In various and fluctuating levels of awareness, we knew this was coming.
Rivers ceased to flow. Lakes and reservoirs dropped to record-low levels or dried up altogether. Maybe not every year in every region, but pretty regularly over the last decade. Then, Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Panhandle this past February—the largest wildfire in Texas history.
In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature of the Earth through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, English steam engineer (and amateur climate scientist) Guy Callendar began gathering climate records from almost 150 weather stations around the world. From this data—and completing all the calculations by hand—he demonstrated that global temperatures had risen 0.3°C over the previous half-century (which roughly parallelled the Second Industrial Revolution and its short-term repercussions). Callendar suggested that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrial processes were responsible for planetary warming, but his ideas were dismissed because other scientists refused to accept the premise that human beings might be capable of drastically impacting the environment.
Callendar’s rudimentary estimates of climate change subsequently proved to be remarkably accurate and consistent with modern assessments. But the term “global warming” didn’t appear until a Science journal article published on August 8, 1975. Titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”, it was written by American geochemist Wallace Smith Broecker.
It sent up red flags in Big Oil boardrooms from sea to shining sea.
American corporatists pre-empted public concerns by funding studies disproving serious analysis of Global Warming and Climate Change and favoring reports that underemphasized what was a stake. But for anyone who was really paying attention, the truth was obvious.
The truth, however, was a liability.
Now, coming up on fifty years later, the truth is more accessible than ever, but no one wants to address it. And Texas is at the forefront of American heedlessness.
Just this past Earth Day, April 22, 2024, the Texas A & M Office of the Texas State Climatologist issued a report titled “Assessment of Historic and Future Trends of Extreme Weather in Texas, 1900-2036.” In 40+ pages, this report predicts that for the next twelve years, things will be hotter and dryer, and wildfires will get worse and expand eastward. Meanwhile, the seas in the Gulf of Mexico will rise and the Gulf storms will become larger and more frequent. And winter as a season, at least, will wither, shrink and occasionally disappear.
Unless—as those pesky folks who are paying attention, again, wonder—Global Warming hastens the next Ice Age. Then, the planet will enjoy winter all year long for centuries.
But who cares when profits are up!
As of August 2023, Texas was responsible for 42% of total United States crude oil production. As of October 2023, Texas was responsible for 43% of all the natural gas produced in America. Also, as of October 2023, Texas was producing 52% of the nation’s exportable natural gas liquids.
No wonder so many Texans walk around with guns.
Like William Barret Travis, Lone Star legend of old, Texans have drawn a line in the sand. But this time we’re behaving more like Charlie Manson than Travis, vowing to normalize heat death and defend a super-sized Alamo constructed from hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic that lie in the 620,000-square-mile Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch—which is, of course, an obscenely profitable derivative of fractional crude oil distillation.
So, let’s not be coy. Texas has made gazillions from trickle-down ecocide, and we have no plans to quit. Heck, you and I even enjoy front row seats. We knew this was coming.
We just didn’t want to deal with it. Hell, we still have political leaders and pundits who refuse to acknowledge what’s even happening. So, by proxy, they’re arguably straight-facedly orchestrating this hellishness—but they will never be held responsible for it. And they definitely won’t be the ones sweating or burning or dying as a result.
But why extend the Texas State Climatologist Earth Day report only through 2036?
Even Travis knows the “official” answer to that.
The year 2036 marks the 200th anniversary of Texas Independence. Unofficially, however, conditions project to get so much worse by 2050 that truncating the truth with a historical cap was probably all the powers that be could stomach.
Capitalism is a flame-thrower and, in the end, we’ll be reduced to cinder by corporate greed or frozen to death by our own mad obliviousness.
A photojournalist who was violently arrested while covering a pro-Palestine student protest at the University of Texas at Austin last week is reportedly being charged with felony assault on an officer, a charge that press freedom advocates condemned as an obvious attempt to intimidate reporters. Citing court documents, a local NBC affiliate reported Monday that FOX 7 journalist Carlos Sanchez…
Doctors performing life-saving abortions in Texas may soon need to record if they attempted to transfer the patient to another facility before resorting to terminating a dangerous pregnancy. Some argue that this requirement exceeds the legal scope of the state’s abortion ban and could discourage doctors from performing legal and necessary abortions. “This creates even more uncertainty for doctors…
A photographer with television station KTBC in Austin was thrown to the ground and arrested by Texas Department of Public Safety officers on April 24, 2024, while filming a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Texas. The photographer, who was not named by the station, was charged with criminal trespassing and released the next day.
As seen in video footage taken by the photographer, who was livestreaming the student protest, and in a report by KTBC, the journalist was filming members of law enforcement as they moved back the protest line when he was either pushed or fell into an officer.
The photographer was then pulled backward onto the ground by an officer, who can be heard shouting at him to “Get on the ground,” to which the journalist replied, “I was moving.” He was then placed in handcuffs and escorted to a police car outside the protest zone.
His video camera continued to film the events, as it was picked up and carried by an unidentified person who walked alongside the photographer and the police until the livestream was cut off.
In a video posted on the social platform X by Nabil Remadna, a reporter with Austin station KXAN-TV, the photographer identifies himself only as “Carlos” and says, “They were pushing me and they said I hit an officer. I didn’t hit an officer. They were pushing.” He added, “I told them I was the press.”
This man says he is a member of the press. An officer said his camera hit an officer. The man claims it was not on purpose. @KXAN_News pic.twitter.com/mZUcTSNJuZ
— Nabil Brent Remadna KXAN (@RemadnaKXAN) April 24, 2024
KTBC said the photographer was booked at Travis County jail and charged with criminal trespassing. He was released the following morning, it added.
Nearly 60 people were arrested during the April 24 protest, in which students walked out of classes to demand that the university divest from companies supplying weapons to Israel used in its war in Gaza.
In a statement on X, the Texas Department of Public Safety said it responded to the University of Texas campus in Austin “at the request of the University and at the direction of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, in order to prevent any unlawful assembly and to support UT Police in maintaining the peace by arresting anyone engaging in any sort of criminal activity, including criminal trespass."
The Texas Department of Public Safety and KTBC didn’t respond to requests for additional information about the incident, including the photographer’s full name and details of the charges.
Faculty from universities across the country have begun to mobilize in solidarity with the student movement for Palestine. From NYU, where faculty linked arms to protect students from police; to Columbia University, where faculty engaged in a solidarity walkout with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment; to Barnard College, where faculty planned a sick-out in defense of their students — faculty are…
New York, April 25, 2024 — Texas authorities should immediately drop all charges against a FOX 7 Austin journalist detained while covering a pro-Palestinian protest and take steps to ensure journalists can do their jobs safely and without interference, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.
Law enforcement officers arrested a FOX 7 Austin photographer — identified only by his first name, Carlos — covering a pro-Palestinian protest on the University of Texas at Austin campus on Wednesday alongside more than 30 other people, according to newsreports and the outlet’s coverage.
Footage on social media showed officers pushing the journalist, who was carrying a camera, to the ground. FOX 7 said he was then detained and charged with criminal trespassing.
“We are very concerned by the violent arrest of a FOX 7 Austin journalist who was simply doing his job and covering matters of public interest,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Authorities should immediately drop all charges against the photographer and ensure that law enforcement officers respect journalists and allow them to report safely and without interference.”
CPJ’s email to the Austin police public information office requesting comment did not immediately receive a response.
My wife’s dad is from Grenada, and we visited there last October. It was an incredible place and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but, when I was speaking with one of my father-in-law’s relatives, I unknowingly committed a geo-political faux pas.
It had been a while since I had traveled to a less commercialized destination and, unaware that the relevant categorizations had changed, I said something about being proud of myself because I thought I had gotten too soft to travel in a Third World country. A group of us stayed in a modest seaside villa. The air conditioning was iffy. The water pressure often barely a trickle. My wife and I didn’t have hot water for a week. I bathed in the ocean or the pool. The steering wheel was on the opposite side of the car, and we drove on the opposite side of the patched or crumbling, precipitous roads. And we amateur-Anthony Bourdained our way through practically every meal. We were forced outside our comfort zone, and I found it wonderful, exhilarating and, ultimately, therapeutic.
