We Resist: Day 900

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Earlier today by me: The USWNT Is F#@king Awesome and Primarily Speaking and A Couple of Notes on the Epstein Charges.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse. Covers entire section.]

This is a reminder that Mike Pence is: 1. As profligate a liar as Donald Trump; 2. As heinous a nativist wreck as Donald Trump, who, while governor of Indiana, went to court in order to try to legally deny access to social services to Syrian refugees resettling in the state. https://t.co/nLsQdmEVIW

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) July 8, 2019

Mike Pence is going to go to the southern border and tell rank lies about what he sees there. Let us all endeavor to counterbalance his propaganda with the truth, wherever we can.

Elham Khatami at ThinkProgress: United Nations Human Rights Commissioner 'Appalled' by Conditions in U.S. Detention Centers. "Conditions in U.S. detention centers where migrants and refugees are being held are 'undignified' and 'alarming,' said United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Monday. ...Bachelet said she was appalled by the detrimental effects of such conditions, especially for children, adding that 'Detaining a child even for short periods under good conditions can have a serious impact on their health and development — consider the damage being done every day by allowing this alarming situation to continue.'"

Amanda Holpuch at the Guardian: Migrant Children Held in Texas Facility Need Access to Doctors, Says Attorney.

Hundreds of children at a migrant detention center in Texas are being held in "inhumane" conditions that amount to an "emergency public health crisis" and should be allowed immediate access to doctors, according to an attorney who gained rare access to the facility.

Elora Mukherjee, the director of Columbia Law School's immigrant rights clinic, was one of six attorneys to visit the detention center in Clint as part of ongoing litigation about an agreement that states unaccompanied children can't be held in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities for more than 72 hours.

The team found that children had no adequate access to medical care, had no basic sanitation, were exposed to extreme cold, and did not have adequate access to drinking water or food.

"I've been visiting children detained in federal immigration custody for 12 years," Mukherjee told the Guardian. "I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen, smelled, had to bear witness to such degrading and inhumane conditions."

Sob.

[CN: Homophobia] And of course it isn't just the children who are being subjected to degrading and inhumane conditions.

Customs and Border Patrol agents at a migrant processing center in Texas allegedly attempted to humiliate a Honduran migrant by making him hold a sign that read, "I like men," according to emails written by an agent who witnessed the incident. https://t.co/NSgsInu7pz

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 5, 2019

Molly O'Toole and Carolyn Cole at the LA Times: Facing Trump's Asylum Limits, Refugees from as Far as Africa Languish in a Mexican Camp.

A group of roughly 100 Haitians, Africans, and South Americans cross the Rio Grande, just shallow enough for adults to wade despite an overnight storm.

As they wait on the muddy bank near Del Rio, Texas, to surrender themselves to the Border Patrol, the voices of children in the group carry across the river to the Mexican side.

There, in the city of Ciudad Acuña, hundreds of migrants have formed an impromptu refugee camp in an ecological park bound on one side by the river. Just outside the park, the official port of entry to the United States sits at the end of a short bridge.

They've crossed thousands of miles by foot, boat, and bus to seek asylum in the U.S., only to find themselves stalled in a purgatory of soggy tents and overflowing bathrooms. Now, they face an uncertain wait prolonged by Trump administration policy.

The temptation to make the risky and illegal river crossing mounts daily.

"If you see people jumping over the river, it is because they are tired of staying here," said one resident of the camp, Luis, who declined to give his last name out of fear for the safety of his family back home.

Home for him would be the West African nation of Cameroon, where Luis was vice principal of a school until he fled last fall. He escaped a widening conflict between the country's English-speaking minority and its Francophone-majority government, which receives security assistance from the U.S.

He was jailed and tortured before escaping to neighboring Nigeria, Luis said. After a trek across three continents, he landed here, where he has waited for six weeks to present himself to U.S. officials at the Del Rio port of entry.

He hopes to join a sister in Ohio.

"At times, it is really disheartening," he said, "so it is difficult to wait."

