Biden's Title 42 Plot to Make the Border Worse

what's happening. Why are we talking about Joseph Robinette Biden today? Well, because you will remember that Biden made some promises when he was campaigning in twenty twenty, and it will shock you to hear that he is throwing migrants under the bus again. In an attempt to get Republicans in the Senate to stop stamping their feet and wailing and having a tantrum, specifically, the Senate failed to pass an immensely spending bill which would find military Among other things, it

would fund military a to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel. And the reason they did that is because these Republicans are having a little tantrum about quote unquote border security. Border security probably doesn't mean what you think it means. In practical terms, what border security means is killing more innocent people, more people who are fleeing the worst things that are happening in this world. At our southern border. It is making America a more deadly place for the most desperate

people on earth. That is what border security means. That is what I want you to think of when you hear people saying we should secure our border, because the people you're securing it against are the Azidi mother I saw carrying her children to try and come to a safer place. They are the Afghan grandmother who I saw walking through the mountains last weekend. Those are the people who we're securing our border against. Right, And this is sorry, This just pisses me off to an unfathomable degree for

many of you. But the reason we're talking about this today is because whatever happens at the border, right, whatever policy we have at the border migration won't change because what people are leaving is worse than that, and so they will still come here because they believe the lies in America tells the world, and it tells its citizens about itself too, that this is a safe place. And for some people that has been a safe place, and

that's a good thing. But what will change is how people are treated when they get here, because what Biden has proposed is a return to Title forty two. I made a whole series on Title forty two that you can listen to. But what he's proposing this time is a very similar policy by which the border patrol agent who meets people after they cross the border in between to entry can send them directly back to Mexico without

them having a chance for an asylum hearing. Right, this is illegal under international law and parts of the US law. It's not clear what Biden's proposing or what the administration is proposing to do about it. Maybe they could change the immigration law. They could probably get enough vote for that, given that people in Congress seem to care very little about migrants. But this isn't a well fleft out proposal.

But what it very clearly shows, right, is the intent to throw some of the most desperate people on earth, and that is It's disgusting, it's ab horror, and it shouldn't be unexpected either.

little guy or people who desperately needed help. It would seem certainly not in the last couple of administrations shouts or the former Obama administration staffords by the way, for showing their whole ass by the screaming racist shit at Muslim people in the last few weeks for people who hadn't already kind of worked out how terrible the Obama administration's policy was. So I want to talk a little

bit about the things that they're trying to do. So the first and foremost would be allowing border patrol to summarily expel migrants. Let me explain to you exactly how fucking stupid this thing is. I was present with a border patrol agent last week who was trying to discern who was a child or not. Who was hampered in

this by not being able to count in Spanish. Border patrol agents do take a Spanish class in their academy, right, but how the fuck are we expect this guy to discern the veracity of someone's asylum claim when he can't count to eighteen? Like this person right under this proposed democratic proposal would have the effectively life or death choice of whether someone can make an asylum claim or they

get immediately bounce back to Mexico. Right, this person would, for instance, have the choice to send a trans woman who would not be safe quote unquote remaining in Mexico while she applied for asylum here back to Mexico to apply for asylum here. Right, this person will be able to send someone who has very credible fears of violence in Mexico back to Mexico where they often have no network,

they have no resources. It once again be putting the strain of our foreign policy and the fucked up shit we've done all around the world that has destabilized regimes, specifically across South Marica, but also all around the world. As a consequence of that, people aren't safe there. They're coming here to find safety, and we're placing it in the hands of a random border patrol agent who may very well not speak the language. You understand anything they're

saying to bounce them back. That's not how we should do think. I think it probably goes without saying. They also want to begin a process of what's called expedited removal. This allows immigration officials to deport people without court hearings if they don't ask for asylum or if they fail

their initial asylum interview. Again like this treating of people seeking asylum like they don't have rights or right like they have to they're guilty and to proven innocent almost in this system, right and to be proven to get these court hearings. To do well in these court inks, they need money. They need lawyers. Those lawyers can cost anywhere from six to twelve thousand dollars from what I've heard. But these people aren't allowed to work in the United States.

We're creating a de factor system the privileges wealthier migrants. Right, ten twelve thousand United States dollars is a lot of money if you're coming from large parts of the world, we're weighing so much lower. So having that kind of money isn't something that people who may be in desperate need of help would have. For instance, yesterday I was speaking to a USD family is ed. However you want to say it who people will be familiar with the

way their community was treated by isis right. Some of the worst genocidal and misogynist violence that we've seen this century was enounted upon that community. They're coming to the United States to be safe, and I don't think those people would have had the money to get together for a hearing. Right, they speak Kurdish. I've never encountered about a patrol agent who speaks Kurdish. Right, So they would have to make their claim on arrival. They could be

immediately rejected. They could if they fail their asylum interview, they could be placed in this expedited removal process, by which they wouldn't have a right to a court hearing, a lawyer or translator, all those things. And the final thing that they've indicated that they want to do, and I think this is the most bizarre one, is that they have decided that they want to mandate the detention

of certain migrants while their claims are adjudicated. This one, it seems like obviously like a massive concession to this sort of insane Republican right wing sort of demand that we criminalize all asylum seekers.

