Sinking to the Bottom: As summer temperatures rise, so do the GOP’s dehumanizing policies and rhetoric, by Melissa Del Bosque

Oh, dear God. This piece made me shudder. So macabre.

I can't get the margins of this piece to work. However, it's just too important not to share. We should all be horrified by what Gov. Abbott and his team are devising to supposedly "deter" migrants from getting into the U.S. It's not like we haven't already had an array of deterrence policies and mechanisms. Melissa Del Bosque is right in saying that the floating buoy barriers are only going to mean more deaths of migrants this summer. South Texas is already a massive graveyard. Del Bosque's gripping quote should cause us some consternation:

"As Todd recently wrote in his poignant piece about this deadly strategy, 'On the cusp of summer, we can predict like clockwork that hundreds of otherwise healthy people will be dead by summer’s end. It has an aura of premeditated murder.'"

The outcome is predictable. And I agree with Del Bosque that these floating buoy barriers are totally fascist and grossly inhumane. Glad that she calls out the harmful effects of the right-wing misinformation campaign that makes people feel that we are being invaded when we're not. 

In the meantime, mainstream media parrots the "crisis narrative," when the reality is that we've always taken in migrants from many countries that seek nothing more than to work and make a better life. Yes, many of them are desperate, but they're human beings, no less, doing what any of us would do were we equally desperate. And now, many will senselessly lose their lives by Summer's end. 

Will the media then cover this foreseeable socially engineered human tragedy? I fear not. That would shift the narrative away from the crisis narrative that is intended to stoke fear. 

Human rights organizations must absolutely get involved.

