I heard the author of this piece (posted below), Christy Thornton, on Democracy Now today. She presents an original and incisive analysis, both in her essay and in the Democracy Now interview…   For so long, I have cringed at the coverage of Mexico’s human rights catastrophe presented as a drug war telenovela. So much popular journalism presents this disaster that has cost the lives of at least 300,000 people, as a series of gory and funny anecdotes that depict the violence in Mexico as the product of “kingpins” and their entitled “juniors” who behave as evil clowns and spoiled rich kids.  This story should not be about the perpetrators, but about the hundreds of thousands of victims who are criminalized at the moment of their deaths. A lot of the mainstream coverage of these tales gets converted into the fictions of novels, movies, TV series’  that now @realdonaldtrump spews back at us as his warped reality…  https://www.vox.com/2019/1/27/18198729/women-duct-tape-trump-truck-border And: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/17/trumps-stories-taped-up-women-smuggled-into-us-are-divorced-reality-experts-say/?utm_term=.ee992d8b604d

As I’ve recommended here before, see the daily coverage by Keegan Hamilton at VICE NEWS, @keeganhamilton on twitter.  Also Alan Feuer of the New York Times @alanfeuer  and pieces in The Guardian by Ed Vulliamy, most recently: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/02/el-chapo-trial-revealed-betrayal-torture-bribe

Over the first three days of February there were 15 homicides in Juarez.  Added to the total for January of 108, there have now been 123 people murdered in the city in 2019. The dead include 4 bodies exhumed from a clandestine burial on Saturday along the Casa Grandes highway during a police search of the desert area. molly molloy

https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN1PS0MJ

Are there any proposals in Congress to reform the excessive cruelty of immigration detention in the USA?  This is not new.  My own experience with these systems goes back to the mid-1980s and Oakdale Federal Detention Center in Louisiana … We must reiterate whenever we can:  the vast majority of immigration detainees have committed NO CRIME. Many long-term (two years or more) detainees have presented themselves at ports of entry and asked for asylum (a right under US and international law), so they are not even guilty of entering the US illegally. So, this cruel treatment of prolonged detention, solitary confinement, and the attempt by detainees to resist by refusing food, and then to be subjected to force-feeding…an action that has been equated to torture at Guantanamo and other sites associated with the “war on terror…”  People who are refugees are now experiencing this torture at immigration detention centers… right here in our communities.  And the congressional bargaining over border security is most certainly going to consider adding thousands more “detention beds” … perhaps as some sort of exchange for less “wall…”  This is not a legitimate bargain. The privately-run, tax-payer funded, cruel and unusual detention of people seeking asylum in the US should never be expanded and it needs to be abolished.

The Washington Post reports today that the Department of Homeland Security is preparing to implement its “Remain in Mexico” (or, as officially known by its Orwellian name, Migrant Protection Protocols) at the El Paso/Juárez border crossing. Under this policy now in effect at the San Diego/San Ysidro border crossing, people who have passed a credible fear interview are being returned to violent border cities to wait indefinitely for a hearing in immigration court in the United States, with no procedures in place for how asylum seekers will meet with U.S. immigration lawyers, or how they will survive in a dangerous foreign country where human traffickers and violent gangs flourish on extortion, kidnapping, and street-level drug dealing.

There were 109 homicides in Juárez in January 2019, according to the statistics compiled by the Fiscalia of the state of Chihuahua for the Northern Zone. In January 2018, there were 70 homicides, so this is a 55.7 percent increase from the beginning of last year.  Last month, December 2018, ended with 100 homicides.