The New York Times recently reported that “over the past four years, at least 10 people in South Texas have been victims of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping or rape” at the hands of United States Border Patrol agents. The agents — including one man who went on a 12-day killing spree targeting sex workers — are described to have “suddenly and violently snapped.”

This stands in stark contrast to President Trump’s repeated racist attempts to paint immigrants from Mexico as “killers and rapists.” Indeed the subtext of the Times‘ writing is that it’s not those who cross the border who should be feared, but those tasked with enforcing inhumane immigration policies against them.

The Times also suggests the possibility that “the very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work—dealing with vulnerable, powerless people, often alone on the nation’s little-traveled frontiers,” contributes to their ability to get away with their crimes, as well their inclination to commit them in the first place. After all, many of these attacks occurred prior to Trump’s reign of terror — including under President Obama — which suggests that the way the United States approaches border control has long been deeply racist and dehumanizing.

We also know that law enforcement officers across the United States are trained to treat people inhumanely, especially Black and brown people, and this reality has also led to a well-documented epidemic of mass incarceration and violence, including sexual violence. In fact, the New York Times also reported this month that women working in the Federal Bureau of Prisons face a near constant threat of assault and harassment, often from their own co-workers.

This portrait of Border Agents could also be applied to the ever-expansive pool of mass shooters, who are also often described as having mysteriously “snapped,” although it’s well-documented that they are largely straight men — typically white — and almost always have a history of violence against women. Not so mysterious.

Every day, men throughout society are encouraged to dominate “vulnerable, powerless people,” including those traversing well-traveled areas, and they know that they are very likely to get away with their aggression — or even be rewarded for it. This is not coincidence. It’s due in part to patriarchy, a social system that not only values men over women, but the behaviors which we describe as “masculine” over those which we call “feminine.” It is — as race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw emphasizes — inherently linked to white supremacy, capitalism, and other social systems rooted in ideals of dominance.

The very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work contributes to their ability to get away with their crimes, as well their inclination to commit them in the first place.
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And yet, none of the news reports above mentioned include the word patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, or any other reference to historically entrenched gendered oppression. Despite the array of blockbuster reports over the past two years unveiling sexual violence in various American institutions, we — especially men in power —  still seem far more comfortable discussing how the specific “nature” of certain environments lend themselves to rape than we are acknowledging that the very structuring of our society is the reason that these types of environments exist in the first place.

In Vivek Shraya’s new memoir, I’m Afraid of Men, the writer and artist never shies away from that bigger picture, beginning with a painstaking account of a day in her life as a trans South Asian woman living in Canada. We follow her as she faces a near constant barrage of sexism, misogyny, transphobia, and literal threats of violence as she walks out of her apartment, logs onto the Internet, does her job, and simply survives the day. Shreya underlines the ways in which the fear of men has been reinforced and affirmed throughout her life, from childhood onward.

In the Times article “Hazing, Humiliation, Terror: Working While Female in Federal Prison,” a prison employee named Jessica recounts something similar in relation to her working conditions:

Every single day something happened, whether it was an inmate jerking off to you, whether it was an inmate pushing you, whether it was a staff member harassing you through email, on a phone, following you to your car.

Both of these accounts echo the report on Border Patrol as well, in which one of the survivors, M.G., describes the moment when she, her daughter, and another woman from the same town in Honduras were first detained by the agent who would go on to attack them all:

“When I saw him, I said, ‘Thank God,’” M.G. said.

But they slowly began to worry as they sat on metal benches in the back of the truck. M.G. thought there was something strange about the way the man was breathing. At first, she tried not to show her fear to the girls.

“I pretended,” she said. “I tried to be strong.”

The acceptance of hypermasculine brooding, anger, and intimidation in our society means people become accustomed to, adept at, suppressing their legitimate fears in order to appease those in power. Not just in prison or while risking their lives to cross into a new country, but as Shraya writes, the fear of men “governs” the choices she must make “from the beginning of my day to the end,” from the way an email is written to deciding what to wear out the door. (Particularly as a trans woman of color).

None of the news reports mentioned include the word patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, or any other reference to historically entrenched gendered oppression.
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Ultimately, M.G. dragged herself out of the brush where she was left for dead and was able to alert another Border Patrol agent passing through. It seems to take such death-defying acts of heroism, or painfully-researched exposes in mainstream media, to even get us to face this violence. Yet, even then, there’s an avoidance of the deeper pattern.

The naming of patriarchy is largely discouraged by those in power because of patriarchy. As bell hooks has written:

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word ‘patriarchy’ in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained.

To name patriarchy is to name the existence of historic gendered oppression, which is to name the existence of systemic bias against what we call femininity. And that is, in turn, an attack on the legitimacy of masculinity, the gender and sex binary, and how we are fundamentally taught to conceptualize power. In other words, naming patriarchy risks dismantling it.

In an essay for The Atlantic last year, Vann R. Newkirk II addressed the backlash against the increased use of “white supremacy” in the Trump era, responding to critics who argue that its usage has become overly broad. Newkirk clarified that this systemic “definition of white supremacy has long animated black activism,” including the work of Martin Luther King Jr., and efforts to reduce its scope have always been directly linked to the ever-expansive project of sweeping racism under the rug:   

The repackaging of Jim Crow into a “race neutral” set of policies didn’t just arise as a wink-and-a-nod deal in southern political backrooms a few years near the end of the civil-rights movement, but was a half-century-long project forged by thousands of lawyers and mainstream political leaders that costs millions of dollars, and was played out in every arena across the country from the Supreme Court to town hall meetings.

When we do tend to hear patriarchy these days it’s often in the form of the limiting phrase “the patriarchy” and it is similarly marginalized to “backrooms” where a certain group of powerful men apparently decide the fates of women. Indeed, some of the rebuttals to the existence of “the patriarchy” come down to the argument: but women are in those rooms too!

This diminishment and dismissal of the dominator culture in which we are swimming, happens in tandem with the avoidance of white supremacy and the fact that this society was in fact built upon white patriarchal violence. Despite the popularity of “intersectionality” as a buzzword—and the subsequent backlash to its use—we don’t often describe in detail the various systems of dominance, including capitalism and imperialism, which overlap to compound oppression.

Keeping these systems in obscurity serves a status quo in which indigenous women living in poverty, while carrying the generational trauma of genocide—on land targeted for environmental destruction—are still the most likely to be raped and assaulted (and usually by white men).

Extreme situations, like the dehumanization happening at our southern border or within our prison system, must be challenged, but isolating hypermasculine violence to particular conditions, independent of history, has also long been a tactic for avoiding cultural change. Or for dismissing unsavory problems as situational.

We’ve seen that in the way many have attempted to reduce Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement to a white Hollywood issue. Or in the way people like Trump blame terrorism on Muslims, or dismiss the epidemic of rape in the military by suggesting that it’s unavoidable in those conditions, asking incredulously, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?.”  

The irony is that these attempts at narrowing the conversation always end up doing the opposite: If the situation is to blame, why are there so many different situations producing similar results? Why is it a given that men will attack women when in isolation? Why do we simply accept the terror of masculinity as a fact of life?

Connecting this all to patriarchy means a commitment to describing how aggression, violence, and dominance are normalized all around us. It requires our constant effort to link the idealization of masculinity to that of things like whiteness, thinness, ability, wealth, Christianity, cisnormativity, and the destruction of our environment. It demands a more complicated story.

Despite the popularity of “intersectionality” as a buzzword, we don’t often describe the various systems of dominance, including capitalism and imperialism, which overlap to compound oppression.
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At the end of I’m Afraid of Men, Shraya laments that “any ambiguity or nonconformity, especially in relation to gender, conjures terror. This is precisely why men are afraid of me. Why women are afraid of me too.”

What she yearns for is a world free of gendered expectations altogether, one in which we follow trans and gender-nonconforming people of color toward our “sublime” possibilities. Words alone do not ensure that safer, physical reality — a society without borders or prisons or hierarchies — but naming systems does force certain realities into the light. And perhaps dares us to look for a path.

Carolina Algara* wanted to work almost anywhere but the chocolate factory in Louisiana, but that’s what she did, for four years in a row.

Each year, recruiters for the United States’ temporary work visa programs would arrive in her rural town in central Mexico and offer the men options for jobs north of the border: in farming, forestry, landscaping, carnivals, hotels. And each year, the women (with their “nimble fingers perfect for delicately sorting chocolates”) were offered only the factory.

“It was my only option—I didn’t know what else to do,” Algara said. “Recruiters would say outright, ‘No, I don’t have opportunities for women—these positions are only for men.’”

The chocolate factory—like many companies willing to hire migrant women under the H2 visa programs—paid badly, offered no overtime, and had no tolerance for complaints or illness. After speaking out about the conditions in the chocolate factory, Algara was not hired to return for a fifth year.

For Algara, and for countless migrant women like her, the initial discrimination during recruitment served as an introduction to a part of the U.S. immigration system where equal protection under the law is nothing more than a catch-phrase. When it comes to the H2 programs (H2-A and H2-B for agricultural and non-agricultural work, respectively), women consistently get the short end of the stick: in everything from job placement to task assignments, and from sexual harassment to wage allotment. And yet, they continue to return, filling the perennial labor needs of a system that disincentivizes their participation.

“In Mexico in particular, discrimination across the board is very commonplace,” said Julia Coburn, director of operations for worker advocacy organization, Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), and coordinator of CDM’s Migrant Women’s Project. “But I think in the United States, discrimination across the board is very commonplace as well. It’s something that we see in jobs of all types, all around the country, but it is especially pronounced in the H2 visa programs.”

When it comes to the H2 programs, women consistently get the short end of the stick: in everything from job placement to task assignments, and from sexual harassment to wage allotment.
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There are three main steps (and three main bureaucratic actors) in the H2 visa approval process. First, an employer hoping to utilize temporary labor petitions the Department of Labor (DOL) for foreign labor certification. During this process, the employer is required to show that their need is temporary, and that they have already tried (and failed) to recruit U.S. workers. Second, the employer submits a petition to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to finalize approval. Finally, prospective workers apply for visas through the Department of State, via the government of their home country. As of January 2018, there are 83 countries eligible for H2 visas.

In Mexico, one of the biggest markets for temporary labor, it is common for a recruiter to serve as the middle-man between labor and bureaucracy. Companies who have been allotted a certain number of visa slots hire recruiters, who tend to have a license to recruit in a town or region in Mexico. The process is chaotic; migrants talk of announcements on village loudspeakers, hours in line under the hot sun, over 200 dollars (4000 pesos) pressed into recruiters’ hands to save a spot in the visa application process. Even those who return to the U.S. year after year are subject to this dysfunction.

