Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Some Stupid

 

Border prospect, McAllen, Texas, via Rio Grande Guardian.

Former Tennessee Congressman Marsha Blackburn (that was my favorite thing about her, that she refused to call herself a congresswoman, like she was afraid that might not be constitutional), now Senator Blackburn,  weighs in on the lessons we can learn from the Ukraine invasion:

Has Mexico captured pieces of Texas and Arizona and set up armed encampments that have been fighting the US army in a civil war for the last eight years? Has Mexico's president been saying for 20 years that the US isn't a real country and we're all really Mexicans?

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

Our border is secure, Marsha, and not just we already have the best equipped military in the world, which Ukraine doesn't, but because Mexico is a REALLY GOOD NEIGHBOR. Which Russia is notably not.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

I mean, when you think about it, incredibly good, when you consider that Mexico has a history of being chopped up the way Ukraine has been, by the United States, carved and served in the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848 when US forces showed up to defend the right of white men in Tejas to hold and trade slaves, and ended up seizing a third of Mexico's sovereign territory and annexing it to the US, through the "punitive expedition" of 1916-17  which successfully decided the outcome of a revolution inside the country, to the Immigration Act of 1924 making it impossible, for the first time in North American history, for normal people to live in the normal way, traveling between Tijuana and San Diego or El Paso and Ciudad Juarez without let or hindrance, that they had been following since the 16th century. Mexico forgives and forgets.

While Russia is playing with the idea of demanding we give Alaska back. Although we paid for it. That's the only insecure border we have, the maritime boundary in the Bering Sea. Is that clear?

Rectification: Roundups

While we've been talking about the correct use of the term "concentration camp" to describe the Customs and Border Patrol encampments at the Mexican border to hold thousands of people in illegal detention in unsafe and unsanitary conditions for weeks and months at a time (including children, who are required by law to be released within 72 hours), blogfriend Bethesda 1971 has been musing at Daily Kos on another word, "roundup", to refer to planned ICE activities across the country:

President Donald Trump said Monday that U.S. immigration officials will start raids after July 4 as part of a nationwide roundup of undocumented immigrants.  Bloomberg, July 1, 2019.

Trump says immigration roundup will start next week. Reuters, June 18, 2019.

Trump administration plans unprecedented roundup of 2,000 family members in deportation raids. ABC, June 22, 2019.

This has a Shoah pedigree too, as in one famous roundup in Vichy France, from July 1942:

Over 11,000 Jews were arrested on the same day, and confined to the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d’Hiver, known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, in Paris. The detainees were kept in extremely crowded conditions, almost without water, food and sanitary facilities. Within a week the number of Jews held in the Vel’ d’Hiv had reached 13,000, among them more than 4,000 children. Children between the ages of two and 16 were arrested together with their parents. Among those detained were Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia. .  .  .  .In the week following the arrests, the Jews were taken from the Winter Stadium to the concentration camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret region south of Paris, and to Drancy, near Paris. At the end of July and the beginning of August, the Jews who were being detained in these camps were separated from their children and deported.

Of course they weren't being deported to misery and lethal danger in the Central American Northern Triangle but to certain death in Auschwitz and other death camps, but the similarities are otherwise pretty striking. And yet we use the word "roundup" without a second thought. Anyway you should read the whole piece, linked above.

Concentration

Cuba, 1896-97, via latinamericanstudies.

In 1896 General Valeriano Weyler, leading Spanish imperial forces against a Cuban guerilla insurgency, decided like many imperial commanders from Napoleon to Westmoreland that it's a problem when your enemy consists of irregular forces blended into the general population, and came up with a novel method of separating them out: he'd take the non-militant members of communities off their land and "reconcentrate" them in central locations where he could stop them from helping the guerillas with food and shelter and keep them out of harm's way, in what he called, with a military bureaucrat's gift for dulling a concept with neuter phrasing, campos de concentración. The policy was, effectively, race-based, as was the war:

'"...del millón seicientos mil habitantes que aproximadamente había en Cuba cuando empezó esta guerra, unos doscientas mil eran españoles, quinientos mil negros o mulatos, unos ochocientos mil blancos cubanos o criollos y un número no determinado de chinos, jamaicanos, haitianos y otros. Los españoles, con alguna notable excepción en especial dentro del clero, se mantenían fieles a España y en contra de la revolución de los cubanos. Los negros, salvo conductas puntuales, estaban entusiásticamente unidos para apoyar a los rebeldes bajo promesa de abolición de la esclavitud, y por que intuían que al final triunfaría la rebelión contra España...Esperaban que bajo el nuevo régimen tendrían condiciones muy similares a las de la vecina república de Haití... soñaban con una Cuba libre ..." 

[Out of the approximately 1.6 million inhabitants of Cuba about 200,000 were Spanish, 500,000 Negroes and mulattos, 800,000 white Cubans and Creoles, and an undetermined number of Chinese, Jamaicans, Haitians, and others. The Spaniards, with some notable exceptions in particular among the Catholic clergy, remained faithful to Spain and opposed to the Cuban revolution. The Negroes, except for particular cases, were enthusiastically united in support of the rebels under a promise that slavery would be abolished, and because they had an intuitive sense that the rebellion would win... They hoped that under the new regime conditions like those in the nearby republic of Haiti could be created, and dreamed of a free Cuba...]