My father-in-law’s relation listened patiently and then politely corrected me. “The term ‘Third World’ is discouraged, now,” they said. “These days, we say “developing nation.”
I promptly apologized and we continued our conversation. We discussed my travels and many of the developing nations I’d had adventures in over the years. I think they realized I wasn’t the average “Ugly American.”
The term “developing nation” avoids the derogatory connotations of “Third World” nation which, in the last half of the 20th century referred to countries that were economically underdeveloped and had little or no affiliation with major or “First World” powers (i.e., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States, etc.). Many countries formerly dubbed “Third World” nations were also disparagingly deemed “Banana Republics,” which connoted small, poor nations often hamstrung by limited resources and sometimes led by despotic or authoritarian regimes big on corruption and economic exploitation. These countries usually functioned poorly for their general citizenry while disproportionately benefiting a specific “elite” group or class of individuals.
Today, this thought process often comes to mind when Lone Star politicians and pundits try to establish rube cred by threatening to secede from the United States. It simply demonstrates that they don’t know much about most of the rest of the world, much less their own state’s place or perception in the eyes of most of the rest of the world.
These days, America, itself, is hardly impressive or inspiring, specifically because it seems that only Americans are ignorant of their nation’s imperialist agenda. Everyone else knows.
And if so many people are attempting to migrate to the United States it’s not so much that anything is great here—it’s because they, like us, prefer being the boot rather than the ass. The United States bootheel hardly discriminates between the guilty and the innocent in foreign states.
But America as a whole is Camelot compared to Texas.
Texas is unrepentantly Third World and would become Third World on steroids if it seceded. And not because Texas is small, poor, has limited resources or lacks connections with First World powers—it certainly wouldn’t be considered a developing nation. It would be Third World because it’s governed by a rabid, despotic governor and legislature rife with corruption, keen on economic exploitation, and defiantly proud of functioning poorly for its citizenry while disproportionately benefiting a specific “elite” group or gaggle of entitled individuals. So much so that no one even bothers to deny it any more. And, this, trumpeted alongside blatant political chauvinism, gleeful censorship, innumerable challenges to fair representation and frequent, reprehensible threats to freedom of speech, reveals what we really are: ugly.
Ugly Texans.
While we may seem attractive to every Golden State “God and Guns” troglodyte, we are repulsive to decent, fair-minded people all over the world. We seem to aspire to a virulent checklist of vomitous superlatives like most sexist, most racist, most homophobic, most xenophobic, most fascist, most ignorant, and, yes, let’s throw it in—most unAmerican.
This is who we’ve become. These are the “values” our legislature champions.
If the United States was Europe, we’d be the Brexiting British. If the United States was Asia, we wouldn’t be Japan or even China—we’d be North Korea. We’re an international embarrassment full of clueless, separatist blowhards, and the Texas Lege is doing everything it can to ban mirrors.
In late March, Texas joined a 15-state federal lawsuit led by Louisiana to block the Biden administration’s executive order pausing new permits for terminals that export fracked gas, or so-called liquefied natural gas (LNG). Separately, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan created a special committee to investigate President Joe Biden’s permitting freeze, a move that has not only drawn backlash from…
The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) announced on Tuesday that it was firing dozens of people who used to work in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at the university. At least 60 total staff members were laid off — 40 of whom worked in the Division of Campus and Community Engagement, which is closing. In a joint letter, Texas NAACP and the Texas Conference of American…
Lizelle Gonzalez, a Texas woman who self-managed an abortion in 2022, is suing local Starr County prosecutors for more than $1 million in damages for “deprivation of liberty, reputational harm, public humiliation, distress, pain, and suffering.” Gonzalez was arrested and charged with murder after a hospital reported her to the district attorney’s office following her visit seeking medical care…
So, I’m sitting in a Port Lavaca hotel room Thursday evening, March 28, thinking about winding down. It’s been a long drive from Fort Worth and traffic has been a beating. But then I open the roller-shade on the only window in my hotel room and see it.
No, not the ocean—though I can see it, too.
It’s the Shellfish.
And no, not a shellfish. The Shellfish. The Port Lavaca restaurant. It looks closed down and I don’t immediately recall why I know the place.
I’m in Port Lavaca to do some research for a new book. I wouldn’t say it’s been an all-consuming process of late, but spotting the Shellfish sidetracks me.
Then, I remember. I realize where I am.
I’ve written a lot about some pretty dark stuff. Massacres, murders, lynchings, rapes, genocide, ecocide, disappearances, expulsions and cataclysms. It would be unfair to say the stuff doesn’t leave an impression on you or, in this case, me. But if you do it long enough, you can lose track. You care about the victims and the people in the stories, or cases or history you’re researching, but when enough of it piles up in your memory, you can slip.
I slipped.
I got invited to a history festival in Houston that Saturday and decided I’d kill two or three birds with one stone (a horrible metaphor in the end). I book a room at a hotel in Port Lavaca and drive down. I visit the site of old port city of Indianola—the victim of two late 19th century cataclysms. I’m focused on the subject matter at hand and not paying attention to other details. For instance, I didn’t notice that my hotel was located right before the Port Lavaca causeway. And I also didn’t realize my hotel sat between the causeway and the Shellfish.
Forty-three years on the morning of April 1, 1981, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Kathryn Elizabeth Collins disappeared in front of the Shellfish restaurant just off the Port Lavaca causeway. A tire on her brown 1974 Chevy Caprice had gone flat and she was attempting change it, but she had no jack. A couple stopped to help, but they didn’t have a jack, either. So, they left to borrow one. At approximately 8:45 a.m., a tan van pulled up. Multiple witnesses saw the van and a man stepping out and offering to help Kathryn. She apparently joined him for a ride in his vehicle, but the tire on the Caprice didn’t get fixed and Kathryn Collins was never seen or heard from again.
In 2021, I wrote about Collins in Texas Oblivion: Mysterious Disappearances, Escapes and Cover-Ups. I devoted a chapter to her and another young lady who had disappeared in the area just three years before. Kirkus Reviews called the book “authoritative and well-researched,” and Texas Books in Review had high praise for the collection, calling me “A voice for the forgotten.”
All well and good then, but now I don’t feel authoritative or reliably vocal. I feel mute and amnesic. I am embarrassed and a little ashamed.
Sometimes I forget I’m a tourist with a typewriter—sorry, keyboard.
We try to get the stories right. We try to tell the truth. We try to be mindful of the victims and their families, and maybe help them find some closure. Maybe even help them find answers.
But then we’re on to the next story. The next disappearance. The next murder. The next cataclysm.
There are so, so many in Texas. And so many Texans are hurting. But we’re not real keen on remembering, these days. Especially on Opening Day.
While I was staring out my hotel window at the spot where Kathryn Elizabeth Collins disappeared, most folks back home were watching the reigning World Series Champion Texas Rangers (or, down here, Houston Astros) play baseball.
And a week from the anniversary of the day Collins disappeared and was eclipsed in my memory by another story, we’d be witnessing an actual solar eclipse—between meaningless sports spectacles and the reporting of well-meaning, but forgetful journalists.
In late 1984, infamous serial killer Henry Lee Lucas was interviewed regarding a number of cases in Victoria County, Calhoun County and surrounding counties, but the dates he said he was in the area didn’t correspond with Collins’ disappearance. In 1991, investigators looked at serial killer Donald Leroy Evans regarding the incident, but no connection was ever established.
I talked to employees at the hotel where I was staying, and they’d never heard of Kathryn Collins. They had to look it up on their phones. They were surprised. And so were some older locals I visited with at the Calhoun County Museum in Port Lavaca. They didn’t remember the disappearance, either. They had never even heard of it.
It was sad, but my lapse of memory was worse, especially in a year that will later mark the fiftieth anniversary of the disappearance of three girls at a Fort Worth mall. A complete and utter vanishing that, for a while, kept people away from the mall.