When workers arrive, their legal status is entirely tied to their employer; they cannot change positions or companies. Workers typically reside in the U.S. for just a season, and many have families that they support during the off-season with their wages from their work north of the border. A September 2017 report by CDM and the University of Pennsylvania’s Transnational Legal Clinic showed that women were particularly likely to be supporting families—94 percent of those surveyed (which included all visa categories aside from the J1 ‘au pair’ program) spent an average of 70 percent of their earnings on “childcare and other family support.”

While H2-A and H2-B visas are both temporary worker programs, the H2-A program is considerably larger. Consequently, H2-A workers have more resources at their disposal: more specialized legal assistance programs, higher wages, and simply better strength-in-numbers. It is widely considered the better visa.

“They have an opportunity to earn more,” explains Coburn. “Often H2-A workers in communities in Mexico are considered privileged; they come back with more money over the average season.”

According to Coburn, in practice the distinction between the two categories translates to significant disadvantages for women, because H2-A visas rarely go to women (only about three to seven percent). Instead women are slated into non-agricultural H2-B jobs, which typically amount to stereotypical “women’s work,” like Algara’s work in the chocolate factory.

Even when men and women work in the same workplace—as is the case in the crab industry—men are given the chance to earn overtime pay for their roles lifting and cooking crab. Silvia, an H2-B worker who did not give her last name, told CDM that men frequently were given more hours of work that the women who worked on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Men are also more often paid by the hour. Women, in contrast, are typically paid a piece rate: usually by the pound of crabmeat picked.

Even when men and women work in the same workplace—as is the case in the crab industry—men are given the chance to earn overtime pay for their roles lifting and cooking crab.
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“We’ve even been told that while these men are working longer hours, women are expected to spend their off-time cleaning the men’s housing, or do other unpaid domestic work that’s considered women’s work,” says Coburn.

Algara started working at the Louisiana chocolate factory in 2003, when a recruiter came to her town. A young mother at the time, she hoped to spend a few months each year working hard in the U.S. for an hourly wage far higher than what she could make in Mexico. That seasonal income would help sustain her throughout the rest of the year.

However, recruiters made it abundantly clear that she would only be considered for certain jobs. Recruitment ads on Facebook and similar networks specify that they are looking for “men ages 18 to 39”. One goes so far as to specify that women applicants must include a (presumably negative) pregnancy test with their visa application materials (also pictured).

In Algara’s case, the lack of options led to a loss of economic opportunity. “The truth is that I wanted to do something else,” she says. “In the factory we couldn’t work more than 40 hours per week, so we had practically three days of doing absolutely nothing.” And while the 40-hour workweek is something American unions fought hard for precisely in order to protect workers from exploitation, it limits migrant workers, who cannot pick up a second job if they want to earn more. Daria, who worked packing vegetables on an H2-B visa and also preferred not to use her last name, explained to CDM that she and her female colleagues only worked three to five hours per week, and earned 10 percent less per hour than she had been promised during recruitment.

Algara also felt that her company took advantage of its monopoly power over her cohort of women workers, barely giving the migrants enough work for the whole process to be worth it. However, with few other options, she returned to the U.S. yearly until she was blacklisted by the factory.

Algara rallied 70 of her colleagues to stop work and demand fair labor standards for reasons of gender discrimination (the men earned more for their roles carrying and stacking boxes than the women did packing chocolates on assembly lines), and lack of respect toward workers. These concerns represent just a few of the buffet of problems workers have voiced, which include visa fraud, misrepresentation of contract, failure to provide workers with copies of their contract, and charging workers fees for recruitment.

While these practices are prohibited under U.S. labor law and the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), the Department of Labor and other relevant bodies simply do not have the resources to investigate all the claims that are made about the H2 program. Several workers, with help from CDM, filed a petition on gender-based discrimination with the NAALC in 2016. They have yet to receive an official response from the U.S. government about that petition (MEX 2016-1) or its supplement under the NAALC. have yet to hear back about its consequences.

(Shortly after filing said petition, CDM got a call from the U.S. government—who ostensibly did not know CDM had helped the petitioners—requesting information on the subject: “we need to reply to this petition, and you’re some of the only people we know working on this stuff.”)

Several workers, with help from CDM, filed a petition on gender-based discrimination with the NAALC in 2016. They have yet to receive an official response from the U.S. government.
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Migrants like Algara are lobbying to get more explicit protections included in the new USMCA agreement. They celebrated a minor victory this August when the U.S. Trade Representative announced that migrant workers would “ensure that migrant workers are protected under labor laws” in the NAFTA renegotiation, though it is unclear what form that protection will take now that USMCA has been announced.

For now, though, women continue to see the worst of a system that allows for rampant abuse of workers of any gender. They frequently describe their fear of retaliation for speaking out (and with good reason, considering Algara’s experience). And for many, the personal and economic stakes are simply too high to do so, even in the face of wage and hour violations, health and safety problems, discrimination, and even gender-based violence.

So, many women simply grin and bear it—the stakes of losing an opportunity like an H2 visa reach beyond themselves to their families and entire communities. And as for why the companies hosting them get away with the practices that would push workers with more options away? It all comes back to the law of supply and demand, says Coburn.  

“If you come with a visa, you have different rights that other people,” she says. “You are constantly reminded that there are thousands of other workers behind you, waiting for your place, just in case you lose or leave your job.”

*Source’s name has been changed to accommodate her fear of further retaliation, should she decide to apply for an H2-B visa again.

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders were set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987.

As we drive on U.S. highway 90, a long stretch of old road that spans the US-Mexico Border, the landscape changes from green snarled trees of the Old South to the dusty brush of the Southwest. The car’s AC billows, disillusioning us to the 104-degree temperature that hovers outside. The car becomes a small enclosed habitat, a floating homestead separate from the world. I sit softly dozing in the passenger’s seat as the scenery morphs in the distance. If I’m not careful I might miss the exact moment when the space shifts, and we begin to inhabit the border country. The dog Winston, a 38-pound black poodle who we’ve been tasked with driving across the country from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, lays knocked out cold in his crate in the back seat of the minivan. My husband drives steady, unwavering as we traverse the long stretch of highway that leads us from Louisiana to Eastern Texas.

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I have never been to Mexico. This is the first time I am physically near the U.S.-Mexico border. For Gloria Anzaldúa, a lesbian Chicana poet and theorist from Texas, the border is a separate place. Not a crossing, but una herida abierta; an open wound that does not heal. I can feel the atmosphere change. But at the same time our little roadster spaceship, like the pockets of the liberal East Coast, seems immune to the trauma of crossing. Like the umbra of the moon, the border stretches out to our left as we drive westward.

Although we do not plan to leave the country, we encounter several border patrol checkpoints on our southern sojourn to California. While not new, an increase in anti-immigration actions from the Trump administration has condoned highway checks some 50-100 miles from the physical border. What that means is border patrol agents and checkpoints stand sentry deep into the southern United States, a threat against undocumented border crossings.

Road signs warn us that we “must come to a stop” as we pass the border checkpoint in Texas. I see the border anew, I begin to understand the wound that Anzaldúa writes about. Each stop a reminder of the trauma of this place, like the raw, unbridled elements of the desert, threatening to break open. America’s southern boundary festers—tissue and organs of the land split open. Despite the protection of a little blue passport book, my heartbeat takes flight and bile rises in my throat.

America’s southern boundary festers—tissue and organs of the land split open.
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How can we define the places that are safe, that distinguish “us from them,” as Anzaldúa puts it? Growing up Puerto Rican and Italian in NYC, the idea of land boundaries made little sense to my hereditary landscape. That is, Puerto Rico and Sicily are both archipelagoes. Islands dotted with smaller islands. Bodies of water told my ancestors if they did not belong. The idea of a continuous landmass transected by only the immaterial was utterly foreign to me. As for growing up in NYC, your borough was your place. Manhattan and Staten Island are surrounded by water. For some, going to “the city” was akin to going abroad; think The Warriors. Although Queens and Brooklyn are physically connected, borough pride was a self-imposed boundary.

Being a light-skinned Latina I often benefit from white privilege while traveling. The NYPD is notorious for ticketing and arresting people who evade fares on the subway, or “jump the turnstile,” as well as for other minor infractions. They enforce the border of who is a good citizen and who is bad, often targeting people of color, who already are more likely to not be able to afford the fare. I have been stopped by police three times while riding on the subway. Twice for fare evasion, and once for putting my feet on the seat. Every time I was let off with a summons (fined around $60-$100). I was never arrested. I might have been poor enough to be fined, but I wonder if it was my light skin that kept me out of jail.

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Before we pull up to the first border checkpoint, several cameras photograph our car, license plate, and faces. It is perhaps made of concrete and brick and low-grade steel. The structure could be the entrance to a city pool, which historically kept out Black Americans. “Us and them” made solid.

The border agent, a white woman of average height with sandy brown hair, wears reflective sunglasses and a gun at her hip; she reminds me of all the ways feminism can slip into complacency. She asks if everyone in the car is a U.S. citizen. We both answer yes, indignantly as we can. However, it is a silent, ineffectual protest. She mistakes our tone for frustration of being minorly inconvenienced with a process that does that concern us. We both have U.S. birth certificates. We have nothing to fear when traveling. Carl is white. I am white enough.

The next day we continue our drive, going from western Texas, through New Mexico to Arizona. In New Mexico we again pass a border checkpoint. This time, as Carl lowers the driver’s side window, the border agent takes one look at him and waves us on through. When Carl is sitting down you cannot tell his stature rises to over six feet. He is blond and blue-eyed—the “perfect American.”

We both have US birth certificates. We have nothing to fear when traveling. Carl is white. I am white enough.
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The third time we are forced to stop is in California. The initial stop is an agricultural inspection. A few years ago California suffered a fruit fly blight when out-of-state fruit was brought in. As the car comes to a halt, an agricultural inspection agent asks, “Are there any illegal fruit or vegetables in the vehicle?” What he implies is, “Are there any illegal people in the vehicle?” We say no, as if he could detect if we were lying. The charade of this person, who looks to be no older than us and seems to have no vested interest in illegal immigration other than for a paycheck, being stationed there for the sole purpose of protecting California’s agriculture from dangerous produce, was both laughable and enraging. We knew this was a thinly veiled way to enforce the violence of citizenship.

The last and final time we pass a border checkpoint, Carl barely rolls down his window when the agent in a dull green uniform and state-authorized gun gestures us through. By this time, it is absurdly clear who the border place is safe for. We both know that if either of us looked “Mexican,” or anything but white, our road trip would have been very different. We were allowed to drive through each state, each boundary in a minivan with out-of-state license plates and a dark crate in the back seat without arousing suspicion. There was no doubt that we didn’t belong. No question of citizenship. We sat comfortable in our AC while the border loomed near, enforced by a boundary that ran in jagged, angry lines.

