MAGA Stephen Miller and the cult are obsessed with "birthright citizenship" but their objections are racist propaganda

What Trump gets wrong about ‘birth tourism’ (Frankly, there is no such thing.....women of other nationalities do not give birth in the U.S. as "tourists".....they want their children to have access to American passports for the purpose of being able to apply for American education in private schools, colleges and universities.  Also, these women, regardless of where they came from, pay cash for their labor and delivery.  Thousands of American women are the mothers who need Medicaid, not the immigrants.)

Echo report published in the Boston Globe by Amy Reed Sandoval

The right-wing panic over birthright citizenship is built on a simple tale of foreigners gaming the system. My interviews with Mexican mothers at the border tell a very different story.

Amy Reed-Sandoval is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of the book “Intimate Borders: Feminist Migration Ethics.”

Donald Trump isn’t giving up on his quest to get rid of birthright citizenship. In August, he signed two new executive orders cracking down on so-called birth tourism to the United States. Stephen Miller, his homeland security adviser, said “people come here, pretend to be a tourist … say they want to go to Disneyland.

“But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, leave our country. ... It gives them access under this broken system to welfare benefits … and all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans.” (HELLO❓But even many needy Americans are unable to access these "rights".)

Condemnation of birth tourism has become Trump’s go-to argument for attacking birthright citizenship, the right, a century and a half old, granting citizenship to individuals who are born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ nationality.

The Trump administration even deployed this argument when it asked the Supreme Court to get rid of birthright citizenship. The court upheld that right last month. But the administration’s rhetoric seemed to have some effect: Justice Clarence Thomas devoted much of his dissent to describing the abuses of birth tourism.

But the Trump administration’s preoccupation with birth tourism is an obsession and not justifiable.

Start with this: The documented number of cases of pregnant women coming into the country just to give birth to an American citizen is very small. In fact, a recent Penn State study showed that “birth tourism accounts for fewer than 0.3 percent of all US births in any year between 2014-2024.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2024 about 9,500 babies were born to mothers with addresses abroad. The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative group that supports immigration restrictions, put the number of potential birth tourism births at 20,000 to 26,000 in its most recent estimate, still only a small fraction of births to mothers who do not live in the United States.

MAGA's Miller, Thomas, and Trump act as though there aren’t safeguards in place to prevent birth tourism. But though it’s true that there is a cottage industry of businesses that charge wealthy foreigners tens of thousands of dollars for private coaching on how to give birth in the United States, the US government has always had the power to deny visas to people whose motives they deem suspect. If a couple misrepresents their intentions for visiting the United States, that is considered visa fraud. And the Justice Department has already prosecuted travel agencies found to be promoting birth tourism.

The Make America Great Again birth tourism narrative — that women come here to access welfare benefits or get US citizenship themselves — offers a warped and simplistic vision of the motivations that foreigners have for giving birth in the United States. In reality, their reasons are complex. I interviewed 30 Mexican women living in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso who had crossed the border from Mexico to give birth. All had legal permission to enter the United States, and all had paid out of pocket for their health care. Still, they were regularly treated by many immigration officers and medical professionals as if they were doing something illegal.

I asked the women to tell me their reasons for giving birth in the United States. And they agreed to speak with me as long as they could remain anonymous.

“I knew I had to move my family to the United States to receive prenatal care,” one woman said while rocking her napping daughter in her arms in their El Paso home. “My baby could come at any minute, and I was told my own life was in danger.”

Some women told me that they had no intention of permanently relocating themselves or their families to the United States; they simply wanted to give their children a broader array of life options. Relatedly, one woman told me that she is concerned about gender-based violence on both sides of the US-Mexico border — but particularly about high rates of femicides in Mexico. When she found out she was going to give birth to a girl, she decided she wanted to give her daughter legal options for international migration if she needed to relocate for her safety.

“It’s better to have two citizenships than one,” she told me over a heaping plate of flautas in a downtown El Paso restaurant. She had just crossed the border from Ciudad Juárez — where she and her family still live — for a day of shopping and errands. “If things get really bad here [in Mexico], she won’t have to suffer through the process of asking for asylum.”

Another woman told me that she decided to have her baby in the United States because there was a chance that her husband, who is employed as a truck driver, was going to be transferred from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso. She was preparing to keep the family together.

“But it would have been much easier for me to give birth in Ciudad Juárez; I would have preferred it!” she lamented during our interview at her kitchen table. And one woman told me that she felt that giving birth in the United States would make her a “true fronteriza,” a true woman of the borderlands, with deepened cultural and political ties to both the United States and Mexico.

Some reported that they wanted to give their children the opportunity to connect with relatives in the United States, many of whom are US citizens. Some said they wanted to have access to better health care in the event of pregnancy complications.



Of course, my sample size of 30 was small, and I only interviewed middle-class women with legal permission to enter the United States.

However, it is clear from what I and other scholars have been able to document that there is little chance that hoards of migrant women masquerading as Disneyland tourists are dipping into the social welfare systems by way of their deviant childbirth practices.

These arguments may not convince people who are determined to see the end of birthright citizenship. But it’s simply not true that birth tourism is a large enough issue to warrant skewering a constitutional right, and the over-the-top rhetoric inflicts real harm.

This birth tourism myth gets used to justify holding nearly 70,000 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers across this country, 70 percent of whom have not been charged with any crime. This dangerous myth also supports sexist ideas, as reflected in a statement by MAGA lawyer Mike Davis, who called on Trump to “get these pregnant women and women who could be pregnant the hell out of our country,” and in another by Sean Davis, CEO of the right-wing media outlet The Federalist, who called for the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

The MAGA birth tourism myth is just that, a myth. Its job is not to address a real problem but to dismantle a cherished constitutionally protected right.