I have a daughter about the age Collins was when she went missing. I can’t help but be a little uneasy about her driving alone, especially at night. But Collins was taken in broad daylight. She was 5’ 5”, brown hair, brown eyes and petite. She had a young son and a boyfriend. Her son eventually went to live with her boyfriend’s family.
As another National Women’s History Month passes, I think about all that women have endured in Texas. I marvel at all their incredible contributions, and then I think about how many women I know who are talking about leaving Texas because they don’t feel safe. And I understand.
I am discomfited by the creepy, unconscionable chauvinism that is reemerging in Texas politics, essentially reinforcing the objectification and subjugation of women at the same time.
The Texas Legislature is much scarier than a suspect in a tan van—if he got you pregnant and let you live, the Texas Lege would make you keep the fruit of his brutality. And if you tried to abort it, you could be thrown in jail or sued by Christian activists.
Will the current abortion of female autonomy in Texas be forgotten?
Incarcerated people often must drink unhealthy water, a particularly cruel – but not unusual – form of punishment
Russell Rowe spent almost two and a half years in Washington DC’s central detention facility, where rusty water flowed from taps in sinks that were connected to toilets. He remembers dawdling at the nurse’s station when it was time to take his meds, in hopes she’d give him an extra, tiny “portion” cup of water, the cup that often holds or accompanies pills.
“I was just in a state of constant dehydration,” he said. “My whole body felt different. I just didn’t feel well.”
Last June, a new federal law granted pregnant people across the country additional protections in their workplaces. But as of Wednesday, those protections have now ended for government workers in the state of Texas. A federal judge in Texas ruled last week that the legislation, known as the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, cannot be enforced in the state because it was passed as part of a spending…
Climate experts are warning that the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas panhandle — now the largest in the state’s history with over over 1 million acres burned and counting — provides a horrifying look into a future of runaway temperatures that result in extreme destruction. The fire is currently only 15% contained, but firefighters said Sunday they are hoping an approaching cold front will help…
Joe Biden and Donald Trump both visited the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas on Thursday, where the two leading presidential candidates each pitched anti-immigration measures to further militarize the border and restrict asylum. Meanwhile, a federal judge blocked a new Texas law set to go into effect that would give police the power to arrest migrants they suspect of entering the U.S.
Texas officials recorded the state’s second-largest wildfire in its history on Tuesday and into early Wednesday as several fast-moving blazes formed what one resident called a “ring of fire” around her town in the Panhandle and forced a temporary closure of a nuclear weapons facility. The Texas A&M Forest Service said early Wednesday that the main blaze, dubbed the Smokehouse Creek Fire…
A 25-year-old college senior in Texas was denied emergency surgical care for a non-viable pregnancy — the latest example of medical providers refusing to make exceptions to the state’s total abortion ban out of fear of being criminally prosecuted. Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz told The Washington Post that she was looking forward to the birth of her child when she discovered she was pregnant in January.
Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, has spearheaded a manufactured political crisis over the state of the US-Mexico border for years. Not content to send hundreds of non-consenting migrants to Democrat-run cities by the busload, Abbott’s latest stunts have now brought him into confrontation with the federal government over the border. Jim Hightower and David Griscom return to The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the impact of Abbott’s standoff on border communities and migrants.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us once again, and welcome to another episode of Rise of the Right, and we’re taking ourselves back to Texas, and we made a great journey down there. A lot has come out of that, and Texas is all over the news at the moment. There’s a crisis on the border. In terms, it’s also a battle for the future of this country being played out right now between the border of Mexico and Texas. Immigration has always been a line of confrontation in our country, and with a powerful racist and right-wing power in Texas at this moment, migration across the border has become literally a violent flashpoint. It feels like some of the first volleys of a second civil war being played out right along the border.
There’s a place called Eagle Pass where it is really being played out. Abbott, the Texas governor has mobilized the Texas National Guard, the state police, put razor wire across the border, pushing confrontation with the border patrol and the federal government. It has put immigrants who come across the border, when they get across the border, Abbott and his people put them on buses and send them into cities run by democratic mayors and dump them off literally. We’re going to explore that, what that means, where it may be taking us, and what can be done.
We are joined by, once again, the legendary Jim Hightower, who from 1983 to 1991 was the elected commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture, and he publishes his monthly newsletter, an in-depth investigative reporting called The Hightower Lowdown. Also joining us once again is Dave Griscom, a writer, organizer, wildly known activist, and co-host of the podcast Left Reckoning. So, let me start with you, Jim, and just this… what’s happening at the Eagle Pass, what it sets up, and how dangerous this point is, do you think?
Jim Hightower:
Well, I’ve been to Eagle Pass many times. It’s a very pleasant little town. Maybe 25,000 people, something like that. Pleasant cross-border relationship. The Rio Grande is not really a divisive border. People cross it all the time. They’re intermarried. They play sports on either side of the border, et cetera, et cetera. So the people of Eagle Pass are a little bit PO’d that their town is being trashed as somehow a horrific battleground that’s extraordinarily dangerous. That is not the situation. In fact, the MAGA crowd sent a caravan down a week or so ago to Eagle Pass. It was a part of the Christian Nationalist Movement, and they called it Take Our Border Back, and they were going to have 700,000 truckloads of people come down, and it ended up… They had 20 trucks, not 700,000, and the whole shebang turned out to be a rambling, babbling speech by Sarah Palin, and Ted Nugent played a song, and about 200 people showed up.
I can tell you that you can get a bigger crowd at a children’s greased pig contest at a state fair, at a county fair here in Texas than 200 people, but nonetheless, it’s a big show. So the point is though that they’re trying to create this scene of violence. In fact, some of those 200 who had made the trek several hundred miles to be there were stunned to find that, “Wait a minute. I don’t see any invasion of hordes of murderous people from Mexico, or Latin America, or wherever. It seems pretty peaceful to me,” and it is. Not that it’s not a problem. It is a problem, but the problem is a solvable one if people really want to solve it rather than doing political stunts.
Marc Steiner:
Dave, let me bring you in here. I mean, we want Jim to do a tale on that, but I also have a question for you that… I was just reading a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that had these recordings on a dash cam of interactions between some of the militia leaders, this guy, Michael Meyer, and the Veterans on Patrol, and with some members of the Border Patrol actually sounding like they were coordinating. In the long term, how dangerous is this situation?
David Griscom:
Yeah. I mean, I’ll say, first up, just following what Jim was saying is I feel like a lot of those folks who went down to the border were a little bit disappointed when they showed up. There was very odd videos of those guys driving around in pickup trucks, circling Mexican restaurants while people were having a nice Saturday/Sunday evening. When it comes to lawlessness at the border, the only thing that I could see, really, was, one, the commotion that these guys were creating, and I believe there’s also a bank robbery that weekend, probably, no doubt, due to the fact that all the police were doing traffic duty after dealing with all of these guys coming down on the border. I mean, at the same time, it’s like you don’t want to make too light of this. It’s like these guys are strange and odd, but Greg Abbott and the Republican Party are really creating a dynamic here where people are hearing orders, and they’re responding, right? People are driving down the border and harassing folks. So when you create an environment like that, it doesn’t take too much to light that fuse and seeing something really awful happen.
Marc Steiner:
I’m going to pick up on this for a minute. So, on the one hand, they can seem like a bad Laurel and Hardy movie. On the other hand, I look at this, and that’s why I wanted to parse this through with you all, see what the reality is that it could be a harbinger of some really dangerous things happening. You have Texas, which is a politically divided state that has had this very conservative and now very right-wing government that is taking federal law into their own hands of the border, putting up razor wire, shipping people across the country that do cross the border, and maybe setting up a confrontation with the Border Patrol despite some of the interaction that these statewide militias, these Texas militias have had with the Border Patrol. Let’s talk about this politically. What does it mean? I mean, in some ways… Yeah. Let me just start there, and David, why don’t you jump off on this first, and then Jim jump right back in?
David Griscom:
I mean, politically, I think it’s very clear that Texas… not just Abbott, but many members of the executive branch are really trying to expand the powers of the state of Texas. So you see Greg Abbott in this direct confrontation with the federal government. We’re also watching this with Ken Paxton who was trying to enforce Texas laws regarding abortion and trans healthcare outside of the state, trying to chase down people who might’ve left the state to have a medical procedure done to them. So there is this fundamental question that we’re seeing pop up in the Republican Party here which is a direct confrontation with the federal government.