-Angela Valenzuela

Sinking to the Bottom

As summer temperatures rise, so do the GOP’s dehumanizing policies and rhetoric

MELISSA DEL BOSQUE  | Border Chronicles June 13, 2023 Photo Credit: Governor's Office Both parties have doubled down on inhumane border policies, but it’s the GOP that is taking it to new depths in its race to the bottom over who can be more deliberately cruel. It’s like some kind of grotesque Last Supper: In a publicity photo from last week’s press conference, Texas governor Greg Abbott is seated at the center of a long table surrounded by grim-faced White men, most of them elderly, in various postures of mental agita. Next to them is a large illustration on an easel board titled “Live Test of Attempt to Breach.” It shows a man with an inner tube (presumably an asylum seeker) clinging to a floating red buoy. Hundreds of these buoys Abbott announced, will be deployed on the Rio Grande near the town of Eagle Pass. The barrier will be 1,000 feet long, and its netting will extend underwater, catching anyone who tries to swim under it. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt,” said Steve McCraw, head of Texas’s Department of Public Safety, at the June 9 press conference. “We want to prevent people from drowning.” The floating buoy barrier will persuade people not to cross, he said. “This is to deter them from even coming in the water.” Photo credit: Getty But we already know this isn’t true. Both McCraw and Abbott were parroting the same strategy, known as “prevention through deterrence,” introduced in the mid-1990s during the Clinton administration. It has turned our southern border into a graveyard. After nearly three decades of militarized border buildup that has pushed people into increasingly deadly terrain like the Sonoran Desert, people haven’t stopped coming. But thousands of them have died. As Todd recently wrote in his poignant piece about this deadly strategy, “On the cusp of summer, we can predict like clockwork that hundreds of otherwise healthy people will be dead by summer’s end. It has an aura of premeditated murder.” These floating barriers, which, according to the manufacturer’s website, can also be reinforced with spikes, will only contribute to an already-skyrocketing death count. Abbott’s latest announcement has already spurred many human rights organizations to sound a warning. Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent and now border human rights activist, along with fellow Texas-based activist Marianna Treviño Wright, released a bilingual video warning migrants of the deadly new policy. All-in on Fascism Abbott has long toyed with the idea of running for president. While it increasingly looks less likely that he will, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has already joined the fray. And he’s all-in on fascism. When he’s not treating fellow human beings like FedEx packages, he’s modeling himself after Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian leader, and darling of the CPAC circuit. Last week DeSantis released “B-roll” of Florida state troopers surveying the Texas-Mexico border as they participate in Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. I suspect they didn’t include any audio in the B-roll because it would humanize the children and adults waving to the troopers from the Mexican side of the river, detracting from DeSantis’s threatening narrative of an invading army. DeSantis campaign video begins with a Texas DPS officer, who sports an official DPS seal on his tactical face covering, unlocking a tiny metal door surrounded by razor wire. This is next-level border security theater, as comical as it is utterly surreal and tragic. Several other Republican-led states are also, once again, sending troopers and National Guard soldiers to the Texas border—as they did before the 2022 midterm—to wage war against the Biden White House before the election. Unfortunately, it’s border communities and migrants who are caught in the crossfire. For many years, I’ve documented border theater as it has ebbed and flowed depending on the political tide. But as I’ve been documenting in The Border Chronicle, we’ve reached an altogether different and deadly era of disinformation, with the GOP parroting invasion and great replacement rhetoric, and increasingly dehumanizing people, spurring mass shootings and political violence. This behavior is championed by a growing right-wing media ecosystem which in turn promotes more anti-democratic and extremist behavior. I spoke with Sergio Muñoz, vice president of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit that has tracked conservative media for nearly two decades. I quoted Muñoz in a recent article, and wanted to include my full Q&A with him here. As Muñoz warns, the U.S. is in a “dangerous moment” as it approaches the 2024 presidential election. All the misinformation and xenophobic rhetoric around immigration and the border creates this cloud of confusion for Americans, making it difficult to understand what’s really happening. I suppose that is intentional. Yes, anytime a policy is proposed that is remotely humane to migrants, right-wing media, in collaboration with Republican politicians, will fearmonger about worst-case scenarios to reinforce their antipathy to immigration in general. And what we’re seeing now are Republican politicians pulling media stunts, whether it’s flying folks out to Martha’s Vineyard or busing people to so-called sanctuary cities. You have Republican politicians who are finding there is no consequence for them to enact outrageous policies of dubious legality toward human beings. There is no consequence for them, because they are not held accountable, politically, and they have a platform in right-wing media that will justify and champion it. Mainstream media, its hands are not clean in this either. Although they might not be championing these political stunts like right-wing media, they adopt the crisis language, which sends a message that something dangerous is going on at the border, something new and dire, when this country has always been a country that receives migrants and immigrants. But the difference now is the xenophobia is really amplified by a very coordinated right-wing media ecosystem, which is in a symbiotic relationship with Republican politicians who are using this successfully for political ends. It seems that much of the toxic, xenophobic content is coming out of Texas and Florida. Yes, both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis are right-wing media darlings. The Trump administration, obviously, really opened the door for politicians to behave in this way. His administration was unapologetically white supremacist in its actions and rhetoric. There were people working throughout the administration, appointees of the former president, such as Stephen Miller, who had explicit ties to white supremacy. The Republican Party, in lockstep with right-wing media, has basically accepted that there is no punishment for them politically, or financially, for this sort of racist, xenophobic rhetoric, which they’re not only repeating on the airwaves but also trying to implement into policy. I mean, Governor Abbott certainly is not apologetic about what he’s trying to do, nor is DeSantis. They’re treating immigrants and migrants as political pawns, and they couldn’t care less about their well-being or safety. What kind of impact do their actions and rhetoric have on border communities? Does it spur real-world violence? Yes, and not just in border communities. If you tell enough people through a coordinated and very effective megaphone that there is an invasion of savage hordes coming to not only take your job but take your life in a country that already has far too many guns, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when some react with violence. They are acting out of the poisonous misinformation that has been fed to them. There’s a direct line you can draw between this sort of rhetoric toward not only individual instances of violence and killings, but also mass shootings. What role does social media play in spreading this type of dangerous rhetoric? A part of it is that our news diet is fractured and has been decentralized in many ways through the rise of social media. But at this point, you won’t only find this poison online and in social media. It is on cable networks, radio stations, and in major news publications. It’s everywhere. And it’s extremely dangerous for immigrants and for this country as a multicultural, multiracial democracy. We’re echoing some of the darkest periods of this country in terms of how we treat people arriving at our borders. What can media outlets do to push back against the “chaos” and “invasion” narratives? The most important thing is not to echo it. This language that there’s a crisis or surge, that sort of terminology that has been captured by right-wing media’s use of it along with the invasion narratives. Mainstream media must be extremely careful about not just borrowing this rhetoric and talking points that right-wing media have constructed an entire fearsome narrative around. I think mainstream media has an obligation to provide more context and to not be pulled into this sort of political framework that right-wing media has so carefully created. That’s the first step. The second step is that, you know, sometimes, news isn’t really news. Mainstream media has been focusing on these stunts of Abbott’s and DeSantis’s flying or busing migrants across the country into places that aren’t well equipped to handle them. These are press stunts. It would be more interesting news if they were implementing some policy with a goal of dealing with the increased migration patterns. But they’re not. They’re just trying to create a press stunt, which will feed their overall xenophobic plans, which are purposely constructed to further their political careers. This is the same problem the press has with Trump, right? How to cover him, because his entire being is spectacle. The media still hasn’t come to terms with it. I think you’re right. And that really doesn’t bode well for the presidential campaign season. And a lot of the worst actors of this phenomenon that you’re describing have already declared [like DeSantis] that they’re running or are positioning themselves to run. There is, unfortunately, an incentive for them to race to the bottom in terms of this vile approach to immigration. And they’re arguably making things worse, both by virtue of how they’re treating migrants and how they’re ignoring the overall context and causes of migration. Instead of coming up with plausible solutions, they’re in a race to the bottom seeking political currency.