Post Script, this article is focused on Mexican women. Reed-Sandoval overlooks the other nationalities of women who chose to give birth in the United States for the purpose of obtaining American passports for their babies at birth. This makes it it easier for their children to attend American schools, colleges and universities. Plus, all of these transactions are paid with cash, the pre-natal care, the labor, delivery and the tuitions to attend American private schools, colleges and universities. Stephen Miller's objection to "birthright citizenship" is entirely racist. 

Donald Trump incarcerating innocent migrants in filthy detention camps. In my opinion, call them concentration camps.

"The New Ellis Island" is a July 2026, review essay by journalist Julia Preston for The New York Review of Books. It examines the book El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by Jazmine Ulloa, using the history of El Paso, Texas, to explore national immigration policies. 

Preston uses Ulloa’s book to explain how El Paso, Texas, has become a modern-day equivalent to historic Ellis Island. 

Historically, Ellis Island in New York Harbor processed over 12 million European immigrants who sought a new start in America. Today, El Paso serves as a major gateway and "bellwether" for US immigration policy, where the country's complicated history of welcoming and rejecting migrants is embroiled in American history.

In this blogspot, I want to highlight the final page of Preston's essay in her book review, because she describes the here and now of this ongoing challenging story.

Preston describes Ulloa’s determination to elevate El Paso was spurred by a horrific event. As a reporter for The Boston Globe, she returned to El Paso to cover the aftermath of a mass shooting by Patrick Crusius, a young white supremacist armed with an AK-47-style rifle and one thousand rounds of ammunition, at a local Walmart on August 3, 2019. He killed twenty-three people, among them both the mother and the father of an infant. Minutes before the attack, Crusius had posted a manifesto online in which he decried “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and said, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement.” 

At the time, Donald Trump was routinely vilifying Mexicans as criminal predators stampeding over the border. Crusius amplified to an extreme the fear of Mexicans that had long permeated the Southwest and was spreading, fanned by Trump’s rhetoric, across the country.

El Paso closes with the advent of Trump 2.0, as the he revives the specter of an alien invasion to justify an evilmass deportation blitz. Yet the outcomes for Ulloa’s families are mostly positive, proving her point about borderland social mobility. Raúl Reyes, the grandson of Miguel Martinez, is a historian in El Paso dedicated to recovering the past of his and many other Texas families. The judge who arraigned the Walmart shooter in an El Paso courtroom was a descendant of the Chews. Blanca and Susan Rubio, the daughters of Sabino, were elected to seats in the California state legislature.

“We are those bad Mexicans that he talks about,” Blanca Rubio said, referring to Trump, in a newspaper interview not long after Susan was sworn in. “We were undocumented, and then we fought hard, we got an education, and now we’re sitting here.”

In his State of the Union address this February, President Trump revived the tropes of Manifest Destiny to express his view of the nation’s origins. Americans, he said, had “carved pass through an unforgiving wilderness, settled a boundless frontier, and tamed the beautiful but very, very dangerous wild west. From empty marshes and wide-open plains, we raised up the world’s greatest cities.” Ulloa comprehensively refutes this version of events. In the Texas borderlands, the marshes were never empty nor were the plains wide open. The story Ulloa tells also makes clear that the unfettered nativism of Trump’s second term is not new in American history—not the poisonous invective depicting Venezuelans and other immigrants as gangsters and thieves, not the cruel removals of people who provide essential labor in American workplaces, not the roundups that ensnare noncitizens and citizens alike.

The border at El Paso is quieter now than it has been in decades, as Trump has made good on at least one of his campaign promises, to impose control by blocking illegal crossings and eliminating access to asylum along the boundary line. By the end of Trump’s first year back in the White House, Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the Mexican border had plummeted to the lowest numbers since 1970, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Yet, consistent with Ulloa’s argument, El Paso is still an epicenter of the United States’ system of social engineering through immigration. Despite the calm at the border, the city has not been spared Trump’s deportation campaign. The Catholic ✝️bishop of El Paso, Mark J. Seitz, in a pastoral message shared in parishes throughout the diocese on March 15, described its impacts. “Neighbors are being snatched as they walk out of immigration court proceedings downtown,” the bishop reported.

Workers are being taken from construction sites across the city…. Young women are languishing in mental torture for months in private detention centers, even when, coerced by the conditions of their imprisonment, they beg to be deported…. So many people are once again being made to feel like they are less than American.

In the first half of 2025, El Paso was second in the country in the number of deportation arrests of immigrants after hearings at the city’s immigration courts, surpassed only by arrests at the courts in New York City, according to a study by the mathematician Joseph Gunther.

El Paso is also a major juncture in the United States’ punitive immigration infrastructure. Not far from downtown sits Camp East Montana, an enormous tent city constructed in 2025 in a bleak patch on the grounds of Fort Bliss, a US Army base that makes recurring appearances in Ulloa’s account. The camp is the country’s largest immigration detention center, part of an archipelago that the Department of Homeland Security is assembling nationwide to hold as many as 100,000 immigrants. People who were arrested as far away as Chicago and Minneapolis have been sent to Camp East Montana. Under Trump’s rules, immigrants have been denied bond and forced to wait out slow-moving immigration court proceedings in detention, with the evident intent of causing them to despair and leave the United States on their own. To date more than four hundred federal judges and three appeals courts have ruled this policy unlawful and ordered immigrants released; two appeals courts have backed the policy, allowing DHS to continue.