legal immigration. Yeah, they and we're just here now where it's like no, like like you try you, if you attempt to come into the US legally, we are going to fucking put you in a camp. Like it's fucking insane. It's like like this is shit that like even like fifteen years ago, people would have been like what the

fuck are you talking about. But the way that the way that this has been accelerated, and this is something that's you know, like the fact that Biden is fucking just like just going like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we should this is this is fine, Like we're gonna do like this is this is stuff that would have been unimaginable for a Republican president in the two thousands. Yeah. Like, the thing about this too is that none of this would have been possible without democratic implicity. This is this

is this way this system has worked this entire time. Right, is the reason they called a bomb of the Deporter in chief because he was the guy who could could have actually turned the tide against this stuff and just didn't and was just like, fuck you, We're gonna deport millions of people. And that's that's how we're fucking here

with this shit over again. People who are literally coming to the country legally, which is what all these people said, spent all this fucking time saying you're supposed to be doing.

the Southern border has tried CBP one. People aren't. Like, No one wants to pay someone to drive them off road across the desert to a shitty hole in the wall in the middle of the freezing mountain range eighty miles east of here, and then to sit with their children while it rains, snows, freezes and wait for one, two, three nights in this shitty conditions with maybe a con tent that we dumps to dive from a Susan g comen event, right, or maybe if they're really lucky, like

a yurt that me and my friends built from palaps, right. And no one in their right mind would want to do that. These people don't want to do that. They've tried fucking CBP one. Most of them who I have spoken to are carrying visa rejection letters, right. They've been to embassies all around the world, have just been summarily dismissed. They don't give a reason for rejecting your visa, right, and they've exhausted all their options. No one wants to

spend their life savings and walk across the desert. It's dangerous, right, but that is the only way they can do it. And as you say, it is perfectly legal to enter the country between ports of entry and immediately surrender to the first law enforcement agent you see to claim asylum. That that is how one claims asylum when one is

fleeing persecution. And when we have shut the door through this stupid app that only recognizes white faces and crashes all the time and isn't in most languages, and it's

entirely understandable that people have taken this route. We have cooked the bottler of migration and then shaken it up right for three years with the title forty two, which is this Trump era policy that co opted the COVID pandemic, which they allowed to rip through large segments of the United States community and pretended that by expelling migrants who are protecting us. It didn't have any provisions for vaccination, it didn't have any COVID testing. It was just a

cynical attempt to use the pandemic. And we've seen through public records request is something they've planned long in advance to evict people from this country without giving them a chance of an asylum hearing, and now Biden is doing it without even the pretense of an excuse. Right at least Trump made up some bullshit. It was transparent. But Biden isn't even bothering to do that, and he's just going to boot these people back into a place where

they're going to be vulnerable. I've spoken to migrants who have been abused, who have been robbed in Mexico. It's it's not a safe place of vulnerable people. And the more vulnerable people you put into it, they're less safe. It's going to get and nor is it. Mexico's a fucking problem, right, Like Henry Kissinger didn't fucking run Mexican policy and then get to live to one hundred and die in's bed, right, It's it's a lot of these countries people are coming from, they're coming from because we

fucked up their policy as a country. We fucked up their future, right. We we did this neoclonial thing where we stole everything we thought was a value. We imposed dictators upon them when they chose socialist or more progressive regimes, and then we'd split our hands up in the air and said no, you can't come here to no space. Sorry, And it's it's fucking inexcusable and it's imhorrent me. Do you know what else is inexcusable? And abhorrent?

afford insulin. And the reason they have died is because these fucking ghouls want to extract every penny out of those of us who have diabetes. So I'm sorry that you heard those adverts and you won't ever again. But here's some other adverts we are back without, hopefully adverts for evil pharmaceutical companies. It's me and Meir, and we're

talking about Joe Brandon and his terrible immigration policy. So the final part of this, and perhaps the most bizarre one, is that the White House but mandating the detention of these migrants pending their claims. The US has never had enough enough detention space to do this, and we don't now. It remains extremely fucking unclear how this will be done. I will say that there was a big fuss made me and maybe remember this that Biden was canceling private

prison contracts when he first came into office. Do you remember his executive order on this vaguely? Yeah, yeah, I think it got a lot of attention. That may have specifically applied to people who are in federal criminal incarceration.

