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The Intercept Briefing

The Democrats’ Long War on Immigrants

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.86.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As Joe Biden took the oath of office this January, Guatemalan security forces at the Honduran border thwarted thousands of U.S.-bound migrants. While decades-long American imperialism has facilitated displacement throughout the region, the U.S. is increasingly outsourcing its deadly immigration policy. This week on Intercepted: The Biden administration announced it will begin to process the 25,000 asylum seekers stuck in squalid border town camps as part of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. But immigration advocates fear President Biden will not reverse the bipartisan trend of his predecessors to further militarize the southern border and expand the reaches of immigration enforcement — policies that have led to more migrant deaths and detention in recent decades. Despite Biden’s executive actions to reverse the Muslim ban, initiate migrant family reunification, and fortify DACA, his administration has indicated that it will continue to support Mexican and Guatemalan armed enforcement of their borders on behalf of the U.S.T


The activist and writer Harsha Walia joins Intercepted to discuss the Democratic Party’s fundamental role in shaping the long arc of U.S. border policy and why the practice of “prevention through deterrence” will continue to incur more suffering and preventable deaths. She also presents an abolitionist view of a world without borders. Walia’s most recent book is “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.”



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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is intercepted.

0:30.0

My name is Harsh Awelia. I am an organizer and activist trained in the law. I'm the author of

0:52.0

Border and Rule by HeMarketbooks. The new Biden-run Justice Department rescinded the Trump administration's zero tolerance border policy. It led to thousands of family separations.

1:06.0

Today I'm going to sign a few executive orders to strengthen immigration system building on the executive actions I took on the day 1 to protect dreamers and the Muslim ban and the better managed our borders.

1:20.0

The moratorium came about as Joe Biden was making various executive orders with respect to rolling back Trump's horrific immigration mandate which was just so vile and of course we know that Trump's legacy included overtly malicious policies of separating families, caging children, the Muslim ban, the border wall, all of that.

1:44.0

There's a lot of talk with good reason about the number of executive orders that I have signed. I'm not making new law. I'm eliminating bad policy.

1:54.0

What I'm doing is taking a lot of things.

1:56.0

But it was short lived because of federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the pause on deportation.

2:02.0

On an issue that actually does matter, a federal judge who was actually appointed at the bench by President Trump has already taken action against Biden's 100 day moratorium on deportations.

2:16.0

And so what we saw within a few days of Biden's announcement was that ICE began deporting hundreds of people.

2:26.0

I'm Haiti President Joe Biden has ordered a 100 day moratorium on deportations, but attorneys for 27 year old have Yehra Castillo Maradiaga who is DACA eligible say ICE has scheduled him to be on a plane back to Honduras on Monday morning.

2:42.0

Maradiaga's family organized around.

2:48.0

Part of what's frustrating about the ice gone rogue framework is that it presents the Biden administration is somehow powerless.

2:55.0

When in fact, they're not that really sets the context, I think, for what we can expect and the battles really to come with a Biden administration.

3:07.0

I think it's so important to understand how immigration enforcement has been a pillar of the Democratic party's governance for three decades.

3:14.0

And it really was under President Spil Clinton and Barack Obama, you know, not Donald Trump exclusively, that an entire immigration enforcement apparatus that was bent on expanding detention and deportation, that was bent on criminalizing migration through criminal prosecutions, that was bent on militarizing the border, the very bipartisan agenda of detaining and deporting and terrorizing migrant communities.

3:40.0

All Americans, not only in the state's most heavily affected, but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.

3:52.0

The Clinton years really normalize the most severe consequences of border militarization and mass detention, both at the same time.

4:00.0

The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants, the public service they use imposed burdens on our taxpayers.

4:08.0

That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before.

4:18.0

We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws.

4:23.0

It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years and we must do more to stop it.

...

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