Despite receiving $45 billion for detention in Trump’s big 2025 tax and spending bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has demonstrated that it is overwhelmed by the demands of jailing so many people. Almost as soon as it opened, Camp East Montana devolved into a hellhole with inedible food, eating areas flooded with sewage, a lack of basic hygiene, and dangerously inadequate medical care that led to outbreaks of measles and tuberculosis, according to a report in December by the American Civil Liberties Union that was based on interviews with forty-five detainees. The death on January 3 of a Cuban detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was ruled a homicide by the El Paso County medical examiner. It was the result of a “spontaneous use of force” by guards, ICE admitted in an official incident report. The report states that the guards were trying to prevent Lunas Campos “from harming himself.” But a witness interviewed by the El Paso Times said he heard the man pleading for asthma medication. Lunas Campos is one of three detainees who have died in the camp since December. According to a report published on June 9 by the US Government Accountability Office, another detainee died in January by suicide after being left alone and unattended in a windowless holding room. The GAO report found that some of the teeming dormitories at the camp were cleaned only once a week. No treatment plans were in place for detainees with HIV or diabetes. The conditions posed “serious risks to the safety and security” of detained people and staff, the report found. In March ICE fired the contractor running the facility, but then hired another one instead of closing the camp down.

What is new in Trump’s second term is the scale of the deportation blitz. The whole country is becoming a borderland, as DHS tries to achieve Trump’s goal of deporting one million people this fiscal year. Acting largely on his executive edicts, agents have extended into the country’s interior the race-based stops, strong-arm arrests, disregard for due process, and fast-track removals that have long been the regular practice of the Border Patrol in remote reaches along the line. A Border Patrol chief from California, Gregory Bovino, led Operation Metro Surge, the occupation by more than three thousand agents of Minneapolis and surrounding areas, applying what he called, in an interview with The New York Times, his strategy of “total immigration domination.” After the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, protesters who were US citizens, Trump sensed that the show of force had gone too far. 

Trump replaced Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator who is equally hard-line but said in his confirmation hearing that DHS would be less conspicuous: “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.” Bovino retired. But under the command of the “border czar,” Tom Homan, agents are still hunting down immigrants, regardless of whether they have criminal records, in homes, schools, grocery store parking lots, and workplaces, if less noisily. On June 5 the Republican-led Congress voted to provide another 💲70 billion to ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and other DHS offices for enforcement, detention, and deportation. (Maine Writer, this appropriation was approved by Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins in exchange for passing more tax cuts for the rich and multimillionaires like herself.)

Also new is the widespread resistance to Trump’s crackdown. In Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and many other places where ICE arrived—including El Paso—citizens have rallied with whistles and horns to alert immigrants of danger, tracked agents’ movements with phone cameras in hand, provided food for families too scared to leave their homes, and even offered places for them to hide. When ICE has tried to open new detention centers, towns have been fighting back with lawsuits, city council resolutions, environmental restrictions, petition drives, and street protests. Places as distant as Chester, New York, and Oklahoma City have succeeded in stopping ICE’s projects. As with the social blend of El Paso, many immigrant families now include a mix of legal status, with undocumented parents, US-born children (who are by definition citizens), and relatives with other forms of status. Neighbors can see that the kids attend local schools and the parents work in the community. More Americans have become witnesses to the damage left behind when parents are separated from their children, including many who are US citizens, and deported. 

Polls re[prt how Trump’s assault is losing public support. In a survey in March by the Public Religion Research Institute only 35 percent of Americans rated Trump’s handling of immigration favorably, down from 48 percent in March 2025; 48 percent held very unfavorable views. If Ulloa’s history is any guide, it may be that the country is reaching the nadir (aka, "lowest point") of one of its perennial immigration cycles.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must not put innocent immigrants in warehouses like Nazi concentration camps

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Paul R. Reyes, attorney.

Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka "evil ICE") is acquiring industrial warehouses to be converted into detention facilities for people swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. 

ICE has bought at least seven facilities so far, some of which are projected to hold thousands of people. One warehouse in an Arizona town is the size of seven football fields. The new facilities are slated to be up and running by November.

These plans amount to a lose-lose proposition. Warehouses crammed full of people will not be good for local communities, nor for the detainees housed inside the facilities. Literally warehousing people is a terrible idea❗ (They are modeled after Nazi concentration camps.)

According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in February there were about 68,000 people in immigration detention. Three-quarters of these folks have no criminal convictions. Now the administration plans to spend $38 billion to boost detention capacity to 92,000 beds.

ICE will be opening its new detention centers in Socorro, Texas, and Social Circle, Georgia., among other sites. These facilities will likely generate more problems than benefits. 

When the federal government takes over a property, it is removed from the tax rolls, so communities will lose potential tax revenue. Large detention facilities will strain local infrastructure, including water supply, sewage and emergency services. The sites may attract protests, diverting law enforcement resources away from protecting area residents.

It’s no wonder that there has been bipartisan pushback against ICE warehouses, with some sellers backing out of deals in response to public opposition.

ICE’s website states that “detention is non-punitive,” and that it is for holding people while they await court dates or deportation. 

Yet, placing people in vast buildings designed for packages will put men, women and children in danger of disease and abuse. 

Warehouses are often drafty, poorly ventilated structures with hard floors. It’s difficult to see how they can be rapidly retrofitted into safe living spaces for detainees who, the government estimates, could be held for an average of 60 days there.

The scope of ICE’s planned detention network is staggering. The agency has already bought two warehouses with capacity for 8,500 people each; by comparison, the country’s largest federal prison holds roughly 4,000 inmates.

The U.S. has not imprisoned people on such a large scale since World War II, when camps were set up to detain Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans.

Buying so many warehouses poses the risk that such facilities could be kept filled to meet quotas in an attempt to justify the huge waste of taxpayer money — a maneuver that would waste even more money. And the multimillion-dollar prices that the government is paying for these spaces don’t include the costs of equipping the buildings with restrooms, showers, kitchens, medical facilities and recreation areas. Our government is pursuing these expensive plans while many Americans struggle to pay for groceries and healthcare.