It's certainly never applied to people seeking asylum because those people have always been detained by third party contractors like cour Civic Right, and they continue to be so on the the Biden administration because again right, it is seemingly the implicit policy of the Democratic Party that these people are of less value and have fewer rights than US citizens or then people seeking permanent restudency in this country through other means.

They're there to diffuse people's ability, capacity and desire to resist doing the exact same fucking things Republicans are doing. And it's really effective. And the consequence of this is that now we're fucking here with like trying to bring fucking the same shit Trump was doing back.

government in Texas has been like shipping them to random cities. Yes, so a bunch of people have been shipped to Chicago, and it turned and there there eventually were protests here, but like our fucking progressive mayor tried to have a basically a concentration camp company set up like a camp for these people on land that it turned out have been a toxic waste dump and only just didn't do I I don't even think he ever backed up the

a story years kind of. I think what happened, if I'm remembering correctly, is that the governor was like, like pritz Crew was like, what the fuck are you doing? You can't have this stuff beyond a toxic waste site.

But so that's like temporarily to stopped. Like that's that's the kind of shit that's happening, like in you know, like like Brandon Johnson like nominally is one of the most left wing mayors in the US, And this is what is fucking happening even in this from of the sort of progressive wing the Democratic Party, like the concern like the Joe Biden conservative wing is like even worse than this stuff.

means something. There is not an electoral option for you, right, You cannot just vote if you give a single fuck about innocent people living outside of this country wanting to come here and be safe. You don't. There is nothing on the ballot box for you to tick that represents a serious option. And that's sad. Yeah, it's a pretty

fucked reflection of our electoral politics. But I think it also impels us to like, look, look as someone who believes that there is not a ballot box option that is going to deliver us a system with dignity and democracy and justice. Anyway, I think this is where we have to step up and do the stuff that we

always talk about. Like this happened a little bit in twenty twenty, it happened a little bit under Trump, but like now more than ever, the need to do mutual aid, especially for migrants, but also for in house people within your community, for all the fucking human detritus of Joe Biden's dogshit, evenance, it's right now, and like it is, as I've seen personally, within the power of a very small group of people to impact the lives of a

very large group of people through organizing. I've participated in mutual aid for a while. I'm sure many of the people are listening have as well. But like if you, if you haven't found the play or the way to do so, like it's it's a great time to start organizing something. The options in the next electoral cycle are that things get worse or that things get much worse.

I don't think we have an option which is dismantling the structural racism that is within the United States, or even just not punching down on some of the most vulnerable people in the world. It would appear, and so to protect those people, it falls upon our communities, And that's that's a big burden to shoulder, right. When the state has enough money to send one thousand pound bomb state Israel, that means that we have to pay for beans for hungry children. Yeah.

Like it isn't like putting people in a prison is like the least cost efficient way to do possibly do anything, And it doesn't matter because the whole point of this, like and this is one of these things with this sort of ratchet, right is eventually you're gonna get to fucking like you know, I mean, like the situation we have now right now in Greece where you have effectively a fascist government who's up like pot like when like

when when boastload boatloads of people go down to the Mediterranean, like go down the Mediterraneans, every hundred people die, their popularity goes up because you know, and then and this is the thing you're gonna be We're gonna we're We're not that far away from in the fucking US. Is the Republican demand in like maybe like eight maybe ten years is going to be just shooting like literally just machine guns at the.

by voting for the Democrats. This is like you know, and like people people thought this about Obama, and people also thought this about Biden, was that we're going to vote for these people because they're going to be good on immigration, and like this is the reason why we're

fucking are where we are now. So so like there there there there is no solution to this that doesn't revolve around like fundamental systemic change to what the US is, because otherwise we're just going to every single fucking year, we're gonna back here.

forty two does to migration flow. Right. As many of you will be aware, Donald Trump has built a big, beautiful wall along the southern border of the United States. The caveat to that being only some of it, and that they didn't do the hard parts. Right. So the places in Hokombo where people are entering are gaps in the war. Right. There are camps at three of these gaps,

spread over about a fifteen mile area. There are apps all up and down the wall, right, And you'll very often see people saying, oh, you couldn't climb this war. Doesn't matter. You just walk along until you find a gap and get through. You also can climb the war. We've seen people climb the war. We've seen people cut it with angle grinders. Right. But what happens with Title

forty two. What happens right now, under what's called Title eight of the United States Immigration Law, people enter the country through a gap in the wall, and they wait, and they surrender to a border patrol agent and say I'm here to claim the silent, right, and then they end up in these open air detention sites in Cucumber,

et cetera. What happens on a title forty two is that if you think you're going to be bounced directly back to Mexico and you believe that you aren't safe there, you attempt to avoid border patrol, right, and so you go to the places where they're going to be watching these gaps in the war one would issue. So you go to the furthest places, and the hardest places and the highest places, in the most rugged places, right, and

you try and walk through those routes. Instead, you try and walk through, for instance, value the Moon, which is just to the east of the Cumber, where just last week some of my friends are involved in the search and rescue operation for a four year old child who'd become separated from their family coming from Afghanistan, and then they found that child, fortunately, but fucking no one else would have done if they hadn't been there, right, Yeah, the result of this is that people will die in

greater numbers crossing our body. And that's what we saw rounder title forty two under Trump, and it's what we saw in title forty two and Biden because there was that like I have attended that you've heard about on this podcast and the ones that I haven't and that you haven't heard about on this podcast are not going to stop because Joe Biden offered a concession to the Republicans, they will keep happening. The poverty that we have created in much of the world is not going to stop.