There’s two things that we have to be able to hold in our heads at once is that there is a very, very dangerous increase in willingness of the Republican Party in the state to start to push those boundaries and ask dangerous questions about the role of the state government versus the federal government while also recognizing that in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott has been having this up and down relationship with his own GOP. The Texas GOP is in the middle of a civil war. We saw that with the very recent impeachments against Ken Paxton. You saw them struggle to do certain red meat policies for the Republican Party like school vouchers.
All at the same time as we saw, as I know you’ve covered and I’ve written a lot about, things like HB 2127 which are direct attempts to strip democracy from the vast majority of Texans. So there’s a dangerous game that’s being played as Abbott particularly, I think, is trying to put on a show for national politics, that that creates really, really dangerous downstream effects for migrants and for everyday Texans. It’s an interesting thing because as I’m saying is Abbott is two things at once. Probably one of the most powerful governors of the state of Texas has seen, and two, somebody who’s also very much struggling to whip his own Republican Party in line, and that creates a very dangerous dynamic of really wanting to do a lot of spectacle to shore up support and project power.
Jim Hightower:
Well, you don’t have to be in who’s who to know what’s what, and what’s what is that Greg Abbott is playing political games. Ken Paxton, our indicted attorney general who is himself under federal investigation, is playing the same game alongside of Abbott. They are [inaudible 00:09:19]. That’s right that they are endangering real people. You mentioned, Marc, that there’s a razor wire stretched across the border. The razor wire is in the river. That means you’re going to get caught in it and get gashed. People are having that experience every single day who are trying to cross, who are fleeing their own horror. This is an abomination. These guys, Abbott, and Paxton, and others who support them politically in the legislature, are just nasty pieces of work.
Woody Guthrie has a song that he wrote that’s not well-known, but it’s a very poignant which is, “I’m mean,” he says, “I’m mean. If I ever did good for somebody, I’m sorry for it. I’m studying to be meaner yet.” Well, that’s Greg Abbott. These people aren’t just… They’re not ideological. They’re not even political. They’re just mean bastards, and that’s what’s at play here. The people who live on the border overwhelmingly oppose this kind of assault. The real invasion, as you indicated, coming to Eagle Pass is from the north, people coming down there armed and driving their pickups or whatever, and full of fury, and thinking that they’re going to war, but they get there, and there’s no people to hate.
That’s really what’s being spread here is an ethic of hatred that has popped up periodically throughout our history along that border. It has never done any good for anybody, including the demagogues who try to make hay out of it. They end up getting caught on their own petard, and I think that’s going to end up being the case here because there’s a logic to what is going on. Also, by the way, there are solutions to this mass movement which I certainly agree is a problem, and not just on our border, but in Chicago, and now in New York City and other cities, Los Angeles where Abbott, and DeSantis, and these political stunt players are sending migrants. I mean, they’re just playing politics with real people’s lives, and there’s going to be a comeuppance on that because believe it or not, even in politics, logic and sanity can ultimately prevail.
Marc Steiner:
I want to come to the solutions as we conclude this because I think it’s important for us to get there because we have to have an understanding of what hope is and organizing how to confront what we’re faced with. But as we’re taping this, just yesterday, Alejandro Mayorkas, who is the Homeland Security Secretary, was impeached in the United States Congress in large part because of the situation, because of what’s happening on the border and what they’re using to get rid of him.
So let’s explore that politically because I mean, this is a… What these militias and these convoys represent is not being larger and deeper that’s infecting the entire body of politics of Texas and the entire country. I don’t think the secretary will be impeached ultimately in the Senate, but that’s a huge move. So it’s drawing this political line that’s also being drawn in Texas. So how do you both see this playing out? I mean, it’s been a long time since a Democrat, let alone, somebody that leans towards the left has been elected in Texas, and it’s a very divided state. So let’s talk a bit about how you both perceive this playing out politically and what it says for the country as a whole. You can start if you want, Jim, and Dave, leap right in.
Jim Hightower:
Well, how it plays out is that this is just political gamesmanship. Lily Tomlin once said, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s hard to keep up.” That’s what’s at work here. The Mayorkas impeachment is a complete fraud. He’s not impeached according to constitutional requirement that he be guilty of some crimes, high crimes and misdemeanors. They didn’t even offer that. They didn’t pretend that. They said, “We disagree with him. Therefore, we are going to impeach him.” They had to have two runs at it to get that done. Even then, they only did it by one vote. So that’s not exactly a firestorm, but I’ll go to my own party, the Democratic Party and say that it has not stood up in the way that it needs to do on the border.
Franklin Roosevelt, when he came into office, got his staff together and said, “Do something. If it works, do it some more. If it doesn’t work, do something else.” That’s what we need. It’s not working, what they’re doing. If I was president, I would mobilize a Border Amigos Corps that would bring lawyers and judges down to clear the caseloads. That’s a huge problem. It’s just taking forever, months for an individual case to proceed. Well, that could be fixed if we just set up quick courts and moved on it, moved thousands of people a day through that system.
Then, I would also have doctors on board, bring in the Doctors Without Borders group that works around the world very effectively to actually take care of people and show that we’re not a country of hatred. We’re not a country just going to exploit very vulnerable migrants, but we’re going to actually at least see that you don’t die on the border, and then bring in family consultants and et cetera, and move it. Bring the force in to clear this up. It is a humanitarian disaster that is taking place, but it doesn’t have to be. It would just say, “All right. We’re going to fix it,” and then do it.
Marc Steiner:
David, let me ask you to jump in here as well. I mean, what Jim is saying, you also have the governor of Texas, Abbott, and others in power, A, saying they’re going to start prosecuting immigrants coming across the border. They could be put in jail for up to 20 years. You have the razor wire put down that Texas did. Texas saying it has the constitutional right to protect its borders, and arrest people, and put the razor wire down. So even though this convoy petered out, this is something bigger than just the convoy. Something is erupting here, and it’s erupting on the right having power in places like Texas and doing the things that I’ve just described they’re doing. A, talk a bit about that, and B, how you fight back.
David Griscom:
Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think that it’s just exceptionally clear that Greg Abbott’s strategy here hasn’t done very much to slow immigration. It’s just on that level, if I was a conservative Republican, that would be something that you could say is that we’re spending a lot of money at the border right now running, effectively, a parallel operation to the federal government, spending a lot of Texas money on this kind of thing. Also, Abbott can go on Fox News and talk about how he’s tough on the border. Right? It’s a waste of our money, it’s extremely dangerous, and it’s also not effective.
Now, I don’t share their goals here, but just saying by their logic, what Abbott is saying he wants to do, it’s not effective. On the larger thing, I think that when it comes to taking this issue on, I love Jim’s idea of having an Amigo Corps going down to the border, and I wish we were seeing more proposals like that coming from the Democratic Party. What’s really frightening to me is that under Joe Biden, despite all of the attacks he’s been getting from the right, Joe Biden has been following similar kind of brutal border politics and even this kind of bipartisan deal that they were pushing.
I mean, of course, the Republicans didn’t go for it, right, because a loser for them. But also, the idea that the Democratic Party is going to beat the Republican Party by being crueler on the border is, one, I think, politically wrong. It’s also morally wrong. We’re going into the same kind of crisis that the Democratic Party in this state has fallen into many times, and the Democratic Party has done… a trap the Democratic Party has fallen into many times on the national level which is, “Oh, we’re going to beat the Republicans at their own game, and we’re going to say, ‘Hey, we’re tougher than the Republicans on immigration.’”
I just think that’s an absolute loser as a political strategy and morally wrong to boot. I think one of the things that just needs to be made exceptionally clear is that you have to have a response to what’s going on at the border, and that doesn’t mean troops. That doesn’t mean being brutal. It means helping people get settled, come into… who are entering into this country, giving them medical care that they need, giving them the ability to get to where they need to go. Remember too that for people who want to see different kind of politics in a different kind of economy in this country, that this immigration stuff, it doesn’t stop at the Texas border.