ICE is defending its decision to ramp up detention capacity. “These will not be warehouses,” an ICE spokesperson told USA Today. “They will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”

However, ICE has shown that it already struggles to meet its own “regular detention standards.” 

Detention centers are known for overcrowding, physical and sexual abuse, unsanitary conditions, and inadequate medical care. ICE is not taking proper care of the people it currently has in custody, and scaling up detention will only scale up its human costs.

Both of the country’s largest detention facilities, Alligator Alcatraz in Florida and Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, are plagued with health and safety issues. In February, there were reports of cases of COVID-19, measles and TB (tuberculosis) in immigration detention. Last year 32 people died in ICE custody, making it the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades.

If the administration’s goal is to remove as many undocumented people from the country as possible, why is it investing in a national gulag of warehouses to house them? The gulag strategy underscores that expanding ICE detention is not about public safety or going after “the worst of the worst.” This is an overreaching government forcing its unpopular agenda on the public and wasting taxpayer money simply because it was allotted a ridiculous $75 billion in last summer’s reckless spending bill. A January Reuters poll found that 58% of Americans say ICE crackdowns have gone too far. Only 39% approve of Trump’s immigration policies.

Concerned citizens must continue to fight the placement of ICE detention warehouses in their backyards. As a political standoff drags on a shutdown of some Homeland Security functions, lawmakers should exert pressure on ICE to redirect taxpayer money away from warehouse projects — and toward more productive efforts, such as improving existing detention conditions or financing immigration courts adequately so that individuals can get their day in court rather than languishing in a warehouse.

ICE’s planned detention expansion will be cruel, costly and harmful. Human beings do not belong in warehouses.

Raul A. Reyes is an immigration attorney and television commentator in New York City. X: @RaulAReyes; Instagram: @raulareyes1

God Bless the heros who are trying to protect innocent immigrants from unwarranted deportation! Have Mercy!

Resistance to Trump's immigration cruelty is already building | Houston Chronicle Editorial

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is probably too blinkered by his Trumpian ardor to realize that closing down a border migrant shelter founded by Catholics in El Paso will do little to discourage Texans, Christian and otherwise, from providing protection and justice to desperate people.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” is a quote from the Bible, Matthew 5:7.

Nearly a year ago, Paxton’s lawyers showed up at Annunciation House, a nonprofit network that has provided food, shelter and clothing to migrants for almost 50 years. 

Accusing the organization of “astonishing horrors” and conspiring to help people enter the country illegally, the lawyers wielded a subpoena demanding “immediate access” to the private records of migrants past and present who have received assistance from the organization. Otherwise, the AG would shut down the venerable facility a few blocks up the hill from the concrete culvert known as the Rio Grande. After an El Paso judge put the kibosh on Paxton’s evil effort, he appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.

Even if he prevails, Paxton will still have work to do. Up and down the Rio Grande, from Brownsville to El Paso, as well as towns farther from the border, individuals, organizations and ad hoc groups are continuing to minister to the strangers, the sojourners, “the least among us.” We spoke to over a dozen of these better angels, but are not sharing names to protect them from being harassed. Their quiet work of resistance to Trumpian chaos and cruelty includes religious groups offering pastoral care to immigrants, their families and others caught up in the immigration system. Churches are creating preparedness plans for members who come in contact with migrants in the workplace, in their children’s schools, in their neighborhoods. Individuals and non-profits are providing legal and material support for those anticipating a knock on the door from law enforcement. They’ve drawn up “know your rights” instructions for interacting with ICE. “We have to be creative,” a small-town border priest tells us.

In South Texas, a deputy sheriff will continue to carry gallon jugs of water in the bed of his pickup, knowing he’s likely to come across desperate people wandering through semi-desert thickets of brush and mesquite during the withering heat of summer. In the trans-Pecos, a sympathetic motel owner, quietly, will continue providing migrants a place to stay at no charge. A border-area rancher — a Trump supporter, no less – will continue providing food, water and shelter when he encounters desperate people traversing his land; the rancher concedes that coming face to face with individuals in need is quite different from holding steadfast to a political position.

And, yes, a Border Patrol agent who encounters a young family will quietly call places like Annunciation House and McAllen’s respite center instead of allowing the family to be separated. One priest who counsels agents experiencing something akin to PTSD puts it this way: “Their heart is saying one thing, and their protocol is saying another. This is the source of their moral wounding.”

The power to resolve this moral conflict — to enforce immigration policy in a humane manner — is in Washington. Lasting solutions require bipartisan congressional action. Instead of pursuing this path, Donald Trump’s allies blocked a tough border bill last year in a cynical move to boost his election prospects and now that he is president, the White House has cut hundreds of millions in migrant aid funding, a quarter of which goes to Texas nonprofits and cities.

Annunciation House states on its website that it receives no government funding and is sustained by donations. The AG’s office claimed that the shelter had impeded law enforcement efforts to detain undocumented immigrants, alluding to an episode in which an immigrant was shot and killed outside Annunciation House after fleeing Border Patrol agents trying to arrest him. That happened in 2003.

Annunciation House maintains that it operates under an agreement with the federal government that it will accept people who have crossed the border but will assume no law enforcement role. The shelter maintains that it “has cooperated with federal authorities for a decade, under presidential administrations of both political parties” and has kept “hundreds of thousands” of newcomers off El Paso streets.

