one to help localities combat existing disparities and save lives. Instead, Hogan chose Steve Schuh to be his covid liaison to local leaders, a move that left me speechless.

Schuh is part of a crew of Republicans from Anne Arundel County, where Hogan hails from, that run the gamut from retrograde to racist. I reported on these guys back in 2018, when Schuh was running for a second term as county executive, and Hogan for a second term as governor, with the two happily endorsing each other.

In addition to Hogan, that year Schuh also backed John Grasso, an Anne Arundel County councilman running for state senate. “John Grasso is motivated by [one] thing,” Schuh told the Capital Gazette: “He wants to make the community a better place. He wants to help people and animals.”

But Grasso’s Facebook posts told a different story. One post accused former President Obama of being “the bastard child of a bigamous marriage between two Communists,” who grew up to become a male prostitute who “had sex with older white men in exchange for cocaine.” Another Grasso post took aim at the LGBTQ community: “Folks keep talkin’ about another civil war. One side has 8 trillion bullets. The other doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

Despite these and other such outbursts, Schuh – who Hogan would later tap to be his covid liaison – stood by Grasso, as well as an even more extreme fellow Anne Arundel Republican.

From my 2018 Counterpunch story:

“Up until the eve of his 2014 election to the Anne Arundel County Council, [Michael] Peroutka was a member of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Even as a councilman, Peroutka continued supporting some of the group’s positions. It wasn’t until June 2017, just days before neo-Nazi David Duke keynoted the League of the South’s annual conference, that Peroutka finally denounced the group. Six months later, in a party-line vote, all four Republicans on the Anne Arundel County Council elected Peroutka Council chairman, his present position.

“While Hogan doesn’t support Peroutka, he’s not that far removed from him. The governor supports County Executive Schuh, who in turn backs Peroutka, calling him ‘a throwback’ who ‘does not have a malicious bone in his body.’”

Unlike Schuh, Hogan publicly distanced himself from Grasso and Peroutka. Still, Hogan showed up in campaign literature with Peroutka in 2014 and Grasso in 2018 – both times unbeknownst to him, Hogan said.

Unfortunately for the Anne Arundel gang, 2018 proved to be a watershed year in the county’s politics, and Schuh, Grasso and Peroutka all went down to defeat. (Peroutka would briefly resurface in 2022 as the Republican nominee for Maryland attorney general.)

Of the Anne Arundel crew, only Hogan won in 2018, beating back Ben Jealous, the youngest ever head of the NAACP. (When Jealous called to concede on election night, Hogan refused to take the call, then boasted about it in his memoir.)

Schuh, meanwhile, wasn’t out in the cold for long. The month after his loss, Hogan named his ally to a cushy post directing Maryland’s response to the opioid epidemic.

When covid hit, Hogan gave Schuh – someone who’d openly backed bigots – an additional role as the administration’s covid liaison to localities, like Baltimore City and Prince George’s.

Meanwhile, during the first six months of Maryland’s covid lockdown, white suicides fell by almost half, even as Black suicides nearly doubled, according to a Johns Hopkins University study published as a research letter in JAMA Psychiatry.

Black shots

Still, when it came to getting covid shots into people’s arms, Maryland fared well compared to other states. But even here there were issues of fairness.

As embarrassing news stories began to trickle out regarding how whites in Maryland had far more access to vaccines than Blacks, Hogan needed someone to blame.

“We have supply chain issues everywhere in the country,” Hogan said, “but in minority communities the additional problem is people are refusing to take the vaccine.”

With his remark, Hogan wasn’t just “blaming the victim” – as the head of the University of Maryland’s Center for Health Equity put it – he was also lying.

There’s “little difference in reluctance to take the coronavirus vaccine among Black and White Marylanders,” the Washington Post reported at the time.

Even as Hogan blamed Blacks for not getting the shot, he also blamed them for getting too many. “Baltimore City had gotten far more than they were really entitled to,” Hogan said.

“I think our citizens in Baltimore know a dog whistle when they see one,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott responded.

Like father like son

Prince George’s was hit particularly hard by covid. That’s due in part to the county’s antiquated tax structure.

If you were to pick a year when the trajectory of Prince George’s departed from that of its better-off neighbors, it’d be 1978. That’s when Prince George’s then-white majority put the county government in a chokehold by depriving it of tax revenue to prevent the increasing Black population from benefitting from quality schools and other public services.

The 1978 referendum – known as Tax Reform Initiative by Marylanders or TRIM – “passed just as Prince George’s County began a demographic transition from majority-white to majority-Black,” DW Rowlands wrote in a 2020 story for Greater Greater Washington. “A major motivation for its passage was the desire of white voters to limit funding for a public school student body that was becoming increasingly Black and integrated — four years earlier, in 1974, Prince George’s school system had become the largest in the country to be subject to a court-ordered busing desegregation plan. Holding property tax revenue constant while the county’s population was rapidly growing led to severe cuts to many county services and increases to fees.”

One of the leaders of this ugly movement was none other than Larry Hogan’s father, Larry Hogan, Sr., who was the last Republican to serve as Prince George’s County Executive from 1978 to 1982.

Today, this very post is held by Angela Alsobrooks, although maybe not for much longer. If polls are to be believed, come Tuesday Alsobrooks will defeat Hogan and become just the third Black woman ever to serve in the Senate.

Pete Tucker is a journalist based in DC. He writes at petetucker.substack.com