As the topography thinned out and expanded into rocks and cliffs, sand and brush washing out the scenery, I swear I could make out the thin red streams. I could hear la herida abiertando. I could smell the wounds festering.

“This is America, speak English.”

This refrain is becoming alarmingly common — used liberally on angry Facebook pages and by everyone from angry JC Penney shoppers to belligerent presidential candidates.

During his primary campaign, Donald Trump declared: “We have a country where to assimilate, you have to speak English.” A moment later he added, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”

Unfortunately, this is not just inflammatory rhetoric — it’s also the basis of current and proposed language policy.

In February of this year, the Michigan House passed a bill to make English the official state language. The bill is expected to pass the state Senate, though it would need Governor Rick Snyder’s signature to become law. If it succeeds, Michigan will become the 32nd state to make English its official language and clear a victory for the “Official English” political movement.

Also known as “English-Only,” this movement has been around for decades, rising to prominence in the late ‘80s and early ’90s. America does not currently, and has never had, a legal designation of any one language as its official one.

Today, three major organizations are trying to change that––U.S. English, ProEnglish, and English First. Of these, ProEnglish has the most active online presence and, notably, political influence: Organization officials have met with Trump administration aides numerous times this year. All three groups, however, have similar missions and goals.

They disparage “multilingualism” and “multiculturalism,” arguing that the lack of a “unifying” national language creates “linguistic ghettos” and limits immigrants’ economic prospects. While they maintain that it’s fine to use other languages in private, they advocate making English the official language of the United States, which would require that nearly all government documents be written — and operations conducted — exclusively in English.

That’s the movement’s long-term goal.

America does not currently, and has never had, a legal designation of any one language as its official one.
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In the meantime they advocate “Official English” laws at the state and local levels, as well as restrictions on the use of other languages in government, schools, and workplaces. To this end, they support English-only voting ballots, driving exams, and workplace policies, an end to bilingual education, and the repeal of EO 13166, an executive order issued by Bill Clinton which entitles people with limited English proficiency (LEP) to translation assistance for government documents and services.

They support the English Language Unity Act, which would make English the country’s official language, restrict access to translation services, and impose an arduous English proficiency requirement for naturalization. They also advocate for the COST Act, which would require federal agencies to document the expense of translation services, and the RAISE Act, which would severely restrict legal immigration and create a points-based immigration system rewarding — among other skills and characteristics — English proficiency.

Advocates claim that these policies, rather than punishing LEP immigrants, will “incentivize” them to assimilate and learn English. They repeatedly invoke the melting pot metaphor, praising diversity while demanding national “unity” — something which, they argue, is impossible in a multilingual society.

But while the movement presents itself as pro-immigrant, its origins are steeped in racism.

U.S. English and ProEnglish were founded by John Tanton, an anti-immigration and pro-eugenicist crusader who has founded numerous racist organizations. These include the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, the pro-eugenics group Society for Genetic Education, and the Social Contract Press, which, with Tanton’s approval, reprinted the notorious The Camp of the Saints, a racist favorite of Steve Bannon.

Tanton was pushed out of U.S. English in 1988 after the leak of some astonishingly racist memos, and there’s no trace of him on either of the group’s official websites. ProEnglish, the group he founded in 1994 (the same year his publishing company reprinted The Camp of the Saints), contains only two mentions of him. This near-absence is unsurprising; Tanton’s more inflammatory statements — say, “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that” — don’t exactly gel with the movement’s message of national unity.

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Instead, advocates argue that a “common language” would unite immigrants and native-born citizens alike. It would also, they claim, incentivize immigrants to learn English, save the government billions of dollars in federally-funded translation services, and improve immigrants’ economic prospects. But this argument hinges on two major assumptions: First, that LEP immigrants currently lack motivation to learn English; and second, that “Official English” legislation will lead to increased English proficiency. Both are false.

In fact, the real problem is not lack of motivation, but lack of federal funding for ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. According to The Migration Policy Institute, such classes are in high demand but, thanks to funding cuts, suffer long wait times resulting in unmet need. The incentive to learn English is already there — what’s missing is the means.

If the “Official English” movement were truly interested in improving immigrants’ lives and fostering national unity they would address this need, whether through support for increased federal funding or by providing free ESL classes and tutoring. But their websites and social media feeds offer no information about ESL class wait lists or suggestions on what to do about the problem.

As for the second assumption, it’s notable that advocates emphasize the potential benefits of their policies, not the actual effects. State-level “Official English” laws have existed for decades, so if they truly lead to increased English acquisition, wouldn’t we know?

The incentive to learn English is already there — what’s missing is the means.
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In fact, six of the 11 states with the highest percentages of LEP residents — California, Hawaii, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and Massachusetts — had “Official English” laws for, at the time of data collection, at least 25 years.

States with “Official English” and low numbers of LEP residents, meanwhile, have relatively small immigrant populations in the first place. These data suggest that it is the number of immigrants, not the presence of Official English laws, that determines English proficiency rates. Mandating official English, meanwhile, does nothing but make it harder for LEP immigrants to participate in society. In short, “Official English” purports to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, with solutions that don’t work anyway — and, in the process, neglects real obstacles to English proficiency.

The argument that “Official English,” through the elimination of government-mandated translation services, would benefit the economy is also suspect. In fact, opponents argue, it would do more harm than good. English-only tax forms would result in lost tax revenue, monolingualism would decrease the country’s competitiveness in the global marketplace, and lack of translation assistance would grow an underclass of people who can’t access basic government services.

Even if “Official English” were financially beneficial, there are other concerns as well, including but not limited to free speech, public health, psychological well-being, marginalization of bilingual students, and — especially prescient now — immigrants’ interactions with law enforcement in general, and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in particular.

 In fact, some of the most dangerous consequences of inadequate translation assistance can be seen at the southern border today.

Such consequences are not new. In 2010 the ACLU issued a letter to the Department of Homeland Security regarding language assistance for LEP immigrants, and cited numerous examples of human rights violations enabled by lack of translation services. Difficulty communicating with ICE officers can lead to — or be used to justify — unlawful detentions, and despite ICE’s supposed commitment to providing language assistance, LEP detainees are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to court proceedings and fair treatment in detention.

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Detainees are not entitled to legal counsel, and only 14% have a lawyer working on their behalf. Those detainees who have neither lawyers nor English proficiency are forced to navigate a confusing court system alone, without translation services. It’s no surprise, then, that detainees with legal representation are twice as likely to win their cases than those without. The numbers are even worse for child detainees: While 73% of children with legal representation are allowed to stay in the country, only 15% of those without representation succeed.

While in detention, LEP migrants struggle to advocate for themselves or receive adequate medical care. As detailed in the ACLU letter, English-only grievance forms make it difficult or impossible for LEP immigrants to report abuse at detention facilities. (Notably, such abuse is pervasive.)

One particularly distressing case in a recent ACLU report on medical care in detention highlights the dangers of inadequate translation assistance. Moises Tino Lopez, 23, died in September 2016 at the Hall County Department of Corrections in Nebraska due to inadequate communication and medical neglect. Lopez’s primary language was K’iche, a Mayan language; he spoke no English and only a little Spanish. Instead of finding a qualified interpreter for either K’iche or Spanish, ICE officials enlisted a Spanish-speaking Guatemalan detainee and Google Translate to convey crucial medical information to Lopez (a violation of HIPAA as well as Lopez’s right to language assistance and medical care). Without a clear understanding of why he had been prescribed a seizure medication or the risks of not taking it, he opted to stop — and consequently died the next day in an isolation unit. (While lack of translation services harms all LEP detainees, those who speak indigenous languages are particularly marginalized.)

These problems existed well before Trump took office. But the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policies — and Trump’s opposition to due process for detainees — put LEP migrants at even greater risk.

Family separation can isolate family members who speak little or no English from those who could act as translators — and although some families are (slowly) being reunited, limited English skills can complicate the already-complicated family unification process. One recent case, for example, involves a 6-year-old girl whose family speaks an indigenous Mayan language and only limited Spanish. She has yet to be reunited with her family, and it’s unknown how well agents have been able to communicate with her.

The family separation policy has also lead to an increase in young children appearing in court proceedings alone. There’s a documented increase in racist abuse on the part of ICE agents, newly empowered by the Trump administration to disregard established protocol and migrants’ human rights.

The danger of English-only doesn’t stop at the border or in detention centers; it carries over into life within the country as well.

Despite the “Official English” movement’s stance against bilingual education, LEP students perform worse in English immersion programs than in well-implemented bilingual education classes. Lack of professional translation services in health care doesn’t just harm detainees, but all LEP medical patients — including, for example, a Spanish-speaking patient with a brain injury who was initially treated for a drug overdose because the paramedics didn’t know Spanish.

The ACLU has already defended a Montana prison inmate barred from receiving letters in Spanish, students banned from speaking Spanish on the school bus, and workers fired for limited English proficiency despite long, unblemished work histories with the company. In 2004, an English immersion teacher in Scottsdale, Arizona was fired for slapping and yelling at students who were speaking Spanish; she claimed she was merely enforcing the school’s English immersion policy.

The danger of English-only doesn’t stop at the border or in detention centers.
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“Official English” advocates often promise certain exceptions to their policies. ProEnglish, in language nearly identical to that in the English Language Unity Act, claims that translation services would be available for measures “protecting public health and safety…in the distribution of information to warn people about the dangers of diseases like HIV/AIDS, etc.” and “actions that protect the rights of victims of crimes or criminal defendants.”

They refer to such exceptions as “common sense” rather than in specific terms. But these concessions elide a larger problem: Without consistent access to translation services, LEP immigrants cannot be reasonably expected to know and advocate for their own rights. This, in turn, can make technically illegal acts effectively legal: Legal protections are meaningless if victims can’t fight back.

Still, you might be thinking, perhaps the “Official English” movement has good intentions. Perhaps they genuinely seek “national unity” and believe that their proposed legislation will benefit immigrants. It may seem unfair to smear them as “racist” over what could be nothing more than a policy disagreement.

But while “Official English” groups make a show of praising “diversity” and have carefully distanced themselves from overtly racist figures like Tanton, their veneer of non-racist respectability slips when convenient. ProEnglish’s Facebook page contains a wealth of race-baiting memes, ranging from the suggestion that LEP immigrants don’t pay taxes (all do) to the implication that “people who require translation services” are not native-born U.S. citizens (some are).

Despite the movement’s insistence that “Official English” laws would only affect government documents and services, numerous memes try to incite anger over any use of non-English languages — for example, this post lamenting people speaking Spanish at home, or the many variations of “Do you resent being ordered to ‘Press 1 for English’?” above pictures of angry white people shouting into landline phones. (The U.S. English page shares similar memes, albeit less often; English First doesn’t use social media.)

