{"id":193230,"date":"2021-08-30T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T11:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=193230"},"modified":"2021-08-27T05:39:18","modified_gmt":"2021-08-27T04:39:18","slug":"from-kabul-to-the-rio-grande-the-u-s-creates-refugee-crises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/08\/from-kabul-to-the-rio-grande-the-u-s-creates-refugee-crises\/","title":{"rendered":"From Kabul to the Rio Grande, the U.S. Creates Refugee Crises"},"content":{"rendered":"

26 Aug 2021 – <\/em>The United States has long branded itself as a safe haven for refugees fleeing war and persecution abroad. The current U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is actually a testament to that, with well over 100,000 people evacuated by the U.S. since mid-August. Despite this historic airlift, the Biden administration is being relentlessly criticized. The airlift continued despite a double suicide bombing at the gates of the Kabul airport on Wednesday that killed 60 people, including 12 U.S. servicemembers, injuring at least 140.<\/p>\n

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Another exodus is happening halfway around the world as asylum seekers from Central America make the perilous journey to the U.S.\/Mexico border. There, they face draconian U.S. immigration policies that consign them to \u201cRemain in Mexico.\u201d Much like Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire of that 20-year war, these migrants live in constant danger in squalid, makeshift refugee camps in Mexican border cities, waiting for a chance at asylum in the United States.<\/p>\n

If there is any chaos as U.S.-aligned Afghans scramble to flee their war-torn nation, blame lies primarily with the previous administration, and President Trump\u2019s right-hand man, his racist, xenophobic advisor Stephen Miller. Miller\u2019s anti-immigrant fervor was driven early on by listening to rightwing radio host Larry Elder, who is now the leading candidate to replace California Governor Gavin Newsom in a recall election.<\/p>\n

Olivia Troye, who was an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, tweeted recently:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov\u2019t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV<\/span> [Special Immigrant Visa] issue by devastating the system at DHS<\/span> & State\u2026Trump had FOUR<\/span> years\u2026to evacuate these Afghan allies who were the lifelines for many of us who spent time in Afghanistan. They\u2019d been waiting a long time. The process slowed to a trickle for reviews\/other \u201cpriorities\u201d-then came to a halt.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Miller also engineered the \u201cMigrant Protection Protocols,\u201d or MPP<\/span>, better known as the \u201cRemain in Mexico\u201d policy. Human Rights First recently issued a report, \u201cDelivered to Danger,\u201d that documented \u201cat least 1,544 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and other violent assaults against asylum seekers and migrants forced to return to Mexico by the Trump Administration,\u201d A 97-page appendix accompanies the report, listing the crimes with chilling detail.<\/p>\n

On Inauguration Day, President Biden issued several executive orders including one revoking the anti-immigrant executive order Trump issued during his first week in office in 2017. The Department of Homeland Security immediately suspended enrolling migrants in the MPP<\/span> program. In response, the states of Texas and Missouri sued the Biden administration, and on August 13th, Texas Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, ruled that the White House must immediately reimplement the \u201cRemain in Mexico\u201d policy.<\/p>\n

The Justice Department appealed, and, within two weeks, a three-judge appeals court affirmed the lower court\u2019s decision. Two of those three appeals court judges were Trump appointees: Andrew Oldham, who was just 39 when confirmed to his lifetime appointment in 2018, and Cory Wilson, who is now 51. Both are fierce rightwing ideologues. A request for a stay pending further litigation was quickly rejected by the Supreme Court by 6-3.<\/p>\n

While the Biden administration fights to shut down MPP<\/span> against a federal judiciary packed with Trump appointees, it still uses \u201cTitle 42,\u201d first deployed by Trump, allowing deportations and immigration bans in times of public health emergencies. Trump\u2019s CDC<\/span> issued the Title 42 order in March, 2020 as the pandemic swept the globe, and Biden renewed it on August 2nd.<\/p>\n

The U.S. government reported a record 210,000 migrant apprehensions along the southern border in July. Many of these people hail from the so-called \u201cNorthern Triangle\u201d countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, where widespread inequality, systemic corruption, food insecurity, gang violence and now climate change are forcing people from their homes. These problems have long been exacerbated by U.S. military, economic and political interventions in the region.<\/p>\n

The United States engaged in \u201cdirty wars\u201d in Central America and has supported coups against democratically elected governments there, from overthrowing the government of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 to actively supporting the coup against President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the U.S. armed and supported the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union. Many of those armed mujahideen then aimed their American weapons at the U.S This led to the disastrous, two decades-long U.S. war, with tens of thousands killed and millions displaced.<\/p>\n

The United States has a responsibility to provide a safe haven for refugees, from Afghanistan, Latin America, or elsewhere, and to cease interventions that fuel these crises and displace so many.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Aug 2021 – The United States has long branded itself as a safe haven for refugees fleeing war and persecution abroad. It has a responsibility to provide a safe haven for refugees, from Afghanistan, Latin America, or elsewhere, and to cease interventions that fuel these crises and displace so many.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":65754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[93,94,133,1106,267,1126,487,1050,504,91,86,112,880,484,639,95,70,126,492,481],"class_list":["post-193230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-afghanistan","tag-central-asia","tag-cia","tag-drones","tag-geopolitics","tag-hegemony","tag-human-rights","tag-imperialism","tag-international-relations","tag-nato","tag-occupation","tag-pentagon","tag-state-terrorism","tag-taliban","tag-uk","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war-on-terror","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}