The fear of getting deported, the fear of having your family get deported, the fear of getting pushed out of your home is something that is utilized all across this country to brutalize folks. As I know y’all cover a lot on The Real News Network, all these horrific stories of children, undocumented children working at places like meatpacking facilities, right? This is used by bosses all across the country to instill fear in people of being deported or being harassed by the government, and we need to come up with a sensible solution so we don’t have an underclass of people in this country, adults and children, working in fear and in under dangerous conditions.
Marc Steiner:
I want to digress on something for just a moment because it’s something you’ve both said which… When you look at the history of immigration in the United States, there’s always been a battle not to allow immigrants in, this movement to say no to other people coming across the border, and it happened to my grandparents who came in from Eastern Europe. I remember my grandfather talking to me about his experience coming into the Port of Baltimore. He didn’t come to Ellis Island. They came to the Port of Baltimore where they had to go through all these inspections, and health checks, and the rest, and he spoke very little English at that time.
As horrendous as that was, what there was was a system that actually worked that allowed people who many Americans did not want to come in the country to come in the country without visas, without passports, coming in, and it became productive citizens of the United States of America. So how do you think that you get to a place where that becomes part of the battle to fight against what’s going on in the border? Before I get to the razor wire, which I’ll get to in a minute, how does that happen? How do people as yourselves and other people, other Texans organize and confront the power that wants to take us back to a very venal place?
Jim Hightower:
Well, one, you come right out and say that again, and again, and again. By the way, that is being said all across Texas and not just in the so-called liberal Centers of Austin, and Houston, and Dallas, and El Paso, but it’s throughout the state that people are fairly commonsensical about it, and they know the absurdity of what the Republicans are doing along with Democrats going along with it and playing right to it. One thing that also needs to be included in this is make the Border Patrol our friends instead of casting them as the enemy, which some of them have been, but instead, let’s put real money in so that we’ve got an adequate border presence, real money into training who they are, and most importantly, give them a positive role to play so that they’re not just people standing there with guns and stretching barbed wire in the river to snag people who are trying to cross for their own humanitarian reasons, but that they become part of the solution.
Then, I would just add one other thing that this is not just on the border. This approach that Abbott and them are taking is, really, they’re trying to replay the Civil War. They want to go back to pre-Civil-War period in which a few elites ran things, and they’re doing that right now with abortion. We’ve passed the most Draconian abortion bill, Abbott and Paxton being leaders in that, in the country. Yeah. Even in cases of rape and incest, you cannot get a legal abortion, and so people are fleeing the state to get the abortions or to get the healthcare that they have to have. So, what have they done? They’ve come up. They’re trying to outlaw the use of public roads, that you cannot drive on the public roads of Texas to go to New Mexico to get the medical services that you need. This is just a level of insanity and the right-wing tyranny that these people represent. So we’ve got to go at the heart of it. Are we going to approach this as human beings of goodwill, or are we going to try to make enemies of everybody that we possibly can?
Marc Steiner:
Dave, you can pick up on that if you would. I think that when you also look at what Jim was just saying and look at in the context of other governors willing to send in National Guard of the militias coming in Texas itself, the razor wire that he will not take down saying, “It’s our right to do so,” it is setting up, in some ways, some kind of civil war scenario in this country with Texas will play a leading role, so it’s something… So pick up what Jim was saying and how you think you organize against that for something different.
David Griscom:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there’s no doubt about it that people are playing with fire. I will say that I had wished that the Biden administration would’ve gotten a little bit more… had a little bit more backbone earlier with this. I mean, people might forget that this has been going on for a while. There’s a million arguments you can make about, for example, putting razor wire in the border. The first challenge being that they didn’t consult the Army Corps of Engineers. I don’t know. It felt a little weak to me. You had Greg Abbott negotiating with governors of Mexico, right? So not only is he trying to do his own border policy, he’s dipping his tone to doing foreign policy. He was doing that last year.
So I wish there had been more fight earlier on, and I think that the Biden administration made a calculation that was wrong that, A, if they just ignore this guy, that this is going to go away. Now, it started to boil, I think, into a dangerous place. Remember too, when it comes to what Abbott is doing, he’s somebody who has made a political career out of operating in the gray space, that kind of gray legal space where the law is interpretable. He did that with Operation Lone Star from the get-go where he was using COVID money to fund that. Despite the fact that he declared the COVID emergency over, he was continuing to declare disaster declarations in the state so that he could reportion money. This is just how he operates, and when you’re watching what he’s doing with the “defying the Supreme Court,” he’s operating from this grade school like, “Oh, well, you didn’t explicitly say that I’m not allowed to do any more of this kind of thing.”
So I think there’s an important thing to remember that this is an extremely dangerous game. Abbott, I think, is trying to operate in that space before it boils over into something that he can’t back down from, but that’s no reason to sit there and let them play this game because, again, it’s extremely dangerous, and it doesn’t take much to push this over the edge. I think when it comes to fighting this, it has to be a political solution, and I think there has to be a lot more courage from people in this state. There’s a lot of people doing great work, and I’m never one of these people to say that that’s not happening, but there needs to just be a way that we talk about the border that I think is a little bit different.
So much of, I think, the Democratic Party in this state and I’d also argue, nationally, especially in places that are run by Republicans, is a point at Republicans and say, “Look how bad they are,” or, “Look how bad they are.” Look, they’re bad, and that works for a lot of folks, but it’s not working enough. One of the biggest victories for the Republican Party, one of the issues that they run on time, and time, and time again is the border. Right? I don’t think that deep in people’s hearts, they want this brutality, but what people will say is something along the lines of like, “Well, at least they’re doing something,” when they’re talking about the GOP. Right?
Look, the Democrats have plans and things like that, but they need to come out there and convince people that there is an actual humane strategy that is deeper than just saying, “Hey, we’re not going to do what the Republicans are doing, that we actually want to do a humane kind of program to help get people set up in this country. We’re not going to have people living in the shadows in this country. We’re not going to have mothers dying crossing over the Rio Grande,” and really be able to hold that space because right now, the Republicans are able to say, “Hey, look. You might not like our techniques, but… It might be a little ugly, but we get things done.” It’s extremely, extremely heartbreaking and dangerous, and it doesn’t have to be this way if I think there was a stronger vision coming from the opposition here.
Jim Hightower:
I’ll just add that there’s a final step in their right-wing nutballism too which is that Texas should secede from the union. So going back to their Civil War mission, but I noticed that Abbott and Paxton are not calling for that because the rest of the country would rise up and applaud the secession of Texas. In fact, I think the greater danger is that the other states will get together and expel Texas from the union.
Marc Steiner:
So when you do have these right-wing militias that are in Texas that are patrolling the border, the razor wire that the federal government has to find a way to have the gumption to tear it out and tear it down, what average response would be? We don’t know, even if the federal government had the guts to do it. So I wonder if you could both paint a picture here of where you think this is going to take us. I mean, Jim, when you were elected Agriculture Commissioner, it was on the cusp of when the right was really pushing power in Texas, and you ran as a very open, progressive populist when you ran in Texas. So talk about, both of you, where you see the political struggle going in Texas at this moment, and what is successful about the rest of the country, and what we may face. You want to start, Jim, since I called your name out? Dave, please close it out for us.
Jim Hightower:
Well, to me, it’s not about what the Republicans are going to do. They’re going to do the same thing they always do and that they are doing now. Rather, it’s where are the Democrats? What are we going to do? Dave is right. You can’t just point and say, “Well, the other guys are so bad.” Truly, they are. They’re worse than bad actually, but nonetheless, that is not a program. A program is saying, “We’re going to put the money, and the effort, and the dignity of the people of America on the line down there on the border, and we’re going to work with the other countries that are causing the influx into our country, and we’re going to come up with a program that will clear the border problem.”
The people who are amassing down there, they don’t want to stay. They don’t want to be there. They want a decent life. Basically, it’s why they’re there, and we should welcome that and make that possible, but only by restoring an order to it. As you indicated, when your parents came across, there was a system, and it worked. We don’t have a system. In fact, we’ve torn down the system, and then we cry, but the system is broken. Well, we broke it. Put it back together.