Although ProEnglish maintains their mission is non-partisan, their tweets include support for the Trump administration followed by the hashtag #makeenglishgreatagain, and the account liked numerous pro-Trump tweets months before Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination. Both their website and Twitter linked an article complaining that bilingualism in the U.S. “means a lot of promotions for Hispanics,” which calls into question ProEnglish’s stated concern for immigrants’ economic prospects.

And despite attempts to shed their racist legacy, “Official English” groups overwhelmingly focus on Latinx Americans and immigrants, implying a Spanish-speaking “takeover” of the U.S. which echoes John Tanton’s more overtly racist statements. This racist dogwhistling makes it difficult to buy the movement’s ostensibly pro-immigrant agenda.

While it’s tempting to dismiss “Official English” as a fringe movement, they have scored real legislative wins — and the Trump administration only makes their vision more possible. Already notoriously hostile toward immigrants, the administration has shown an openness to “Official English” proposals; the Trump campaign even, ProEnglish giddily observes, polled on the issue.

But while it’s true that language acquisition is crucial to social and economic success in the America we inhabit today, the movement’s solution would only exacerbate inequality.

Real “national unity” is achieved not through government-imposed monolingualism, but through policies and attitudes that assist LEP immigrants in navigating society and don’t punish them for failing to instantaneously acquire a new language. The responsibility of learning a new language, moreover, shouldn’t fall solely on non-native speakers, but on English speakers as well. A true commitment to supporting immigrants always, but especially during the Trump administration, requires that their voices be not only be heard, but understood.

Former White House advisor David Axelrod tweeted today:

Kind of amazed and appalled by the number of folks on Left who applauded the expulsion of @PressSec and her family from a restaurant.

This, in the end, is a triumph for @realDonaldTrump vision of America:

Now we’re divided by red plates & blue plates!

#sad

The only thing that triumphed here is Mike Huckabee-esque anti-humor.

Meanwhile, a more sober take comes to us from the Washington Post editorial board, whose genteel relativism urges us to “let the Trump team eat in peace”:

Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?

It’s not hard at all to imagine what a moral emergency looks like to the extreme right. They’ve murdered abortion doctors and shot up clinics already. We were living in the Post’s grim dystopia for decades before this point. Right-wing extremists, hopped up on their eschatological visions of the world, have indeed taken matters into their own hands repeatedly. They’ve committed massacres at mosques and schools, and from the Pizzagate crowd — deep in thrall to an alternate universe without peer even among the wild fever dreams of conservatism — we’ve only narrowly avoided mass shootings at a pizza parlor and a homeless camp in Arizona.

Thus, I’m less than perturbed at the fact that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was politely asked to leave a restaurant — indeed, she was even told the food she’d already been served was “on the house.” More uncivil, arguably, was the DSA protest that drove Kirstjen Nielsen from a Mexican restaurant in downtown DC, but this involved no violence either and was eminently fair as she’s a cabinet secretary in a public place. By her own claim, she was having a “working dinner” at the restaurant, to boot. So even the Post’s “private time” distinction hardly applies.

The truth is that for all of the recent handwringing about civility, the methods now being employed against the administration’s core supporters are actually quite civil. The manner in which Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave was actually the portrait of civility; it was a communal decision taken by staff, she was informed of the decision in private and politely asked to leave, and was not charged for any orders that had already been delivered. So what happened, exactly? Well, she was shunned. A social consequence was applied to her actions as Press Secretary that served as a powerful reminder: What she does is not normal, and should not be taken lightly.

This seems to be less the embrace of Trumpism than its precise opposite: the enforcement of normative moral standards through the application of polite, non-violent social consequences for immoral acts.

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Trumpism, by its nature, is consequence-free. Just witness how Huckabee Sanders herself abused her power as Press Secretary to publicize the incident on her government account, leveraging her status and calling down a rain of abuse on the restaurant. That she used her @PressSec account to do this is a violation of White House ethics policy. It won’t matter.

This is one of many problems with Trumpism. Scott Pruitt’s bizarre, expensive peccadilloes and overt ethical violations as EPA secretary haven’t cost him his job; Kellyanne Conway spruiking Ivanka Trump’s fashion line in her official capacity didn’t cost her hers; Trump himself experiences next to no oversight from the Republican-dominated Congress and routinely positions himself as being above the law — his simpering defenders on cable news argue much the same.

Therefore, an ordinary citizen took it upon herself to quietly, politely, apply a much needed consequence to a member of a government that thinks itself beyond responsibility to anything but Trump’s whims. That doesn’t seem like a validation of Trumpian callousness, but a repudiation of it.

Trumpism, by its nature, is consequence-free.
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Of course, when you use the smooth, overgeneralizing language of the Posteditorial board — the same rhetorical gesture that categorizes even life-or-death political battles as “disagreements” — this can all be effaced. One act of incivility is as bad as another. I’d dispute that the Red Hen owner’s actions were uncivil, but even in a case where a dollop of rudeness was at play, like the Nielsen protest, such things are necessary for exactly the same reason: Without these mechanisms, these people would experience no meaningful consequences for engineering and supporting horrors.

The people are doing the checking and balancing that our government will not. We should be much more worried that we’ve arrived at that point than about the politesse of a private citizen.

But if we must indulge the “civility” discussion, then it’s worth saying that these acts of civic protest remain peaceful. They are a humane response to inhumanity, and, frankly, one more manifestation of democracy and decency. People who support this administration’s cruel Zero Tolerance regime, whether from a White House podium or from a Twitter account spewing memes and hashtags, should be made to experience the power of shunning. It is, at bottom, a peaceful way to say “this is not okay, and you should go away and think about what you’ve done; then you can rejoin society.”

The people are doing the checking and balancing that our government will not.
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Furthermore, unlike, say, “conscience”-driven bigots who wish to use Christian belief to refuse service to LGBT people, the owner of the Red Hen wasn’t antagonizing any class Huckabee Sanders belonged to. She was responding to Huckabee Sanders’ actions as an individual. The very things she, and she alone, are responsible for. In another time, conservatives might’ve called that “personal responsibility.”

Shunning is harsh in its way — we are social creatures, after all — but it is also humane and non-violent. In short, it is civil. Even better, it’s grassroots. Citizens are taking their responsibilities seriously. As the Red Hen owner said, “This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

That’s more than can be said for Huckabee Sanders, Miller, or Nielsen, who rely on a consequence-free environment in order to do their dirty work.

I’ve often been leery of applying the language of interpersonal abuse dynamics to politics. “Gaslighting” is a word perilously close to being defined out of all meaning, just as “trigger” has been all but stolen from trauma survivors. But there is merit in the observation that abusers define any resistance to their actions as rude and uncivil, that they apply one standard to themselves and another to any who might raise a voice against them. That’s long been the case here.

What Huckabee Sanders experienced was nothing compared to what she’s propagandized for from her podium. She goes home to a warm bed and her loving family, not a cage where she sleeps on concrete under foil; her children will not be parted from her before being spirited through a ramshackle, Kafkaesque prison system that refuses to track its wards.

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A powerful government secretary was denied the momentary privilege of eating at a specific nice restaurant. Even if I had tears left to shed, this would be the last thing to draw them from me. If these people are so concerned about civility in restaurants, then perhaps they can more aggressively take ICE to task for incidents like this.

We should not fall into the moral trap of analogizing a children’s prison camp to a principled denial of service. Or, indeed, analogizing the latter to Jim Crow or shops that discriminate against queer people, as a breathtaking number of people have done in the last few days. We must be smarter and more discerning than this. We owe that much to ourselves.

Where The Washington Post sees sorrow, I see hope. If our government cannot hold its leaders accountable, then the people must.

It was like a Biblical triptych of our times. On one end, a man telling the heartfelt story of a girl with Down’s Syndrome being forcibly ripped from her mother’s arms, on the other a fascist responding “womp womp!” and in the middle a beatifically silent newsreader letting the obscenity unfold. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski made plain both the substance and practice of his ideology with the characteristic efficiency of his imperial icon: cruelty, swaddled in mockery that evokes the most callous of internet trolls.

The atrocity unfolding on the United States’ southern border is not new, and it has been a swelling cancer on the national consciousness for years. But that continuity should not obscure the dramatic and deliberate ways in which it has been catastrophically worsened courtesy of deliberate enforcement mechanisms put in place by Trump and his cadre, aided by the contemptuous consent of the man’s rabid supporters. We are continually barraged with appeals to understand Trump’s supporters, even as multiple New York Timesop-eds lament the supposed vulgarity of people like Robert De Niro or Samantha Bee.

Frank Bruni writes:

“When you answer name-calling with name-calling and tantrums with tantrums, you’re not resisting him. You’re mirroring him. You’re not diminishing him. You’re demeaning yourselves. Many voters don’t hear your arguments or the facts, which are on your side. They just wince at the din.”

In the wake of Donald Trump tweeting that Latinos were “infesting” the country, the best the Times could do was proffer this rather nuclear take:

“The contagion of incivility: President Trump says undocumented immigrants want to ‘infest’ the United States. His critics respond with vituperative words of their own.”

Of course De Niro and Bee were mentioned, putting the expectorates “fuck” and “cunt” on the same level as the leaden words of policy that shatter families and traumatize children. What could be more balanced?

Amidst all the hand-wringing about civility is the implication that if only we were nicer to Trump’s supporters, if only we refrained from four letter words and discomfiting comparisons to Auschwitz, if only we assuaged the hurt feelings of ICE and called cages “chain-link enclosures” or baby jails “tender age facilities,” that we would win more people to our cause.

This is a fatal lie that will see blood in the streets, and in camps before the end.

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Vulgarity and incivility are indeed coarse and uncomfortable, but like any weapon there are moments when they must be employed in self-defense. This is just such a time. If we cannot be vulgar about a cabinet secretary lying to the nation and saying “we do not have a policy of separating families at the border” when her own department has produced statistics and photos evidencing just such a policy, then what is vulgarity for? The milk of human kindness, strained as it is, should be spared for those children and their shattered families — and, indeed, for their homelands who have oft suffered from American foreign policy stretching back decades.

The Kafkaesque cruelty of making their homes unlivable and hammering apart their families when they flee in desperation to the border of the nation that looted its wealth from those selfsame ruins… it’s unforgivable.

At such a point, I’ve no kindness left for Kjerstin Nielsen when she has the audacity to go to a Mexican restaurant for a charming dinner while her department presides over a profound human rights violation, which she had the audacity to lie about. In the midst of all of this, Trump’s supporters have dissembled and equivocated on the question, arguing that asylum-seeking and immigrant parents are to blame for bringing their children in the first place, or that separations are about protecting children from “traffickers and drug lords.” Online, they’re even less circumspect. And that brings us back to the “womp womp,” and to the late report that Trump adviser Stephen Miller “actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border.”

These people have told us who and what they are, and what they’re willing to make excuses for.