Patrick Timmons at the Guardian: 'People with No Names': The Drowned Migrants Buried in Pauper's Graves. "Dotted amid the decorated graves there is the sudden, jarring sight of plain, wooden crosses. One has scrawled on it in Spanish: '24 April 2019. Unidentified male recovered from the Rio Bravo approximately 300 meters from the black bridge in the Morelos neighborhood.' ...As drownings have increased in the treacherous river amid the Trump administration trying to block all undocumented people from crossing into the U.S., even to seek asylum, Piedras Negras has had to bury unidentifiable bodies after they were hauled out of the water by first responders."

Family members of a 47-year-old man who died after falling from the border fence said he was trying to return to his family in the United States after being deported and "had lived in Arizona and California since he was 2." https://t.co/G7LcjeRnQe

— Nick Miroff (@NickMiroff) July 5, 2019

Malice is the motherfucking agenda.

As I have noted many times previously: This administration (mis)treats migrants and refugees as the canary in the coalmine of their official cruelty. The Trump Regime's war on immigrants is intolerable on its face, but understand that, whatever they are doing to undocumented immigrants, they will do to other marginalized people and dissidents in the same way eventually.

With that as preface, Drew Harwell at the Washington Post: FBI, ICE Find State Driver's License Photos Are a Gold Mine for Facial-Recognition Searches. "Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver's license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans' photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show. Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents, and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by researchers with Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state departments of motor vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure."

A lot of folks will read headlines about this item, see "ICE," and assume the technology is only being used to "nab illegals." It isn't. It's already being used against citizens. And, even if it were only being used against undocumented immigrants, that's bad enough. But the population's indifference to abuses against undocumented immigrants will mean this surveillance programs expands without much pushback. So, let's make some noise.

Tina Vasquez at Rewire.News: Sanctuary Leaders Fight Back Against ICE's 'Psychological Violence' and Steep Fines. "Ivan and his mother Hilda Ramirez came to the United States fleeing familial violence in 2014. Since then, they have been 'under attack' by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the elder Ramirez said. They were detained together for almost a year after first arriving in the United States. Since their release from detention, they have been targeted for deportation. Because of ups and downs in their immigration cases, they have been forced to take sanctuary twice in St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. On July 4, soon after receiving a letter from ICE informing her of a $303,620 fine, Ramirez told Rewire.News she sees these financial penalties as part of a larger pattern of attacks against immigrants in sanctuary."

Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post: Justice Department Changing Lawyers on Census Case. "The Justice Department is swapping out the lawyers who had been representing the administration in its legal battle to put a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census, possibly signaling career attorneys' legal or ethical concerns over the maneuvering ordered by [Donald] Trump." We knew this wasn't over yet. Goddammit.

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Jamie Ross at the Daily Beast: Federal Grand Jury Probing Top GOP Donor Elliott Broidy over Trump Inauguration. "Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally Elliott Broidy is under investigation by a federal grand jury over suspicions that he used his position as vice chairman of Trump's inaugural committee to help him strike business deals with foreign leaders." Yeah, that Elliott Broidy.

Mohamad Bazzi at the Guardian: The Troubling Overlap Between Jared Kushner's Business Interests and U.S. Foreign Policy. "The meeting in May 2017 was crucial because it helped solidify a Trump foreign policy favoring Saudi Arabia and the UAE in their conflict with Qatar, a tiny emirate in the Gulf that is rich in natural gas and home to a major U.S. military base. It also raises questions about a problem that has dogged Kushner since the earliest days of the Trump administration: whether his family's business interests are driving his political decisions." Yes, they are.

Spencer Kimball at CNBC: Deutsche Bank Will Exit Global Equities Business and Slash 18,000 Jobs in Sweeping Overhaul. "Deutsche Bank announced Sunday that it will pull out of global equities sales and trading, scale back investment banking and slash thousands of jobs as part of a sweeping restructuring plan to improve profitability. ...Deutsche has come under renewed scrutiny in the U.S. over its business relationship with [Donald] Trump. The House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees subpoenaed Deutsche in April for records on Trump's finances. Trump and his family sought to have that subpoena squashed in court, but a federal judge ruled the bank can turn over financial documents to House Democrats."

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?