Paxton, true to his typically outrageous modus operandi, claims that Annunciation House isn’t religious enough to qualify for protections under this state’s religious freedom restoration act. (Texas is one of 28 states, along with the federal government, with similar protections.) The AG argues that the organization doesn’t hold Catholic Mass regularly; does not offer confessions, baptisms or communion; and does not try to evangelize or convert its guests. “In other words,” as New York Times columnist David French observes, “Annunciation House isn’t Catholic enough ❓ ✝️ to earn "Pope Paxton’s" seal of approval.”😕😢

French, an attorney and evangelical Christian, also points out that “serving the poor is one of the purest forms of religious service that exists. It’s mandated or endorsed in, by one count, more than 2,000 passages in Scripture. It’s also one of the most ancient manifestations of Christian service and identity.”

In light of a Trump administration that has embarked on its “Day One” anti-immigrant crusade — a crusade that’s likely to rely on 10,000 federal troops — and a Texas governor willing to spend billions in hard-earned taxpayer money to fund his own crusade (plus a Legislature eager to give him what he wants), as well as a regularly compliant all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, Annunciation House is the David facing a Goliath in this story.

Paxton also has gone after McAllen’s Humanitarian Respite Center, a shelter run by Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. The organization’s nationally known executive director, Sister Norma Pimentel, has — like Ruben Garcia, founder of Annunciation House — worked for decades to provide shelter, food and compassion to vulnerable men, women and children.

Paxton, a self-professed evangelical Christian, apparently sees no connection between Christian fealty and service to others, particularly the poor and dispossessed. In fact, it’s hard to see how his religious beliefs have had any bearing whatsoever on his professional priorities. As his fellow Texans well know — and fellow Republicans try to ignore — our chief law enforcement officer remains under federal investigation for public corruption and was impeached by his fellow Republicans (and acquitted amid partisan cowardice in the Senate). Surely, a man of moral principle would find better things to do than unleash the powers of the state on charities helping people in distress.

This Houston Chronicle editorial board has said many times before and will say yet again: We do not advocate open borders. This nation cannot tolerate drug traffickers, sex traffickers and other criminals who seek to do us harm, not just along the border but in cities and towns across the country. We believe in border security and support the Trump administration’s efforts to deport people here illegally who have committed violent crimes. 

Along with the late Barbara Jordan, we believe the federal government should set limits on legal immigration and assist communities in absorbing and integrating newcomers. Immigration courts need the resources to adjudicate asylum cases quickly and send home those without legitimate claims.

At the same time, we will continue to speak out against a system of immigration so complex, chaotic and convoluted that would-be immigrants have few realistic options except to wade a river, scale a fence or evade authorities while they work in the shadows to build new lives (and contribute to the economy). We will speak out against outrages that could be imminent: racial profiling, raids on schools and churches, family separation, and inhumane conditions at internment camps at Fort Bliss or newly purchased state land along the border.

Regardless of what Stephen Miller*, President Trump’s relentless in-house xenophobe, expects to accomplish, regardless of the efforts of Trump lackeys like Paxton, the fact remains that we are a nation of immigrants, a nation strengthened and refreshed by waves of newcomers. Until Congress quits its cravenness and (some day) a responsive White House makes a good-faith effort to fix the system, we’ll have to rely on Ruben Garcia in El Paso and Sister Norma Pimentel in the Valley, as well as countless anonymous Americans on the ground — including many Texans — to show us what it means to live up to this nation’s ideals.

*In my opinion, Stephen Miller is proof of reincarnation. He is a doppelganger for Nazi Joseph Goebbles.

Governor Greg Abbott says he is a practicing Roman Catholic? But his comment about shooting migrants is evil and asinine

Echo editorial opinion published by the Houston Chronicle in Texas: This is an accuarte and brutal criticism about Texas Governor Greg Abbott! 

“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”  

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

That’s our governor talking, folks. Yessir, he’s one tough son of a gun. Or, at least, he sounds like one. We would suggest, though, that he's not tough at all. We would suggest that he’s a coward, not to mention an ongoing embarrassment to this state.

Despite his big talk, it is a small man who leaches power and satisfaction from the mistreatment and mockery of the vulnerable. 

Rather, it is a small man who refuses to consider the dangerousness💀💥 of his tough talk and his callous policies. 

While clumsily evoking the murder of migrants could incite another El Paso massacre 😓😡😯, his rogue, unrelenting policing of the border is endangering lives.

Indeed, on Saturday, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, announced that the bodies of three migrants — a woman and two children — were found floating in the Rio Grande near an Eagle Pass park that Texas DPS troopers have seized. Cuellar said Texas authorities wouldn't grant access to U.S. Border Patrol agents trying to respond to migrants in distress and agreed only to send a soldier to assess the situation.

"This is a tragedy, and the state bears responsibility," Cuellar said in a statement.

If Abbott fears the criminal penalty for shooting migrants, does he fear any kind of consequences for letting them drown?

Abbott’s asinine (as in "extremely stupid")  "shooting" remark came during a January 5 interview with the popular right-wing talk-show provocateur Dana Loesch, and has drawn wide outrage after it was recirculated Thursday by a Chicago-based progressive radio station.

Loesch had asked the governor about the "maximum amount of pressure" he could implement to "protect the border" without crossing a legal line.

Abbott was ready with a Texas-tough answer: “We are deploying every tool and strategy that we possibly can. The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

The interview was aired again on Thursday, minus the line about shooting migrants. Abbott responded to the uproar over his original remarks, saying, “I explained in detail all the different things that Texas is doing that we have the legal authority to do and pointed out what would be illegal to do. It’s that simple."

Maybe it's not that simple. Abbott is a Texan, by God. He lives in the mythic shadow of “men with the bark on,” to borrow Frederic Remington’s memorable phrase. He’s a Texan no doubt familiar with such storied law-and-order gun handlers as Texas Rangers “Captain Jack” Hays and Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell, Bill McDonald and Frank Hamer.

He’s a gun-loving Texan (and, by the way, a practicing Roman Catholic) with a Lone Star reputation to uphold, especially when he’s being interviewed by the celebrity former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association. 