After Lewandowski’s on-air act of cruelty, Trump supporter Carmine Sabia tweeted:

“We as supporters of Donald Trump need to stand and say what Corey Lewandowski said about a 10 year old girl with Down Syndrome was abhorrent. He became the caricature of what the media wants people to believe we are.”

But this is who they are. For evidence I turned to Trump supporter Carmine Sabia, who tweeted that same night “A poem on the Statue of Liberty is not immigration law it’s a fucking poem” and a quote about how 765,000 children are supposedly separated from their active-duty military parents (presumably, those children are not held in cages and permanently separated from their families). This callousness and whataboutery, which is the perfect distilled essence of how Trumpists have justified the family separation policy, is what paves the way for Miller’s sadistic enjoyment or Lewandowski’s ability to mock a traumatized 10-year-old girl.

In short, these are the people that those hand-wringing editorials think can be reached by the right combination of reasoned argument and smiling politesse.

Here are some home truths that we — and The New York Times newsroom — need to understand.

We are well past the point when Trump or his people could cross a red line for Republicans. Nothing this Administration says or does will cause these people to turn against Trump. Every line of cruelty Trump crosses will be excused by them. The mealy-mouthed NeverTrumpers like Ben Shapiro, David Frum, George F. Will, and Bill Kristol? That’s it; that’s as good as GOP/conservative “opposition” is ever going to get. Everyone else has signed up for a one-way ticket to Nazism-but-with-memes.

Back on Twitter, I saw someone — with a verified checkmark — going around saying that when a child dies in one of these jails that that’ll be the moment the GOP turns on Trump. I have some very, very horrifying news for you.

We are way past the point when a dead child would make any of these MAGA-spewers, or any elected Republicans who aren’t already issuing tepid do-nothing critiques, change their minds. They knew what they were signing up for.

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They hate Latino immigrants. They hate refugees. They hate asylum seekers. Passionately. If you think, for one moment, that they would seriously mourn the deaths of any of these people, you have not been paying attention. Either to the discourse here or in Europe — lest we forget, a little Syrian boy washed up on the shores of Turkey, dead from the dangerous Mediterranean crossing. That was in 2015. Since then, Brexit happened, Trump was elected, and fascists have come to power, or entrenched it, in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hungary.

The people who support these movements were not and will not be moved, by even the most utterly vulnerable visions of our humanity as people of color. They will not be moved even by the very shattering of our lives. That is the depth with which we are hated, and that depth is the chasm that divides people of good will from those who support Donald Trump — or Alternativ für Deutschland.

This is not an academic “difference of opinion.” It is a gap measured in increments of blood already spilled.

The people who support these movements will not be moved even by the very shattering of our lives.
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If a child died in an ICE facility and became a cause celebre, Trump’s supporters would respond in one or more of the following ways:

• Dissemble. i.e. “maybe they were sick when they got to the border! How irresponsible of their parents!”
• Lie. “It’s fake news!”
• Blame Obama.
• Say “well you didn’t care this much when an immigrant killed an American citizen!”
• “What about when our troops die? Do you care then?”
• And finally, the worst of them would just fucking celebrate it.

The enduring mistake made by those huffing the paint can of civility is that they sincerely believe people who voted for Trump, at bottom, care about other people — especially those who could be seen as “the Other.” True, some slices of Trump’s base hate certain groups more than others. Maybe the top priority for some is hating Muslims, for others it’s Latinos, for others still (like the Evangelical base) it’s hating transgender people, or hating queer folks more widely. But they are all united by the conviction that Trump’s presidency would permit them the violent retribution they craved, visited upon somegroup they hated with a passion.

Trump is a shambles of a man, a bundle of impulses and appetites whose Jupiter-mass ego lends itself neatly to reactionary politics. But to his base, he is an idea. More than even that, he is a license. Clothed in the power of the presidency, he grants permission to those who’ve longed to indulge in their worst, most bigoted impulses. It’s why we’ve seen an uptick in hate crimes, and why so many videos are surfacing of loudmouth bigots who either reference Trump or current events in their rants. More than anything else, Trump is permission. “It’s okay to stop caring about other people,” his existence announces. “You too can be fabulously rich, above the law, and as abusive as you please.” So long as he has the imprimatur of the presidency, he will have an invincible appeal to bigots who’ve yearned for some form of towering legitimacy for their hatred.

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You cannot wait for some universal moral outrage to overwhelm and convert your opposition. The outrage will never be universal until the threat of fascism has passed, at which point no one will want to admit they cheered on crimes against humanity.

If you are sincerely concerned about the great crimes of our time — from Trump’s policies to the new Italian government threatening to expel Roma — then you cannot concern yourself with appealing to the people vociferously cheering on those policies. They’ve already made up their minds; they’ve found their moment.

Many other people, perhaps people isolated by feelings of powerlessness and despair, are waiting for theirs. Your job is to give it to them, activate and mobilize them. In the process, do not give the slightest damn about the hurt feelings of fascism’s enablers. The only feelings they care about are their own, and that’s always been the problem. They’ll whine more about the cancellation of Roseanne than they will about giving toddlers PTSD. Frankly, fuck them.

There’s no eloquence that should be wasted on them.

The dirty secret of fascism is that its appeal is not rational; it is, therefore, impervious to rational argument. You cannot talk someone out of a feeling of hatred. If your conscience requires you to believe in redemption, as mine does (once a Catholic, always a Catholic), then consider this: Redemption is not yours to give. It can only be sought by the soul that craves it, that has admitted its sins, and seeks to honestly make amends. You cannot give that to anyone. Those who now support fascism may one day stare in a mirror and cry “what have I become!?” But that epiphany can only come from within.

In the meantime, fuck ’em, and organize everybody else.

There are two kinds of white people who work in restaurants. The kind who doesn’t learn the names of the Latinx immigrant cooks, and the kind who does. And there are two kinds of celebrity chefs. The kind who leaves the kitchen to pick up his award and forgets about the crew that made him, and the kind that doesn’t. Anthony Bourdain was the second kind. In his first book, Kitchen Confidential, specifically in the section “Who Cooks,” he made it very clear who is feeding America — something other celebrity chefs have never bothered to point out:

“Most of the Ecuadorians and Mexicans I hire from a large pool — a sort of farm team of associated and often related former dishwashers — are very well-paid professionals, much sought after by other chefs. Chances are they’ve worked their way up from the bottom rung; they remember well what it was like to empty out grease traps, scrape plates, haul leaking bags of garbage out to the curb at four o’clock in the morning. A guy who’s come up through the ranks, who knows every station, every recipe, every corner of the restaurant and who has learned, first and foremost, your system above all others is likely to be more valuable and long-term than some bed-wetting white boy whose mom brought him up thinking the world owed him a living, and who thinks he actually knows a few things.

You want loyalty from your line cooks.”

Bourdain didn’t just ask for loyalty, he returned it. In season 1 of his first television show A Cook’s Tour he took his cameras to Puebla, home of the line cooks in his kitchen. The episode was called “Puebla: Where Good Cooks are From.” Bourdain’s host in Puebla was Bourdain’s colleague and sous chef Eddie Perez, who Bourdain described as the “backbone of Les Halles,” his French restaurant in New York City.

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Let other white people swallow every lie in the press about Latinx immigrants. White Americans work side by side with Latinx immigrants, both documented and undocumented, in restaurants every single day. There is no plausible deniability for them. They know undocumented immigrants aren’t choosing to be undocumented. They know that America needs them, exploits them, and persecutes them.

Bourdain’s loyalty and willingness to tell the truth didn’t end with humanizing immigrants. He also demanded real solutions from the people showering him with awards and television shows.

In an interview with Eater, he urged the James Beard Foundation to fund para legal aid for Mexican cooks.

It’s not a fucking Benetton ad. Maybe pony up some of that money for free paralegal advice for the great number of Mexican immigrants who have been working in this business all of these years who are struggling to stay in this country and would like to do it legitimately. Just seems like there’s a lot of money floating around, and I’d like to see a little of it broken off to reflect those that are actually cooking in this country.

He also spoke on social media about the need for the culinary establishment to fight for immigration reform.

And in a society where it is rare for to go against the well-worn yet fictional narratives that vilify undocumented immigrants, Anthony Bourdain told the truth about that too. He told the Houston Press in 2007:

“People have differing opinions on what we should do about immigration in the future. How open or how closed our borders should be. Fine. But let’s be honest, at least, about who is cooking in America NOW. Who we rely on — have relied on for decades. The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board. Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable. Illegal labor is the backbone of the service and hospitality industry — Mexican, Salvadoran and Ecuadoran in particular. To contemplate actually doing without is to contemplate mass closings, a general shake-out of individually owned and operated restaurants — and, of course, unthinkably (now) higher prices in the places that manage to survive. Considering that our economy and employment picture is now largely based on us selling hamburgers to each other, the ripple effects would be grave. I know very few chefs who’ve even heard of a US born citizen coming in the door to ask for a dishwasher, night clean-up or kitchen prep job. Until that happens — let’s at least try to be honest when discussing this issue.”

Anthony Bourdain was not a politician. He was not a political activist. He was a cook who spent years with Latinx immigrants on food production line in sweltering kitchens. The fact that he spoke up at every opportunity on behalf of immigrant Latinx restaurant workers was motivated by an extremely simple formula: loyalty, plus an extreme aversion to bullshit.

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Bourdain explained his loyalty to Latinx immigrants in Parts Unknown “Season 9 Ep 1: Los Angeles.”

I worked in French and Italian restaurants my whole career, but really, if I think about it, they were Mexican restaurants and Ecuadorian restaurants, because the majority of the cooks and the people working with me were from those countries. That’s who, you know, picked me up when I fell down; who showed me what to do when I walked in and didn’t know anything and nobody knew my name.

Bourdain proved that you didn’t have to master the nuances of immigration policy or have a degree in political science to have the courage to defend undocumented immigrants. He saw his crew being persecuted and criminalized and he wasn’t willing to ignore that for the approval of the culinary establishment. As a wealthy white man, he didn’t even pay a price for it, so culinary industry elite, take note.

In the days following his death, social media and blogs were flooded with people of color grieving and honoring him. Why was he so loved for doing something so simple? Because the stakes are life and death, and almost no one else in a position of power, especially a white man, will stand with us. Activists working to help undocumented immigrants are everyday, mostly Latinx people with the courage to stand up to the dominant culture in America. Around the country, they have formed rapid response teams to respond to ICE raids, raise money to bail people out of immigrant prisons, and look after the families whose loved ones have been deported. And for their trouble, they receive racist hate mail, death threats and a deafening silence from the political establishment.