It will keep happening. Transphobia a thing that we have exported culturally. That's on Britain too, which I definitely.

or what week will that be? The week after next, Like I'm gonna we're gonna replay the epithet, like the interviews that I did with Mexican trans organizers talking about the turfs there because they are armed and they will fucking like actually they will attack people.

border policy doesn't change migration. Migration happens because people aren't safe where they are, and that's why they leave. They don't take this journey because it seems easy. Because even right now it's incredible hard. People walk thousands of miles, they walk across mountains, they run, and they take risks and hop on trains. They get extorted, they get robbed,

that they get assaulted. Young women often get sexually assaulted. Like, it's a terrible and dangerous journey, and people won't stop taking that journey because Joe Biden decided to do something different. The things that are driving them to leave their homes will still keep happening, and they will now have to

take a more dangerous journey. And all that this does is make it more likely that there's people will die on the way here, or that when they get here, they have to live their whole lives always wondering if they're going to get sent back, right, never really feeling safe. It rubs people of what some of us can take for granted, right, which is being able to go to sleep at night and feeling safe. And yeah, that's I guess what we all voted for when we chose an

anti fascist guy in twenty twenty. Like, it's a pretty fucking bleak vision of politics in this country and the impact I have for people who don't get a choice to vote in this country.

who fucking use this language. But you know, how how how else do you describe living in a condition where you can at any point be removed and are spending literally all your time attempting to flee a police date, Like, yeah, yeah, the US, the US is and has always been an unbelievably authoritarian state, and it's getting more so fucking every day. And you know, and this is also one of these things where it's like, I mean, we literally saw this in twenty twenty, the people who got sent in to

put down the uprising in Portland. It was fucking Bortac, right, it was. It was it was the the it was it was it was the border patrols like special forces units, right, Like, that's that's the inevitable logic of this state, is that you any person who wants to resist the state, eventually one day these people will fucking come for you too.

And the question is whether you know, it's whether you start Because Vortec didn't win, really and like the stuff that they were trying to do in twent like they they basically kind of got beaten, but you know they're still there. They're still getting fucking money like they're getting

I mean to give more money. Yeah, So you know, either either we stop them now before they fucking have another trillion dollars to spend on this shit, or you know, we fight them again in like five years when there's more of them and they're better funded.

so that you don't care. I will say that, like every single time we put more money into border security to ends up with all of us being surveiled more. If you attended a protest in twenty twenty, you might have been surveiled by border patrol. Right. If you walk around in the desert where I live, you're probably being surveiled by border patrol. If you use your cell phone

without encryption, you might be being surveiled at the border. Right, the companies, many of them are based in the US and with them based in Israel that are surveilling Palestinians are the same ones that are surveiling us at our border. And this will come back to bite you at the ass. In the ass. This will come back to bite you in the ass, even if you don't care about migrants, because the moment you are not in lockstep with the government,

you become a potential victim of that surveillance. Right, and a big thing with undocumented immigration is it essentially makes you a legible and therefore untaxable to the government. Right. What the government state at its very core want people to be is legible and taxable and accountable. If you think that it isn't going to bounce back on trans folks,

right and making them specifically lon binary folks too. Right, like the idea that you don't have a box to tick on a form, and that makes you harder to be legible and statistically quantifiable by the government. All of

this will come back and hurt you. Even if you're just a super right wing libertarian who doesn't want to pay their taxes like this, border security is a thing that will eventually be used against you, and I don't think it's in any of our interests to just keep handing these tools to the state that end up being used against the most desperate people in the world. And so hopefully I know there's no one you can fucking vote for to change the Yeah, yeah, you can feel

free to write your legislators. I have been on the phone to my legislators about individual cases of people who I care about very deeply, who are in a very grave amount of danger and they haven't done shit. So instead I go to the border and I build shelters, add of pallettes and tops for people because it's the only thing that makes me feel like I'm not completely

fucking powerless. And so if you want to take that paradynamic back, you know, cook some beans, make some rice, buy some tops with your holiday money, and go out there and start doing mutual aid. You don't even have to go on x dot com or Reddit to do it. Just fucking go out and start helping people. You'll find other people who want to help. You can organize, and it's about the only way I can see that you can make things meaningfully better right now?