Loesch (pronounced Lash) is a former punk rocker from the Ozarks turned Lady Limbaugh talk radio star. The author of “Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America,” she's arguably best known for claiming that “many in legacy media love mass shootings.” She would make any gun lover feel inadequate if he couldn’t measure up to her gun-loving bellicosity.

Abbott is afraid of the NRA, despite the organization’s depleted condition these days. Presiding for nearly a decade over a state that’s invariably near the top in the number of mass shootings, he’s afraid to do anything, no matter how minor, to protect his fellow Texans in schools, churches, workplaces or entertainment venues. Ask him about Santa Fe and Sutherland Springs, El Paso and Odessa/Midland, Uvalde and Allen, and he has no answer. He quails at the prospect of Second Amendment absolutists derailing his political future.

Whatever that future happens to be, Abbott can’t ignore his party’s provocateur-in-chief and primary role model, a man who just might redefine “the maximum amount of pressure” at the border should he move back into the White House. Although Donald Trump’s incendiary language about immigrants has become de rigueur for the Republican Party, Abbott so far hasn’t repeated the former president’s Mein Kampf-style warning about immigrants “poisoning the blood" of America.

He does like to talk about an immigrant invasion, as U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, well remembers. In 2019, the day before a gunman massacred 23 people at a Walmart in her hometown, the governor’s campaign warned about the dangers of immigrant hordes invading the country. In response to Abbott’s latest remark, the congresswoman wrote in a post on X: “I can’t believe I have to say murdering people is unacceptable. It’s language like yours that left 23 people dead and 22 others injured in El Paso.”

We agree with Abbott that there's a migrant crisis at the border. We believe Congress is largely to blame for failing again and again to fix a broken immigration system. President Biden has implemented some helpful actions, such as the "safe mobility" program that seeks to deter would-be migrants from a dangerous journey to the border by allowing them to apply to enter the U.S. as refugees, but Biden was too slow to act.

Nevertheless, Abbott's intemperate remarks about guns and shooting people are merely of a piece with his immigration stunts – busing migrants to northern cities, stringing razor wire along the Rio Grande, arresting asylum seekers. The governor is afraid to dig in and look for real solutions to a complex problem — solutions that might mean collaborating with political opponents. When we made a similar criticism of Abbott in a recent editorial, the governor noted on X that we neglected to mention the letter he had hand-delivered to President Biden a year ago in El Paso.

That letter, antagonistic in tone and political in motive, demanded Biden get busy on border wall construction and make pandemic-era immigration policies permanent long after the pandemic ended. 

Abbott did not recommend suggestions about solving anything❗ 

It was the same performative politics we've come to expect from a self-aggrandizing politician who's not Texas-tough enough to do what's right. 

Or even, at times, what's human.

End evil white supremacy

The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ 

Rather, he’s a Mainstream Republican
Echo report published in Rolling Stone Magazine

By Talia Lavin

Mass shooter "lone wolf" crime scene

The right-wing extremists who control the modern GOP are all gripped by a racist delusion. The shooter is just the latest to act on it.

There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.

Such was the case on Saturday, when a teenaged white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, while livestreaming the carnage on the live-video site Twitch. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a 180-page manifesto in which he laid out his rationale clearly: He was an adherent of what is called Great Replacement Theory, the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness. It’s a conspiracy theory that has inspired terror attacks in New Zealand and Pittsburgh, San Diego, and El Paso – an ideology that marries demographic panic with the idea of a cunning, nefarious plot. Reading through the document, what struck me hardest, however, was how very close the killer’s ideas were to the American mainstream – the white-hot core of American politics.

Five years ago, when white supremacists walked down the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and carrying tiki torches, few people understood their intent – the fact that they were referring to replacement theory. The idea seemed outlandish, even incomprehensible; at the time, it was a fairly obscure rallying cry, based around a 2012 book by French novelist Renaud Camus fear mongering about a nonwhite-majority Europe, absorbed into the fetid stew of white-supremacist cant, where it acquired a vicious antisemitism. For many white supremacists, it is Jews who are orchestrating the “reverse colonization,” as Camus put it, of white countries, in order to more easily manipulate a nonwhite and therefore more malleable general populace. 

In Gendron’s manifesto, after explaining in detail why he picked the particular supermarket he did — it was in a majority-Black neighborhood with a majority-Black clientele — he felt the need to explain why he did not choose to attack Jews. “[Jews] can be dealt with in time, but the high fertility replacers will destroy us now, it is a matter of survival we destroy them first,” he wrote, before listing his weaponry in detail with price points included — a manual for future murders. While Gendron’s choice to engage in mass slaughter puts him on the radical fringe of those who enforce their beliefs with bullets, and his overt antisemitism differs slightly from vaguer blame of “elites,” “Democrats” and “globalists,” his fixation on white birthrates and demographic change are neither fringe nor particularly unusual. The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.

The demographics of the United States are changing, and the share of the population considered white is shrinking. This change is occurring faster than anticipated, thanks to the relative ages of white and nonwhite populations in the country — the nonwhite population trends significantly younger — and all national population growth is being driven by nonwhite groups, according to an analysis by Brookings. This confluence of death, birth, and immigration is in and of itself morally neutral, a matter of the natural ebb and flow of populations over time. But as the era of the white majority nears its end, a revanchist, racist right has treated the facts of demography as an occasion for a sweeping, violent moral panic.

Donald Trump’s ascendance was a key marker of the force of white racial panic; from the moment he launched his candidacy, his overt racism set the party’s agenda, and from the very first, his rhetoric directly provoked racist violence. Far from ebbing as Trump has ceased to be the party’s sole center, however, the tide of white animus has become even more central to a new crop of Congress people and candidates.