Almost no one else in a position of power, especially a white man, will stand with us.
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Democratic politicians spout the same misleading, toxic catchphrases as everyone else. Undocumented immigrants shouldn’t cut in line (as though there are any orderly lines for immigration paperwork, much less ones they are allowed into). Undocumented immigrants must avoid criminality (turns out they do a better job of that than native born Americans.) Democratic politicians have done the math. By speaking up to tell the truth about undocumented immigrants they are taking a risk. They calculate what they will gain, factoring in the lower rate of voting and political donations of the Latinx community. They correctly assume that with Republicans literally advocating for policies that kill our loved ones, we have nowhere else to go. A red Trump hat is hate speech in a Mexican restaurant. So for Democrats, the math always comes out the same. Silence at best. Status quo at worst. As a result, the Trump message of fear and bigotry carries the day, and the Democrats get our support no matter what.

But the food industry is in a unique position. As a wealthy white man, Bourdain didn’t pay a price for speaking out. If anything it burnished his reputation as a fearless teller of truth. So not only do privileged people in the culinary industry not have plausible deniability, they have nothing to lose.

Bourdain was criticized in some corners for being too political. When a person of privilege would like to gingerly step around the bleeding body of a person of color, they say that defending them is ‘too political.” But Anthony Bourdain didn’t step around the bodies of his friends. And he wasn’t someone you silenced.

I can attest to the truth of everything he said. I have spent decades looking for the truth about the dystopian and horrifying ways that America treats undocumented immigrants. I have worked in restaurants, studied politics in academia, worked on Capitol Hill, and bore witness to the lives of my undocumented family and friends. The truth is this: America has deliberately and strategically created an underclass of undocumented immigrants by targeting certain types of immigrants for criminalization. You don’t have to understand immigration policy to see that. Twenty million people, the vast majority of whom are people of color, don’t just get up and say ‘You know what? Screw economic stability, family unity, and safety, I’m gonna be undocumented.’ Twenty million people constitute an underclass purposefully created and steadfastly maintained by the white power structure. Despots need fear to maintain power. Fear needs a scapegoat. Undocumented immigrants cannot defend themselves, so scapegoating them is the perfect crime.

What I’m saying is, we could really use a hand here. And people in the food industry — Food Network executives, celebrity chefs, food award foundations, food bloggers, food related charities, should be the first ones to stand up. Anthony Bourdain did everything he could in his tragically abbreviated life. He stood with us. But he is gone now. We need powerful allies more than ever.

Trump didn’t invent deportation. He didn’t even invent ICE. But he has made life more terrifying and more dangerous for all immigrants and anyone who loves them. His dehumanizing rhetoric harks back to genocidal heads of state.

It gives everyone from ICE agents, border patrol officers, and school yard bullies license to racially profile and harm people with impunity. He is currently suing California for trying to defend its communities against his illegal and unconstitutional power grabs.

He is carrying out increased mass deportations proudly, and increased the number of non-criminal deportations significantly.

People in the food industry should be the first ones to stand up.
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And since Latinx immigrants are the reason the squeezed middle class can buy produce or eat out on a weekend, since they trained and made possible the career of every famous cook in America, I challenge every person in the food industry to step up now.

Here is the plan, food industry titans — people who have made their fortunes making and talking about food. Here is what we expect of you from now on. Let’s call it the Bourdain doctrine:

When you hear hateful rhetoric, stand up to it. I want to see Rachel Ray in a ‘no human is illegal’ t-shirt.

Demand action from your government. You know, the one that listens to you and not us?

Demand rational, comprehensive, immigration reform now.

Demand the closure of immigrant prisons.

Demand ICE be abolished.

And when the political establishment drags its feet like it always does, that is not the moment in which you shrug your shoulders and say you did everything you could.

It is time for you to pony up money for legal assistance and bail money.

It is time for you to create health care funds, since undocumented immigrants cannot access health insurance.

It is time for you to publicly shame the government for separating families and terrorizing children.

It is time for you to walk your happy ass up to the state capitol where you live, and demand that the state government to do anything they can to protect your employees.

Visual Artist Julio Salgado Is Queer, Undocumented, And Proud As Hell
theestablishment.co

And if you are a restaurant owner, know your rights. When ICE shows up to your restaurant to raid the place, you need to be prepared. Don’t let them do a single solitary thing they aren’t legally allowed to do. If your staff did something criminal, it wouldn’t be ICE visiting you, it would be the police. Your staff are being picked up and incarcerated for coming to work. And you are the one that hired them with the full knowledge of their status, so you damn well know that. In the words of Anthony Bourdain, let’s at least try to be honest.

As the tributes have poured in for Anthony Bourdain, I see many of the same people he excoriated, claiming to have respected him. So let’s test out that hypothesis. We all know that Anthony Bourdain hated lip service. He despised posturing. Anyone who claims to have loved him or shared his values must pick up where he left off. Latinxs in the food industry lost our most passionate champion in the elite culinary establishment. Who is going to step into the void?

Loyalty and truth. That’s all it takes.

The Trump administration is engaged in an all-out war against abortion rights—and pregnant immigrants are on the front lines.

Joey Thompson/Unsplash

Since 1973, the Constitution has prohibited the government from imposing an “undue burden” on a person’s right to choose what’s best for their reproductive health. Immigrants to the United States, authorized or otherwise, have never been excluded from that constitutional right — until now.

Currently, the Trump administration is engaged in several simultaneous battles that constitute what is an all-out war against women and gender-nonconforming people’s reproductive rights. Forty-five years after Roe v. Wade ensured the right to abortion, the Trump administration is trying its best to slowly chip away at the precedent set by the landmark Supreme Court ruling, and they’re starting with a population that is one of the most vulnerable in Trump’s America — pregnant undocumented immigrants.

“They come to our country and find themselves pregnant and under the control of the state in a way that is so profound it is hard to overstate,” says Michelle Oberman, professor of law and author of Her Body, Our Laws.

“They’re young and far away from caring adults, many have been victims of sexual violence, and now they find themselves pregnant and in custody. To watch these cases play out is to understand how fully a government might assert control over a person’s reproductive autonomy.”

Since last October, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has operated with complete disregard for Roe v. Wade protections, as well. Under the leadership of ORR Director Scott Lloyd, the federally funded office has attempted to block at least four undocumented minors — the Janes Doe, Poe, Roe and, most recently, Moe — from obtaining abortions, the most recent of which occurred in late January.

‘To watch these cases play out is to understand how fully a government might assert control over a person’s reproductive autonomy.’

The Constitution does not withhold any inalienable rights from immigrants. The Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures that no state entity can deprive a person of their life, liberty, or property without due process, or deny any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the law, is particularly relevant—and oft-challenged—in immigration law proceedings. But with so many different government entities overseeing various aspects of the immigration process, pockets of grey area have emerged and allowed the Trump administration to show its hand with regard to their plans for longterm abortion rights reform.

“I just have not seen anything quite this brazen from a federal or state government before,” says Brigitte Amiri, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

“They have, in each brief, doubled down on going further in their quest to coerce young women to carry their pregnancies to term by forcing them to go to religiously-affiliated crisis pregnancy centers, telling parents in their home countries about the abortion decisions—even if that means harm potentially to the minor or other family members—and that’s all a coercion tactic to try to force the young woman to carry her pregnancy to term. And if those tactics fail, they basically say, ‘We’re not going to let you access abortion.’ They hold them hostage to prevent them from accessing an abortion—just when I think it can’t get any more extreme, it does.”

In their initial filing concerning Jane Doe last October, the ACLU positioned their case as a class action lawsuit “on behalf of a class of similarly situated pregnant unaccompanied immigrant minors in the legal custody of the federal government.”

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son

According to the ACLU’s court documentation, the federal government reported that in Fiscal Year 2016, 59,692 unaccompanied minors were referred to the ORR. “The class is so numerous that joinder is impracticable,” asserted the documentation, meaning that it is impossible to calculate exactly how many undocumented immigrant minors would be affected by the outcome of the class action lawsuit. “In any given year, there are hundreds of pregnant unaccompanied minors in defendants’ custody.”

And the Trump administration has not limited their attacks to solely undocumented minors, either.

In the appendix of Trump’s 2019 budget request, which he sent to Congress in early February, there is language that would give any employee working under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to refuse to facilitate the procurement of an abortion for any immigrant woman—whether the federal government is paying for the procedure or not.

ICE has never been allowed to use federal funds for abortion services unless the life of the person carrying is at risk, or the pregnancy is a result of rape and/or incest, but detainees who wanted an abortion outside those circumstances were still allowed to procure one if they came up with the funds themselves.

Now, under the proposed stipulations of Trump’s 2019 budget recommendation, ICE officials and employees who are morally or philosophically opposed to abortion wouldn’t have to aid in the facilitation of the services, a contentious caveat to Roe v. Wade eerily reminiscent of the birth control rollback mandate made late last year (which was ultimately blocked at the district court level in December).

In a vacuum, this proposed facilitative change wouldn’t be quite such a cause for alarm — Trump’s proposal is just that, a proposal — but this is not an isolated circumstance.

Between January and April of last year, ICE detained nearly 300 pregnant women, often in breach of the organization’s own protocol for dealing with expectant immigrant mothers. This led the ACLU to filed an administrative complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of Inspector General in September 2017. They called upon the governing bodies to investigate ICE’s treatment of pregnant people in its custody.

Then, as recently as Thursday, according to a report from The Daily Beast, the Trump administration released an executive order unequivocally ending an Obama-era policy that limited the detainment of pregnant women in ICE custody to only “extraordinary circumstances.”

As for the Janes, the ACLU has thus far been successful at securing their abortions. U.S. district court judge Tanya S. Chutkan is the presiding judge who’s ordered the Trump administration to allow the Janes to get their abortions on a case by case basis thus far. Yesterday, she ruled that the ACLU will be able to proceed with their class action suit, effectively blocking the ORR from preventing undocumented minors in their charge from seeking an abortion in the meantime.

But no permanent change or established protections for pregnant undocumented minors will occur until the courts determine whether the ORR has the jurisdiction to circumvent constitutional precedent on the basis of its leader’s religious beliefs and questionably revised operational protocol.

How U.S. Policies Shape Abortion Rights Around The World

In March of last year, according to ACLU court documentation, the ORR quietly revised its policies not only in flagrant disregard of Roe v. Wade’s constitutional precedent, but in conflict with its own ORR-specific protocol set forth in 1997 by the Flores v. Reno Settlement Agreement.

The Flores Agreement, more than 20 years old, legally obligates the ORR to provide care to the young people under its jurisdiction—specifically including family planning services and reproductive health care. The revisions to these provisions last March effectively prohibited all federally funded shelters from taking any action that facilitates abortion access for unaccompanied minors in their care without direction and approval from the ORR.

It bears noting that Lloyd, the current director of the ORR, is vehemently anti-choice. Under his jurisdiction, young people fleeing violent home lives in other countries are doubly suffering due to his unyieldingly “pro-life” stance.