Marc Steiner:
Dave, I’m curious, where you see this going? I mean, I was thinking about how you see people like Abbott bringing in the National Guard, the militias happening, other right-Wing governors saying, “We’ll bring our National Guard to you to confront the stuff on the border, the razor wire.” I mean, how do you see the future going and how you organize against it for something, for a different vision of where Texas and the nation could be?
David Griscom:
Yeah. I mean, I hate to be pessimistic. I think it’s going to get worse for a little while. I think that what we’ve seen in the response from the Democratic Party in particular makes me very worried about what this is going to look like. I mean, Colin Allred who’s running in the Democratic primary to be the Democratic Senate candidate going up against Cruz basically came out, condemned Biden’s border policies from the right. He’s run up against Roland Gutierrez, but there’s a lot of money behind him, and that to me shows that there still is a pretty large segment or at least power base within the Democratic Party in this state, and I think nationally too, that wants to pursue the strategy of outflanking the Republicans and trying to do some version of a right-wing border policy. I think that’s really scary and dangerous.
How do we fight back against it? I mean, I think at the end of the day, going back to what I’ve been saying is holding on to a vision that is not just morally better, but it’s also mobilizing and motivating for people. South Texas, still very strong Democratic a part of the state, but we’ve been seeing some of those districts… decent amount because of gerrymandering, but also, just because there has been a shift within certain populations of the Hispanic community in South Texas in voting for the Republican Party. You go, and you talk to folks, and you really investigate why. It’s because, for example, that’s a part of the state that has been under-invested in for a really long time in Texas’ history, and it’s been under-invested in on the national level, on the state level, and you have a program like the Border Patrol which can give you a nice job.
We have to be thinking like that to not tie employment or better life for folks to brutalizing people at the border. What we have to be able to do is to think about, “How can we think of programs, for example, that can work to meet this historic need that we’re seeing at the border, this humanitarian need of people coming into this country who need healthcare, care, need abilities to get set up?” Go to where they want to go. Hell, what they’re doing, what DeSantis and Abbott is doing is so disgusting with these buses. Tricking people and sending them into a parking lot in Massachusetts is an evil thing to do, but a very humanitarian thing to do would be somebody comes across the border, you give them medical care that they need. You say, “Hey, where would you like to go?” and you set somebody up in a Massachusetts, or in an Oregon, or wherever it is that they want to go where they can get set up with jobs, employment, and that kind of thing. Right?
That would be a jobs program in the sense of, one, helping out migrants and two, helping out people in those local communities get employment, doing a good thing for society, for the state, and for the country. I think when it comes to what the right wing is promising, the right wing is promising more harassment, more brutality, more violence, and more chaos. What the left should be able to do is say, “Hey, we are pushing for more humanitarianism for a better life for you and people coming into this country, and for a stronger social vision for what life is like in the border communities, or in the entire state of Texas, or the nation.”
You just have to be able to beat them with actual concrete visions of programs and organizations that will help improve their life and improve other people’s lives instead of just saying, “Yeah, these guys are really bad.” You have to be able to promise people something that is going to make their life better. That’s the promise of politics, at least on our side, is that we’re offering people a better life than the one that they have right now. I think that is going to have to be the cornerstone of any kind of political messaging to deal with this.
Marc Steiner:
Well, I want to thank both of you for taking your time. I know you’re busy men, and I do appreciate you taking the time today. Before I let you go, I want to remind our listeners that we will be bringing you… Very shortly, you’ll be hearing them again along with others in our production that we are producing that came out of our journey to Texas to begin to learn more about this story, about what’s happening on the border, and what’s happening in Texas in general, and what it says for the future of the nation. That will be coming up very shortly in the next couple of weeks, and so look for that. I look forward to giving you all that. I want to thank both of you for joining us here today, Jim Hightower and David Griscom. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you both. Thank you for the work you do, and thank you so much for being with us today.
Jim Hightower:
Thank you.
David Griscom:
Yeah. Seriously, thank you.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, thank you to Jim Hightower and David Griscom for joining us today, and we’ll be linking to their work on the site here. Coming up the next couple of weeks, we’ll hear a special report from Texas featuring the people you heard today, other activists who are organizing and taking on the fight for the future. It’s a very critical report, and we look forward to sharing that with you in the coming week. Once again, I want to thank you all for joining us today, and thanks to David Hebden here for running this show and editing this program, and the tireless Kayla Rivera for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.
As I said, we’ll link to the work of Jim Hightower and David Griscom here on our site at The Real News Network, and please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I will write to you right back and create a dialogue. Stay tuned for more conversations about Texas, the rise of the right, and what we can do to secure our future. So, for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, support The Real News, and take care.
As more renters struggle to afford housing, Texas landlords are filing more evictions than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic — and tenants have few, if any, protections to keep them housed. Landlords filed more than 177,000 eviction cases in the Houston, Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth areas in 2023, according to records tracked by Eviction Lab, a research center based at Princeton University…
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Janine Jackson interviewed the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Aron Thorn about the Texas border standoff for the February 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Many see a looming constitutional crisis in Texas, where, as the New York Timesput it, Gov. Greg Abbott has been “testing the legal limits of what a state can do to enforce immigration law,” with things like installing razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande, and physically barring border patrol agents from responding to reports of migrants in distress—in one case, two weeks ago, of a woman and two children who subsequently drowned.
The tone of much corporate news reporting, outside of gleefully racist outlets like Fox, is critical of Texas’ defiance of federal law, but conveys an idea that, yes, there’s a crisis at the border, but this isn’t the way to handle it.
But what if their definition of crisis employs some of the same assumptions and frameworks that drive Abbott’s actions? Precisely how big a leap is it from Biden’s promise that, if he gets a deal for money to Ukraine, he would “shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” to razor wire in the Rio Grande?
Defining a crisis shapes the ideas of appropriate response. So, is there a crisis at the US Southern border, and for whom?
We’re joined now by Aron Thorn. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He joins us now by phone from the Rio Grande Valley. Welcome to CounterSpin, Aron Thorn.
Aron Thorn: Thank you.
JJ: I want to ask about US immigration policy broadly, but all eyes are on Texas now for a reason. And from a distance, it just looks wild. As an attorney, as a Texan, what are the legal stakes that you see here? It feels a little bit like uncharted territory, even if it has historical echoes, but how alarmed should we be, legally, about what’s happening right now?
AT: Yeah, I think that is the billion-dollar question for all of us seeing this issue bubble up from the ground, frankly, as a slow boil from a couple of years ago, when Governor Abbott began to establish the Operation Lone Star program, in which he spent billions of Texas taxpayer money to send troops, and put a ton of resources into this state hardening of the US/Mexico border.
We’ve seen an increasing, frankly, level of aggression of the state, towards not only migrants, who are the ones who are caught in the day-to-day violence of being caught up in the razor wire, being met with officers, things like that. But the aggression from the state to the federal government has increased intensely over the last year or so. It is difficult to say that this constitutional crisis, between what a state and the federal government can do, it’s hard to say that that is overblown.
I would say that Texas is absolutely challenging the limits of federalism, to see just how far it can go. And immigration is a perfect vehicle for this kind of test. How far can I push the federal government to act the way that I want the federal government to, on things like immigration, on any other sort of federal issue where the feds are the ones who are responsible under our system? How far can I go?
Immigration is controversial. It’s very sensitive to a lot of folks. A lot of folks do not know a lot about it, and so the images that come out, as you mentioned, they seem chaotic, but this has ramifications for something much beyond immigration.
So when I think of the constitutional crisis, I think about it in this larger sense of, what does this really mean for federalism in this country, right? If the federal government is not able to stand up and assert its dominion over anything—immigration is just the hot topic now—what does that say for the government of our country? And the next time another state doesn’t like what the United States does on, say, environmental regulations, or other things that are cross-border or national, how far can that state take their agenda?