The Republican Party’s embrace of nativism has been more of a full-on dash than a slow slide, and it has been catalyzed by the vast constellation of right-wing media. Chief among these is the juggernaut that is Fox News. 

As a New York Times analysis revealed, the network’s flagship prime-time show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, has an obsession with replacement theory: In more than 400 shows the newspaper analyzed, Carlson evoked the idea of forced demographic change through immigration and other methods. Carlson is not alone: A Media Matters examination of Fox’s rhetoric throughout 2021 found that the network fulsomely embraced replacement theory, or, as it is more commonly known among extremists, “white genocide.” Such fears have become commonplace campaign talking points among Republican candidates: Ohio senatorial candidate J.D. Vance recently declared that Democrats are “bringing in a large number of new voters to replace those that are already here”; in Arizona, far-right state senator Wendy Rogers responded to an article about migrants with the ominous message, “We are being replaced and invaded.” Just hours after the mass shooting in Buffalo, Senate candidate Blake Masters posted a video appearance in which he declared that Democrats’ electoral strategy involves bringing in “millions” of immigrants to vote for them. 

(#STUPIDMTG) Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene rode extremism into Congress, long after sharing a video that declared that an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation, with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.” This clamor — from politicians and pundits, candidates and conspiracy theorists — has become the radioactive center of the right’s policy.

Once you understand an obsession with racial composition and white fertility to be the driving engine of Republican politics, a number of seemingly disparate movements begin to fit together into an ugly whole. Some aspects are obvious: The anti-immigrant movement that has seen U.S. refugee admissions at historic lows and asylum seekers marooned in purgatorial camps in Mexico continues to dominate the right-wing airwaves. Historic levels of gerrymandering are ensuring that a diversifying populace remains beholden to the views of a white minority — alongside openly antidemocratic restrictions on voting and changes in election administration.

Other aspects are more veiled, but no less vitriolic. Years of fearmongering about transgender rights, and in particular their influence on youth, are linked to fears of waning fertility: anti-trans demagogues like Abigail Shrier describe trans bodies as “maimed and sterile,” and, as such, a chief motivation for the legion of anti-trans laws passed by state legislatures is the future fertility of trans children born female. The violent antifeminism of a far-right movement that sees women principally as vessels for breeding a new white generation expresses itself in a fixation on a return to “traditional” gender roles. 

And the culmination of generations of right-wing activism, which will secure the “domestic supply of infants,” as Justice Samuel Alito memorably put it, is poised to arrive in the form of the dissolution of Roe v. Wade. Payton Gendron, and those like him, are listening: like Brenton Tarrant, the mass shooter at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, Gendron opened his manifesto with a screed on the supposedly apocalyptic consequences of “sub-replacement fertility rates” among white women.

In his manifesto, Gendron claims to have acted alone, while in the same breath admitting, “I’ve had many influences from others.” The 180 pages of the document reveal the breadth of those influences: it is largely pastiche, with page upon page of racist and antisemitic memes compiled in repulsive collages; collections of scientific studies of I.Q. differentials between racist groups; screenshots and links to news articles that confirm his prejudices; and segments of other manifestos, including Tarrant’s, bloat a thin line of racist scrawl. He may have, as he claims, become radicalized by over-enthused browsing of the Internet’s sewers, principally 4chan. But his fixations mirror those of the right wing more broadly, from violent transphobia to a loathing of immigration to a preoccupation with the possibility of civil war.

When the rhetoric of an entire movement devolves into Manichaean demonization of their political foes; when demographic shifts are represented as apocalyptic; and when a party can appeal to nothing but the consolidation of white power, it is an inevitability that such rhetoric will leave bodies in its wake. The Republican Party caters chiefly now to those who claim that to be born the wrong color is an act of genocide, and act with appropriate fervor. 

There has never been a lone wolf when it comes to racist terror in the United States; it suffuses every aspect of our politics and policy, and in latter years the mass howl of fear at change comes from a jaw that drips with blood. As long as we fail to recognize the wellspring of racial animus that animates the right wing in this country, the corpses will continue to accrue.

Republicans are failed leaders - they must respond to protect Americans from gun violence

Echo opinion by E.J. Dionne published in The Las Vegas Sun

What has happened to Republicans? At one time, Republicans supported safety and security.

OPINION:
The right and wrong sides of guns, white nationalism

When one side proposes ways that human beings might begin to solve a deadly problem while the other side leaves it up to God, you know which side is right.

When one side proposes solution after solution to contain gun violence — and offers compromise after compromise to get something done — while the other side blocks action every time, you know which side is right.

When the president of the United States and his most incendiary media allies fuel hatred of those who are not white while his opponents say we should stand in solidarity with one another, you know which side is right.

When one side brushes aside the dangers of racist and white nationalist terrorism while the other side says we need to be vigilant against all forms of terrorism, you know which side is right.

"....America's democracy is failing.....and its moral compass is broken" - E.J. Dionne

And when Americans are gunned down in incident after incident, when we are numbed by repeating the same sorrowful words every time, when we move within a news cycle from “something must be done” to “the Senate will block action” or “the politics are too complicated,” you know America’s democracy is failing and its moral compass is broken.

Our rancid political culture is, quite literally, killing our nation. And the problem is not caused by some abstraction called “polarization” or by “the failure of both sides to understand each other.” Those are the alibis of timid souls so intent on sounding “balanced” that they turn their eyes from the truth.

What is that truth? When it comes to gun violence and the need to confront white nationalism, one side is right and one side is wrong.

Until we face this, even two mass shootings within 24 hours will do nothing to galvanize action. In El Paso, 22 people were killed at a shopping center Saturday and 26 were wounded by a gunman who, according to police, appears to have posted an anti-immigrant screed online before the shooting. Then at 1 a.m. Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, another mass shooter left nine dead and 27 injured in an area known for its lively nightlife that is heavily patrolled by police. The shooter was killed in less than a minute.