Lloyd’s personal beliefs, and the Trump administration’s unveiled aversion to a person’s right to determine their own reproductive future, have dually contributed to a cultural climate in which it is not unreasonable to fear a future in which Roe v. Wade has no constitutional tack at all.

According to the New York Times, “It was unclear late Friday whether the Trump administration would appeal the ruling.”

Under Scott Lloyd’s jurisdiction, young people fleeing violent home lives in other countries are doubly suffering due to his unyieldingly ‘pro-life’ stance.

The possibility that they will is quite plausible, seeing as the administration has challenged several rulings related to the Janes since the first case occurred last October.

As the Trump administration continues to operate with little regard for the constitutional precedent that should govern all of its subsidiaries, this outcome of this class action could be monumental.

“The unique time that we are in is where a federal appointee, a Trump appointee, is setting policy that is blocking young women from being able to obtain an abortion — shaming and stigmatizing them on top of everything they’ve already been through — and (is) being supported in his decision,” says Amiri.

“This isn’t a rogue government employee. This is a Trump appointee who has the backing of clearly much higher-ups. The Department of Justice is defending Scott Lloyd’s action to the full degree. I think that’s also what’s surprising, is that there isn’t anyone in federal government at the higher level saying, ‘What you’re doing is not only blatantly unconstitutional under well-established Supreme Court precedent, but it is also just downright cruel, the treatment of these young women.’

I think that’s what’s really scary to me. There is no check on Scott Lloyd’s ideologically-driven attempts to coerce and block young women from accessing abortion despite the fact that it’s blatantly unconstitutional. I think that signals what’s going on in our federal government in general. We know we have a president who has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade.”

So, what’s next?

“We are relieved that the court issued an order preventing the administration from continuing this practice while our case proceeds,” says Amiri. “With yesterday’s rulings, we are one step closer to ending this extreme policy once and for all and securing justice for all of these young women.”

Amiri says the ACLU will now push forward in the district court, seeking documents from the government and asking for depositions of Scott Lloyd and others. When that is completed in several months, the case will be decided finally with a trial or briefs—and, one hopes, the decision will align with justice.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/how-trump-is-working-to-destroy-the-reproductive-rights-of-immigrants-7c8c00983d59/ Sat, 31 Mar 2018 17:51:39 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1569 Read more]]> The Trump administration is engaged in an all-out war against abortion rights—and pregnant immigrants are on the front lines.

Since 1973, the Constitution has prohibited the government from imposing an “undue burden” on a person’s right to choose what’s best for their reproductive health. Immigrants to the United States, authorized or otherwise, have never been excluded from that constitutional right — until now.

Currently, the Trump administration is engaged in several simultaneous battles that constitute what is an all-out war against women and gender-nonconforming people’s reproductive rights. Forty-five years after Roe v. Wadeensured the right to abortion, the Trump administration is trying its best to slowly chip away at the precedent set by the landmark Supreme Court ruling, and they’re starting with a population that is one of the most vulnerable in Trump’s America — pregnant undocumented immigrants.

“They come to our country and find themselves pregnant and under the control of the state in a way that is so profound it is hard to overstate,” says Michelle Oberman, professor of law and author of Her Body, Our Laws.

“They’re young and far away from caring adults, many have been victims of sexual violence, and now they find themselves pregnant and in custody. To watch these cases play out is to understand how fully a government might assert control over a person’s reproductive autonomy.”

Since last October, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has operated with complete disregard for Roe v. Wade protections, as well. Under the leadership of ORR Director Scott Lloyd, the federally funded office has attempted to block at least four undocumented minors — the Janes Doe, Poe, Roe and, most recently, Moe — from obtaining abortions, the most recent of which occurred in late January.

‘To watch these cases play out is to understand how fully a government might assert control over a person’s reproductive autonomy.’
Click To Tweet

The Constitution does not withhold any inalienable rights from immigrants. The Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures that no state entity can deprive a person of their life, liberty, or property without due process, or deny any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the law, is particularly relevant—and oft-challenged—in immigration law proceedings. But with so many different government entities overseeing various aspects of the immigration process, pockets of grey area have emerged and allowed the Trump administration to show its hand with regard to their plans for longterm abortion rights reform.

“I just have not seen anything quite this brazen from a federal or state government before,” says Brigitte Amiri, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

“They have, in each brief, doubled down on going further in their quest to coerce young women to carry their pregnancies to term by forcing them to go to religiously-affiliated crisis pregnancy centers, telling parents in their home countries about the abortion decisions—even if that means harm potentially to the minor or other family members—and that’s all a coercion tactic to try to force the young woman to carry her pregnancy to term. And if those tactics fail, they basically say, ‘We’re not going to let you access abortion.’ They hold them hostage to prevent them from accessing an abortion—just when I think it can’t get any more extreme, it does.”

In their initial filing concerning Jane Doe last October, the ACLU positioned their case as a class action lawsuit “on behalf of a class of similarly situated pregnant unaccompanied immigrant minors in the legal custody of the federal government.”

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son
theestablishment.co

According to the ACLU’s court documentation, the federal government reported that in Fiscal Year 2016, 59,692 unaccompanied minors were referred to the ORR. “The class is so numerous that joinder is impracticable,” asserted the documentation, meaning that it is impossible to calculate exactly how many undocumented immigrant minors would be affected by the outcome of the class action lawsuit. “In any given year, there are hundreds of pregnant unaccompanied minors in defendants’ custody.”

And the Trump administration has not limited their attacks to solely undocumented minors, either.

In the appendix of Trump’s 2019 budget request, which he sent to Congress in early February, there is language that would give any employee working under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to refuse to facilitate the procurement of an abortion for any immigrant woman—whether the federal government is paying for the procedure or not.

ICE has never been allowed to use federal funds for abortion services unless the life of the person carrying is at risk, or the pregnancy is a result of rape and/or incest, but detainees who wanted an abortion outside those circumstances were still allowed to procure one if they came up with the funds themselves.

Now, under the proposed stipulations of Trump’s 2019 budget recommendation, ICE officials and employees who are morally or philosophically opposed to abortion wouldn’t have to aid in the facilitation of the services, a contentious caveat to Roe v. Wade eerily reminiscent of the birth control rollback mandate made late last year (which was ultimately blocked at the district court level in December).

In a vacuum, this proposed facilitative change wouldn’t be quite such a cause for alarm — Trump’s proposal is just that, a proposal — but this is not an isolated circumstance.

Between January and April of last year, ICE detained nearly 300 pregnant women, often in breach of the organization’s own protocol for dealing with expectant immigrant mothers. This led the ACLU to filed an administrative complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of Inspector General in September 2017. They called upon the governing bodies to investigate ICE’s treatment of pregnant people in its custody.

Then, as recently as Thursday, according to a report from The Daily Beast, the Trump administration released an executive order unequivocally ending an Obama-era policy that limited the detainment of pregnant women in ICE custody to only “extraordinary circumstances.”

As for the Janes, the ACLU has thus far been successful at securing their abortions. U.S. district court judge Tanya S. Chutkan is the presiding judge who’s ordered the Trump administration to allow the Janes to get their abortions on a case by case basis thus far. Yesterday, she ruled that the ACLU will be able to proceed with their class action suit, effectively blocking the ORR from preventing undocumented minors in their charge from seeking an abortion in the meantime.

But no permanent change or established protections for pregnant undocumented minors will occur until the courts determine whether the ORR has the jurisdiction to circumvent constitutional precedent on the basis of its leader’s religious beliefs and questionably revised operational protocol.

How U.S. Policies Shape Abortion Rights Around The World
theestablishment.co

In March of last year, according to ACLU court documentation, the ORR quietly revised its policies not only in flagrant disregard of Roe v. Wade’s constitutional precedent, but in conflict with its own ORR-specific protocol set forth in 1997 by the Flores v. Reno Settlement Agreement.

The Flores Agreement, more than 20 years old, legally obligates the ORR to provide care to the young people under its jurisdiction—specifically including family planning services and reproductive health care. The revisions to these provisions last March effectively prohibited all federally funded shelters from taking any action that facilitates abortion access for unaccompanied minors in their care without direction and approval from the ORR.

It bears noting that Lloyd, the current director of the ORR, is vehemently anti-choice. Under his jurisdiction, young people fleeing violent home lives in other countries are doubly suffering due to his unyieldingly “pro-life” stance.

Lloyd’s personal beliefs, and the Trump administration’s unveiled aversion to a person’s right to determine their own reproductive future, have dually contributed to a cultural climate in which it is not unreasonable to fear a future in which Roe v. Wade has no constitutional tack at all.

According to the New York Times, “It was unclear late Friday whether the Trump administration would appeal the ruling.”

Under Scott Lloyd’s jurisdiction, young people fleeing violent home lives in other countries are doubly suffering due to his unyieldingly ‘pro-life’ stance.
Click To Tweet

The possibility that they will is quite plausible, seeing as the administration has challenged several rulings related to the Janes since the first case occurred last October.

As the Trump administration continues to operate with little regard for the constitutional precedent that should govern all of its subsidiaries, this outcome of this class action could be monumental.

“The unique time that we are in is where a federal appointee, a Trump appointee, is setting policy that is blocking young women from being able to obtain an abortion — shaming and stigmatizing them on top of everything they’ve already been through — and (is) being supported in his decision,” says Amiri.

“This isn’t a rogue government employee. This is a Trump appointee who has the backing of clearly much higher-ups. The Department of Justice is defending Scott Lloyd’s action to the full degree. I think that’s also what’s surprising, is that there isn’t anyone in federal government at the higher level saying, ‘What you’re doing is not only blatantly unconstitutional under well-established Supreme Court precedent, but it is also just downright cruel, the treatment of these young women.’

I think that’s what’s really scary to me. There is no check on Scott Lloyd’s ideologically-driven attempts to coerce and block young women from accessing abortion despite the fact that it’s blatantly unconstitutional. I think that signals what’s going on in our federal government in general. We know we have a president who has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade.”

So, what’s next?

“We are relieved that the court issued an order preventing the administration from continuing this practice while our case proceeds,” says Amiri. “With yesterday’s rulings, we are one step closer to ending this extreme policy once and for all and securing justice for all of these young women.”

Amiri says the ACLU will now push forward in the district court, seeking documents from the government and asking for depositions of Scott Lloyd and others. When that is completed in several months, the case will be decided finally with a trial or briefs—and, one hopes, the decision will align with justice.

By Malú Huacuja del Toro

October 12 is known in all the American continent, except the United States, as the “Day of the Race,” meaning an encounter of different races and worlds, not “Columbus Day.” The U.S. is the only country that celebrates the discovery of one continent by people from another one, as if the native peoples didn’t exist before being seen by the people coming inside three ships. It also celebrates the cult of personality. For all these reasons, the diverse people of the United States are considering renaming Columbus Day under different terms and a different understanding of history.