These are questions baked into our political system, they don’t have any solid answers, and Texas is running into that gap to assert that the state, at the end of the day, can assert itself over the federal government when it wants to.
JJ: So it’s important to stay on top of, but for a lot of folks, it’s just kind of a story in the paper. It’s about feds versus states, and it’s kind of about red states and blue states, and I think it’s a little bit abstract—but it’s not abstract or potential or theoretical. There are communities of human beings, as you’ve pointed out, not just at the border, but elsewhere that are being impacted. And I just wonder, how would you maybe have us redefine the scope of impact, so that folks could understand that we’re not talking about a few border communities?
AT: Yeah, absolutely. I think one angle of this story that we don’t always see, it’s been heartbreaking to see, for example, the state’s rhetoric of “come and cut it,” be very aggressive, “we have a right to defend ourselves,” etc., etc. The, in my opinion, overblown claims about just how many cartel members are among people, just how many drugs they’re finding on people, for example.
The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection, they’re in need of safety, they’re in need of stability. That is the very vast majority of people.
And so something that does not often show up in these stories that is particularly pertinent right now is, let’s be clear, Texas is fighting for its right to lay concertina wire so that people can get caught in it for hours, and get injured and languish there as punishment for trying to seek safety.
And what they want to do is push people back into Mexico where they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, worse, as punishment for wanting to seek safety. That is what Texas is asserting its right to do. That’s what the Trump administration’s primary goal was on the US/Mexico border. That’s what Greg Abbott’s primary goal is at the US/Mexico border. And we don’t talk about that, as a country, of what that actually looks like every day, what that looks like on the ground.
What we talk about are US communities, we talk about people “taking our jobs,” we talk about the fentanyl that’s coming in—all real issues that are not touched, not controlled, by people who are desperate and are trying to seek safety. So to me, that is one of the biggest holes that I always see in these stories, that we don’t really take: our right to defend our border, but from what?
As a Texan, I don’t think what Texas is doing on the border day-to-day will actually improve the lives of Texans. We are spending billions of dollars of our own tax money for this political ploy that we are improving the lives of Texans, while we are stripping Texans off of Medicaid faster than any other state in the country. Texans are very strapped in an economy where inflation is still an issue, and nothing that we’re doing at our border is going to affect that.
So we don’t talk about where the rubber meets the road for basically anybody in this story. It’s just simply in the political cacophony.
JJ: When you were on ABCNews in December, talking about SB4, which you can talk about, the setup talked about a “tidal wave” of people coming over the southern border—let’s be clear, we’re talking about the southern border, right—the strain on US resources being “unprecedented,” and all of these people were crossing the border “illegally.” And that was the intro for you. And in media, generally, migration itself is sort of pre-framed as a problem, as a crisis; but we haven’t always seen it that way, and we don’t have to see it that way, do we? We kind of need a paradigm shift, it seems like here.
AT: I think you’re absolutely right, and one thing that I sometimes will tell people is, take a step back and really think about it. Migration is one of the most constant things in the entirety of human existence. This is one of the most fundamentally human things that someone can do. If you are suffering in one place for whatever reason, X number of reasons, throughout literal human history, you migrate to a place where you will do better.
Aron Thorn: “We will continue down this really ugly road of, how violent are we willing to get with people? That’s the question we’re at in 2024.” (image: ABC News)
Let’s not let the federal government get off the hook. The idea that you can law-enforce your way out of human instinct and human behavior is absurd, and it’s been very present in, obviously, Texas, but the federal government’s policies on the US/Mexico border, for at least 30 years, since at least the early ’90s. This idea that there is such a strain on resources, but yet we have a blank check for enforcement-only policies, that if we are just a little more violent and a little more aggressive towards people trying to come in to get more stability in their lives, then we can prevent something that is a fundamentally human behavior, is absurd.
And we need to have more of a discussion about why we’re sitting here, 30 years later, and we’re at a point where if we lay a hundred more yards of concertina wire, and we cut up a few more women and children, they will stop coming. That is the argument we’re having now, and it’s absurd.
So I absolutely agree that without this paradigm shift of: what are we doing? we will continue down this really ugly road of, how violent are we willing to get with people? That’s the question we’re at in 2024.
JJ: Yeah, I harbor hatred for corporate media for many reasons, but one of them is this PBS NewsHour, real politic for the smart people, that I saw recently, which basically said, calm down, Biden is just “seeking to disarm criticism of his handling of migration at the border as immigration becomes an increasing matter of concern to Americans in the lead up to the presidential election.”
So we’re supposed to just think of it as part of a chess game, and I guess ignore the actual human impact of what these moves are going to be. But I just really resent this media coverage that says, “This is just shadows on the cave wall; it’s really about the election, you don’t really need to worry about it.” I just wonder what you would like to see news media, well, I guess I’m saying do less of, but what could they do more of that would move this issue forward in a humane way?
AT: Yeah, I mean, hearkening back to the last question about a paradigm shift, I think as somebody who has done this work on the ground for many years, started doing this in the middle of the Trump administration, now has seen this through the Biden administration, something that we often remark to each other on the ground is that so much of the Biden administration’s policies have the exact same effect as what the Trump administration was doing, just in a less visceral way.
And so when that is raised to folks—he’s having the same exact effect on the daily lives of migrants—people who would be outraged and out in the streets to protest against Donald Trump, look at the Biden administration having the exact same effect, saying, “Well, he’s trying his best.”
So the idea that it still boils down to the politics of it all: “I just don’t like this person who’s in office, and so anything that he does, if he breathes wrong, I’m going to criticize him,” but yet somebody who has the same effect… It really brings to bear how many folks in this country, this is a theoretical issue for them. When the rubber meets the road, we don’t have a great track record of being truly empathetic and truly smart on migration. “It’s a political football in the right hands, and so I’m going to just agree with whatever the administration does, and I’m certainly not going to critique him,” is not the way that we really get to actual solutions on immigration in this country.
JJ: Are there any policies that are in the works, or about to be in the works? Is there anything that folks can be pulling for, either in Texas or nationally?
AT: That is also a really complicated answer. But one thing I will say, I always raise for folks to think about the guest worker program in this country, and it’s complicated to say in a soundbite type of answer, because labor has its own issues, right? Labor is very exploited in the United States, and so sometimes I don’t want to have this discussion about bringing migrants here just to be exploited by abusive employers, right? That’s not the answer.
However, it is true that economics is one of the biggest drivers of migration trends over the last couple of centuries that we can see, right? Bad economies in other parts of the world encourage people to migrate to the US, and a bad economy in the US actually encourages people to go home. The numbers are there.
And so that is actually true, that a lot of people are coming to seek stability in their lives, or in the lives of people who are still at home. And yet the United States has done everything in its power to either gum up the works of its guest worker program—slashing visas, making things more difficult for whatever reasons—and we are still sitting here with the reality that a significant slice of people would love to come to the United States, make money and go home.
To me, that seems like a no-brainer that both parties could get behind, of “let’s confront that reality,” and if we do not want to absorb these people into our society, let’s allow people to come in, benefit us, benefit themselves, and then return.
There is a significant slice of people who would like to do that, and we do have a guest worker visa program, but every year we make it more difficult, or we don’t want to expand it. An expanded guest worker program, I think, is a step in the right direction, if we don’t want so many people showing up at the US/Mexico border saying, “OK, I have no other viable options. Let me take the way that I need to to protect myself and my family.”
JJ: Ari Paul wrote for FAIR.org recently about how news media—he was writing about the New York Times, but they weren’t alone—make this fake consensus. They had a front-page piece that said, “Biden Faces Pressure on Immigration, and Not Just From Republicans.” And it was the idea that even Democratic mayors and leaders are agreeing: Too many South Americans are trying to get into this land of milk and honey. And what that reporting involves is manipulating statements of local officials who are saying, “We want to welcome immigrants, but we don’t have the resources,” and turning that into, “Nobody wants immigrants in their community.”
And I guess my big beef, among others, with that is that media do us a disservice, confusing people about what we believe and what we are capable of and what we really think. And it just kind of breaks my heart, because it tells people their neighbors think differently than they do. It misleads us about public opinion about the welcoming of immigrants.