“Think about that minute,” said Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley. “The shooter was able to kill nine people and injure 26 in less than a minute.” (!)

The gun-permissiveness crowd wants us not to think about that minute. It puts the lie to the gun lobby’s claim that having armed people nearby when a mass killer strikes is all we need to keep us safe.

The wrong side in this debate does not want us to come together. On the contrary, its goal after every mass shooting is to deflect and divide. Here’s what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said when asked by reporters what we should do about gun violence. “Listen, there are bodies that have not yet been recovered,” Abbott replied. “I think we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics.”

But Abbott, reading from the National Rifle Association’s script, started “the politics” right at that moment, and it is an insidious form of politics. Simultaneously, he deflected by pretending it’s impolite to answer substantive questions and divided by saying that those who raise them disrespect the dead.

Nothing disrespects those who are slaughtered more than the political paralysis Abbott and those like him are encouraging.

Invoking God and calling for prayer should never seem obscene. But it is always obscene to use the Almighty to escape our own responsibility.

“God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio,” President Donald Trump said in a Sunday morning tweet from his New Jersey golf club.

Yes, may God bless them. But may God also judge Trump for a political strategy whose success depends on sowing racism, reaction and division. May God judge him for stoking false and incendiary fears about an immigrant “invasion,” the very word echoed by the manifesto that police suspect was the El Paso shooter’s. May God judge the president for cutting programs to fight white extremism at the very moment when the FBI is telling us that we are more at risk from white nationalist terrorists than Islamist terrorists.

In pursuit of a mythical middle ground, the faint-hearted will counsel against calling out the moral culpability of those who divide, deflect and evade. Meanwhile, the rationalizers of violence will continue to claim that only troubled individuals, not our genuinely insane gun policies, are responsible for waves of domestic terrorism that bring shame on our country before the world.

But sane gun laws are the middle ground, and most gun owners support them. Opposing the political exploitation of racism is a moral imperative. And refusing to acknowledge that only one side in this debate seeks intentionally to paralyze us is the path of cowardice.

E.J. Dionne is a columnist for The Washington Post.

"...closing of the border would lead to immediate layoffs" - Trump's height of folly

Republican alert- Food prices are already causing budget stress in many homes, but the cost of groceries was removed from the index used to determine the rate of inflation. Shutting down the Mexico border will have immediate negative economic impact. In my opinion, closing the Mexico border is a stupid Trumposity and will cause food prices to soar, may even cause hording. 

"60 percent of all Mexican winter produce consumed in the U.S. crosses into the country at Nogales, Arizona"- Associated Press published in the Ohio newspaper, The Independent.

EL PASO, Texas — Donald Trump’s threat to shut down the southern border raised fears Monday of dire economic consequences in the U.S. and an upheaval of daily life in a stretch of the country that relies on the international flow of not just goods and services but also students, families and workers.

Politicians, business leaders and economists warned that such a move would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping.

“Let’s hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools’ joke,” said economist Dan Griswold at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. He said Trump’s threat would be the “height of folly,” noting that an average of 15,000 trucks and $1.6 billion in goods cross the border every day.

“If trade were interrupted, U.S. producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and U.S. exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market,” he said.

Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point.

Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict “severe economic harm.”

In California’s Imperial Valley, across from Mexicali, Mexico, farmers rely on workers who come across every day from Mexico to harvest fields of lettuce, carrots, onions and other winter vegetables. Shopping mall parking lots in the region are filled with cars with Mexican plates.

More than 60 percent of all Mexican winter produce consumed in the U.S. crosses into the country at Nogales, Arizona. The winter produce season is especially heavy right now, with the import of Mexican-grown watermelons, grapes and squash, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas.

Nogales border crossing

He said 11,000 to 12,000 commercial trucks cross the border at Nogales daily, laden with about 50 million pounds of produce such as eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, cucumbers and berries.

He said a closing of the border would lead to immediate layoffs and result in shortages and price increases at grocery stores and restaurants.

“If this happens — and I certainly hope it doesn’t — I’d hate to go into a grocery store four or five days later and see what it looks like,” Jungmeyer said.

Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, said a closure would be catastrophic.

“Closing the border would cause an immediate depression in border state communities and, depending on the duration, a recession in the rest of the country,” he said.

“Our business would end,” said Marta Salas, an employee at an El Paso shop near the border that sells plastic flowers that are used on the Mexican side by families holding quinceañeras, the traditional coming-of-age celebrations.

Salas said her whole family, including relatives who attend the University of Texas at El Paso, would be affected if the border were closed.

“There are Americans who live there. I have nephews who come to UTEP, to grade school, to high school every day,” Salas said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration said Monday as many as 2,000 U.S. inspectors who screen cargo and vehicles at ports of entry along the Mexican border may be reassigned to help handle the surge of migrants. Currently, about 750 inspectors are being reassigned.

That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border.

The effects were evident Monday: Sergio Amaya, a 24-year-old American citizen who lives in Juarez, Mexico, and attends UTEP, said it normally takes him two minutes to cross the bridge. It took an hour this time.

“The Border Patrol agent said it’s going to get worse,” Amaya said.

Instead of ensuring the flow of goods across the border, the inspectors are being put to work processing migrants, taking their applications for asylum and transporting them to holding centers.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the reassignments are necessary to help manage the huge influx that is overloading the system.

“The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it,” Nielsen said.

In addition to reassigning inspectors, Nielsen has asked for volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress requesting resources and broader authority to deport families faster. The administration is also ramping up efforts to return asylum seekers to Mexico.

Apprehensions all along the southern border have soared in recent months, with border agents on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry there in March, more than half of them families with children.