Words have meaning and history, usually from the conquerors’ point of view. Latin American countries speak Spanish because our native peoples were conquered by the Spanish Crown, while native peoples in the North were conquered by the British Crown. Ever since, our languages divide us. We need translations to build bridges between us.

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The U.S. is the only country that celebrates the discovery of one continent by people from another one.
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For good or bad, translators can change history. They are the anonymous ghostwriters of it. They can also create myths, or else, destroy them. Mexico City was built on top of, and because of many myths, but also, one translator — Malinche. Four-hundred ninety-eight years before the latest deadly earthquake, when Spaniard Conqueror Hernán Cortés took over the majestic city, Aztec mythology was certainly on his side, but a translator on the other one. Aztecs mistook him indeed for their Serpent God Quetzalcóatl who, according to prophecies, was supposed to return.

As written by the conquerors themselves, King Moctezuma welcomed Cortés most warmly inside the sacred city that was built over another myth (the eagle and serpent’s myth over the lake). He opened the doors of his palace and temple for him. He hosted him. He allowed him to scold the Indigenous people for having such horrible non-Christian gods. He gave Cortés access and time enough to figure out how he was going to steal Axayácatl’s treasure, but one always wonders if all that non-violent first part of the Conquest would have been possible without the Indigenous woman Malinche translating the summit.

When Moctezuma addressed to Cortés, he called him, Hernán Cortés, “Malinche,” because that was the person who spoke on behalf of the Spaniard Crown. She was the voice that the Indigenous invaded people heard in their heads. We will never know if she modified or suppressed some parts of the conversation that made history.

The Other Wall

Before Trump’s wall idea, another kind of wall has already been built between Mexico and the United States — the wall of disinformation. It is the wall that led to NAFTA, signed without the consensus of both U.S. and Mexican ordinary people, compromising our future for generations, and increasing immigration. It is not in the best interest of Mexican oligarchs, Mexican drug lords, U.S. plutocrats and U.S. politicians that a majority of ordinary people start communicating between each other. They would end up making a better deal for both countries. So, this is a wall that was built for a reason.

One would expect that Google translators and communication apps in the digital era can break language barriers among ordinary people, but a closer look to any election campaign in any country, and particularly last year’s presidential election in the U.S., would correct this interpretation. With the help of Facebook and Twitter farms of trolls, more U.S. people ended up insulting more Mexican people than ever, probably, and not wanting to learn any foreign language.

Better communication with the help of automatic translators might be certainly the case in private exchanges, but not in open forums where social and public interest issues are discussed, and definitely not with the interference of paid trolls with political purposes. They are trained to end any conversation before it starts.

It’s a hard wall to break without professional journalism informing the public about real issues across the continent, and the language barrier doesn’t help.

It was not until recently that one U.S. progressive network, Democracy Now!, started considering the need to “go South” and communicate not only to Mexico but also to all of Latin America and immigrants in the U.S., offering not just the leftovers made with “the guy who speaks Spanish at the office” but high quality translation services of their news. Their web page in Spanish made a tremendous difference. Not too long ago, the only TV channels available to Spanish speakers in the U.S. broadcasted old soap operas mostly produced by the Televisa network and talk shows publicizing Televisa stars, hosted by conservative people at an elementary-school level, and no interest in social issues, economy, and politics.

The rest of the press, radio, and TV news in Spanish was mostly a replica of Fox and Friends in English. Strangely enough, progressive media and leftist organizations in the U.S., led by people who acknowledged the existence of a very diverse working class in U.S. America — including immigrant workers as part of that workforce — didn’t think that such a massive attack on the immigrant workers’ mentality needed to be countered by a very professional, objective, smart radio, press or TV.

For years, conservative news shows in Spanish had no other relevant competition but the least qualified hosts who seemed to be picked by the policy of “the guy who speaks Spanish at the office.” No offense to the intern who is in the process of learning Spanish or the “guy next door” whose mother speaks Spanish because she was born in Latin America, but there is a double standard in the progressive U.S. media that needs to be addressed to break that wall.

If you were the CEO of a radio or TV network in English, would you hire a host with no experience and/or no grassroots representation whatsoever in his or her community, no traction, no leadership, not enough vocabulary to speak fluently on the microphone, no information, and no background in communications, not even in theory?

That’s exactly what an iconic progressive radio station in NYC has been doing over the last decades when it comes to most of their shows in Spanish. They apply a double standard to their hiring policies because they are progressive, but only in English. Judging by the results of their productions in the last decades, they don’t think their Spanish audience deserves the same level of information and professionalism, let alone grassroots representation.

With very little audience, in certain cases, their hosts are precisely some of the most isolated persons of their communities, be it because they have no social skills, charisma or any background in communications. You can see them trying to socialize in our public political events. They don’t even introduce themselves as reporters of this station (no one taught them to do so). I know at least one host who believes that the Illuminati are taking over the planet and OVNIS will rapture us. It doesn’t make his radio chain very different than InfoWars.

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This two-tier system for English and Spanish media produced so many bad shows that turned to be reason enough for the National Public Radio to eliminate its Spanish Division in the ’90s.
Click To Tweet

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This two-tier system for English and Spanish media produced so many bad shows that turned to be reason enough for the National Public Radio to eliminate its Spanish Division in the ’90s. The low-quality level was documented.

Such reduction of funding only hurt the smaller, truly grassroots and less-fancy (but with larger audiences) networks directed by and for immigrant workers like Radio Bilingüe, broadcasting in Spanish, Indian Mixteco, and English languages. Founded by Indigenous agricultural worker from the Mixteca Zone in Oaxaca and Harvard-graduate Hugo Morales, this listener-supported network produces the only daily national Spanish-language news and public affairs programs in the U.S. public broadcasting.

Even though most of their audience is made by workers living in low-income communities, Radio Bilingüe doesn’t treat them like second-class citizens who don’t deserve high-quality standards in information, vocabulary and fluency, only because they speak Spanish. Needless to say, they were directly benefited by Democracy Now! being professionally translated into Spanish, which Radio Bilingüe features on its home page as their top recommendation.

Spanish Versions Go South

It is a hard and tall wall to break between North and South, because it is made of several layers of cultural indifference.

“Democracy Now! has been really helpful by translating their key article of the week into Spanish and making some interviews to immigrant rights activists, for instance,” Rebelión Collective says.

“[Democracy Now! host] Amy Goodman is an excellent interviewer, allowing her guests to go deeper in their subject. Both her and Juan González and all their team are outstanding, in comparison to the rest of the U.S. media, because they give voice to grassroots, African American, Latin-American organizations, and people from across the world who have been affected by the US government policies. They give perspectives that have been systematically excluded from commercial media.”

With about 10,000 readers every day — half of them living in Latin America — Rebelión is one of the most diverse and professional online publications across Latin America and Spain. It is made by a group of editors, translators and writers from all Latin American countries, covering all the continents. They respond collectively to this interview, explaining that they cannot trust commercial U.S. media because “they don’t give an idea to the rest of the world of what is really happening in the U.S., since they are just broadcasting propaganda in favor of the 1% protected by a police state investing astronomical numbers of money in wars while denying health care and education to their people, in a country with the highest per-capita rate of prisoners in the world.”

“Our main sources of information are independent journalists,” Rebelión Collective continues.

“We voice Hispanic immigrants living in the U.S., including undocumented workers who are suffering in flesh the system’s discrimination and oppression. We publish texts by community groups fighting for a more just society, like Unión del Barrio, as well as thinkers and activists like Noam Chomsky and James Petras. It is basically from all of them, and other alternative media, that we present to our readers another view of reality in the United States.”

Rebelión is one of the few online publications that pays special attention to the work of translation from different languages, with specialized translators for various subjects or sections. “Why are they still interested in using human translators instead of Google robots?” I asked.

“Since its foundation, Rebelión has been lucky enough to count on a translators’ team who are militant and aware of the importance of making accessible into Spanish information that was written in other languages. Information needs to be really understandable so that the reader gets access to it. Automatic translation apps rarely get the context. A writer-author-thinker-human being deserves to be translated by an equally human, thinking translator. A ‘human translator’ will always strive to make an article’s content both most understandable to the reader and accurate to the original version. This is something that members of our team pay special attention to.”

‘U.S. Fights That Are Close to Our Heart’

Ke Huelga Radio in Mexico City reproduces Democracy Now! every day in Spanish. Created during the long but successful 1999 students’ strike opposing the privatization of public college — which gave the people of México two more decades of free public education at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, by its acronym in Spanish) — Ke Huelga Radio has become one of the most trusted alternative radio stations for grassroots movements in Mexico. They respond to my questionnaire for AlterNet after the quake, while running from one “Centro de Acopio Autónomo” (“Autonomous Rescue Collective Center”) to another one. They too don’t want to be quoted individually but as a collective.

Ke Huelga Radio find it “most important” that critical media in the U.S. is heard by Mexican people, and that’s why they broadcast Democracy Now! for the “Ciudad Monstruo” (a city of a monstrous size). “This news show reports about many fights that are close to our collective hearts, like Standing Rock and the fight of immigrant workers against xenophobic measures proposed by president Donald Trump.”

Ke Huelga talks very seriously against disinformation, especially after the earthquake. This collective of reporters and grassroots radio hosts considers that it is the duty of alternative media to keep people well informed about the autonomous rescue teams working right now in Mexico, the police attacks, the government’s hoarding of international donations and, last but not least, sorting out the information on social media to dismiss fake news.

“In contrast, Mexican commercial media has turned the quake into a circus of morbid curiosity, even making up nonexistent victims like Frida Sofía, while portraying the Mexican Army and Marines like heroes,” they say. However, the Army prevented independent organizations of professional rescue workers from doing their work.

Subversiones: Cracking the Media Siege

Founded in 2010, Subversiones is a non-commercial, online publication “seeking to champion the people’s collective memory and critical understanding of the context we live on.” To them, the context is as important as the event itself, so they rely on good translations as well. “We communicate in honesty and earnest from our recognized subjectivities, in order to crack the media siege and create a counterbalance to the commercial media and its massive manipulation.”

During the earthquake, they became a community service to connect people in need of help with people who want to help, not only in Mexico City but Oaxaca and Chiapas. They have been reporting the movement against the Mexican government’s corruption that caused so many new buildings collapsing. Their publication is mostly made by voluntary work and fundraising events, selling photographs and printed publications, as well as readers’ donations.

These are just a few examples of the many bridges that progressive media can build across the United States and Latin America while commercial media keeps echoing president Donald Trump’s tweets. Incidentally, it is the same mainstream media that helped to put him in the White House by publicizing everything he did and said during the primaries, while ignoring the fight for life that was taking place in Standing Rock.

This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.