And I guess I should have put a question on that, but I can’t think of one, except to say that when communities say, “We need more resources to address this,” that is not the same as them saying, “Migrants out.”
AT: Having worked in immigration now for many years, immigration is such a difficult topic, because underneath the banner of immigration are so many other debates, about US society and culture and race, class, our place in the world, right, foreign policy—the list goes on and on and on. Immigration hits on so many of those realities.
And it hearkens back to, many other different types of groups of folks can tell you about—people of color, for example—having white colleagues who say prejudiced things until they know a person of color, or they say xenophobic things until they know an immigrant.
And I think that this is so deeply challenging because people are stepping to this without having any actual access, easy access, to folks who have gone through this process, and specifically on class, and also on the way that the United States government works, right? I don’t know the exact figure, but DHS’s budget is colossal, and Texas is spending billions of dollars with its own money.
And so everybody’s stepping to this debate of whether this person should “have not broken the law.” But we have gotten to this place by spending all of this money we could use welcoming people, putting welcoming infrastructure in place, we’re using it on enforcement. No wonder we don’t have any money to welcome people into our communities, and that’s frustrating and hurtful to you. And then also you’re stepping with all of these biases, because that’s a real challenge we have in our society.
Yeah, no wonder, it’s very easy to point fingers at that person. It is the culmination of all of these other real societal ills that we grapple with every single day. No other issue hits on so many at the same time.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Aron Thorn; he’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program at the Texas Civil Rights Project. Aron Thorn, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Eagle Pass, Texas—Residents of the border town at the center of an ongoing feud between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Biden administration made it clear over the weekend that the only people they see as “invaders” in their community are the 14 Republican governors and a convoy of Christian nationalists calling themselves “God’s Army.” “There has been an invasion, but I’m not talking about the…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is suing five cities in the state to block recently passed ordinances that decriminalize the possession of cannabis. Voters in Austin, San Marcos, Killeen, Elgin and Denton approved similar ballot measures in the 2022 election cycle that end arrests for low-level marijuana-based crimes and eliminate citations for possession of less than four ounces of cannabis.
This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court ruled that federal agents can remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along parts of the US/Mexico border. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Elite news media, for their part, suggest we seek a hallowed middle ground between those two worldviews.
Corporate media are filled with debate about the best way to handle the “border crisis.” But what if there isn’t a border crisis so much as an absence of historical understanding, of empathy, of community resourcing, and of critical challenge to media and political narratives—including that reflected in President Joe Biden’s call to allow access for “those who deserve to be here”?
Flanked by several dozen uniformed members of Florida’s State Guard and standing behind a podium displaying the words “Stop the Invasion,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday announced a plan to send the civilian force and other resources to Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration has been embroiled in a standoff with the White House over the U.S-Mexico border. DeSantis said the State…
Toxic pollution from the petrochemical industry along the Houston Ship Channel in Texas is causing “devastating harms” to local communities, according to a new report by international human rights advocacy group Amnesty International. The report underscores the climate, environmental, and human rights tolls linked to petrochemical production, adding to the ongoing controversy surrounding the…
The United States is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, one that enlivens the nationalist fervor of Trump America and that centers on a violent, racist closed-border policy.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (NBC, 1/14/24): “The only thing we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
In January, the Supreme Court, with a five-vote majority that included both Republican and Democratic appointees, ruled that federal agents can “remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along some sections of the US/Mexico border” to make immigration more dangerous (CBS, 1/23/24). The state’s extreme border policy is not merely immoral as an idea, but has proven to be deadly and torturous in practice (USA Today, 8/3/23; NBC, 1/14/24; Texas Observer, 1/17/24).
In a statement (1/22/24), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton decried the decision, saying that it “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Paxton, a Republican, vowed that the “fight is not over, and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, “is doubling down, blocking the agents from entering the area,” the PBS NewsHour (1/25/24) reported. PBS quoted Abbott declaring that the state’s constitutional authority is “the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”
‘Dangerous misreading’
University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck (Houston Chronicle, 1/26/24) observed that Abbott’s position “has eerie parallels to arguments advanced by Southerners during the Antebellum era.”
For a great many people, a Southern state invoking its “sovereignty” over the federal government in defense of violent and inhumane policing of non-white people sounds eerily familiar to the foundation of the nation’s first civil war. And 25 other states are supporting Texas in defying the Supreme Court (USA Today, 1/26/24), although none of them are states that border Mexico.
Texas media are sounding the alarm about this conflict. The Texas Tribune (1/25/24):
From the Texas House to former President Donald Trump, Republicans across the country are rallying behind Gov. Greg Abbott’s legal standoff with the federal government at the southern border, intensifying concerns about a constitutional crisis amid an ongoing dispute with the Biden administration.
Houston public media KUHF (1/24/24) said this “could be the beginning of a constitutional crisis.” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle (1/26/24) that Abbott’s position is a “dangerous misreading” of the Constitution.
Other legal scholars are watching with concern. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, told FAIR, “I think that this is reminiscent of Southern governors disobeying the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions.” He added, “I agree that it is a constitutional crisis in the sense that this is a challenge to a basic element of the Constitution: the supremacy of federal law over state law.”
But the New York Times has not covered the issue since the Supreme Court decision came down (1/21/24). The AP (1/27/24) framed the story around Donald Trump, saying the former president “lavished praise” on the governor “for not allowing the Biden administration entry to remove razor wire in a popular corridor for migrants illegally entering the US.” The Washington Post (1/26/24) did show right-wing politicians and pundits were using the standoff to grandstand about a new civil war. NPR (1/22/24) covered the Supreme Court case, but has fallen behind on the aftermath.
‘MVP of border hawks’
The “legal expert” quoted in Fox News‘ headline (1/25/24) works for America First Legal, a group founded by white nationalist Stephen Miller to “oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.”
Meanwhile, Fox News (1/25/24, 1/25/24, 1/27/24) has given Texas extensive and favorable coverage of its feud with the White House, citing its own legal sources (from America First Legal and the Edwin Meese III Center—1/25/24) saying that Texas was in the right and the high court was in the wrong.
Breitbart celebrated Abbott’s defiance as a states’ rights revolution, with a series of articles labeled “border showdown” (1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/25/24, 1/28/24) and several others about Republican governors standing with Texas in solidarity (1/26/24, 1/28/24).
The white nationalist publication American Renaissance (1/25/24) stood with Abbott but lowered the temperature, saying that it is “unclear whether this could cause a constitutional crisis, but the optics are not great for the White House in an election year.” “This will not be a ‘Civil War’ or anything close to it unless someone on the ground wildly miscalculates by firing on the Texas National Guard,” the openly racist outlet asserted. Rather, the publication saw Abbott as recentering the immigration debate as a way to weaken President Joe Biden’s reelection chances. “We couldn’t hope for a better start to the election-year campaign,” it said.
The National Review (1/28/24) admitted that Abbott is probably wrong on the constitutional question. Nevertheless, it called him the “MVP of border hawks” for orchestrating a public relations coup by forcing the federal government’s hand:
Abbott has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a controversy—with its fraught legal and constitutional implications—that will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical importance.
This is impressive by any measure.
The support of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal government.
Underplayed significance
Donald Trump defended his use of the Hitlerian formulation “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation,” saying, “He didn’t say it the way I said it” (NBC, 12/22/23).
As noted, AP and the Washington Post haven’t completely ignored the story—although the Times, as of this writing, has more or less looked the other way. But as the right celebrates Abbott’s defiance and legal scholars worry about a constitutional crisis, the two big papers and the major wire service have clearly underplayed the standoff’s significance.
Given that former President Donald Trump is now the likely Republican presidential nominee, with his neo-fascist ideas (ABC, 12/20/23; NBC, 12/22/23) about immigration the centerpiece of his campaign, one would think centrist news outlets would give this story more attention.
Even if American Renaissance and the National Review are right that this standoff is more rhetorical than a pre-staging of the next civil war, given that nearly half the states are backing a state’s defiance of the Supreme Court in an election, the major news outlets should be a part of that conversation.
