A dispatch from Ajo, Arizona — an unincorporated community w/ no hospital, no local government, in the heart of the desert — where the Border Patrol is dropping asylum seekers and volunteers are struggling to respond.
Today's piece looks at how the releases are unfolding on the ground.
On the one hand, humanitarian aid volunteers are holding it together — providing new arrivals with covid testing and transportation.
On the other, everyone involved agrees that this is an untenable situation.
The mayor of Yuma said his city has received "well over 2,000" asylum-seekers since February. When Trump did these releases in the city in 2019 he declared a state of emergency.
Biden is effectively doing the same thing but in even smaller communities with fewer resources.
Volunteers in Ajo have encountered cases of family separations in their processing, a reflection of the chaotic and often confusing way the public health law known as Title 42 is playing out on the border.
"It's always excused with paperwork," one veteran volunteer told us.
We witnessed these problems firsthand when a group of asylum seeking families were dropped in Ajo with none of the materials they needed to prove they were authorized to be in the US — Border Patrol agents evidently forgot.
The official sent to deliver the missing documents wore a pendant bearing a symbol sometimes appropriated by white supremacists, a shirt that read "100% Bacon" and no mask.
He mixed up which kids belonged to which parents and indicated that he didn't understand their Spanish.
The shift in CBP's posture in Ajo is particularly ironic. This is the same community where BP and the Trump administration directed its multi-year crackdown on humanitarian aid providers.
Today, the same agency is turning to that same network to provide aid to asylum-seekers.
There's an audio version of this story on today's episode of @intercepted — check it out. This piece is part of a broader package of reporting currently in the works, so stay tuned for more.
Good to see the paper of record highlighting this important national news story that we’ve been covering at @theintercept for the past eight months.
Going to provide some links and info for those who might be interested in reading more on the topic. nytimes.com/2021/01/30/us/…
In June, a trove of hacked law enforcement documents was posted online. I went through hundreds of those files to look at how law enforcement was treating antifa/anarchists vs groups on the far right.
Part of the reason I did this was because we had already published reporting showing that the NYPD was using a curfew in response to the George Floyd protests to hand over demonstrators to the FBI for questioning. Antifa was a subject of the interviews.
There is a substantial migration from Parler to Telegram underway right now and paramilitary far-right accelerationists are attempting to capitalize on the moment to radicalize what they consider “normie” Trump supporters — here’s what we know so far theintercept.com/2021/01/12/boo…
A “Parler life boat” channel is fast approaching 16,000 subscribers and as researcher @MeganSquire0 has noted, a Proud Boys channel attracted nearly 6,000 users in four hours over the weekend — Telegram says more than 25 million people have joined the app in the past 72 hours
According extremism expert @AlexBNewhouse, the most active channel in the so-called “Terrorgram” network right now — and the one talking most explicitly about violence in the days ahead — is “Boogaloo Intel Drop,” which has nearly 7,000 subscribers.
NEW: an analysis of hundreds of leaked documents reveals that while the president and the attorney general clamored for a crackdown on antifa, law enforcement was sharing detailed reports of threats from far-right extremists to protesters and cops theintercept.com/2020/07/15/geo…
These materials are part of an enormous trove of documents that were recently hacked and posted online.
At first glance, you might say that the fact that the most credible threat to human life during the recent protests was coming from the far-right is not surprising — of course that was the case.
That's true but there are other issues here worth noting.
Just had a conversation with a young guy in Crown Heights about the fireworks situation in Brooklyn that might be helpful to folks trying to understand what’s happening — the source is a lifelong resident whose block has been featured in at least one viral fireworks video.
The supply chain is pretty simple. There’s a widespread understanding that you can buy fireworks on the cheap right now from neighboring states, so folks are carpooling to those states to make those purchases, coming back and selling fireworks at higher prices.
Some of the fireworks are being set off by competing groups of young people from different blocks and areas — there are battles. In addition to fireworks, young people are also attacking their rivals with squirt guns. It’s summertime in Brooklyn. People are trying to have fun.
Happening now: following NYC officials @bradlander, @JumaaneWilliams and @KeithPowersNYC as they attempt to access holding cells in Manhattan — legal advocates say many of 2,500 people arrested in the last week are disappearing in a system rife with unsafe conditions
.@bradlander is knocking on the backdoor here at 100 Centre Street — no answer. Officials are invoking a city charter that empowers them to inspect jail cells
Officials at the front of the building told lawmakers to try the back, officials at the back told them to go to the front.
@JumaaneWilliams gave the NYPD commissioner advance notice that they would be conducting this inspection.
The NYC curfew is not about public safety — it is a pretext for police to arrest people when they otherwise would have no justification to do so.
Some of those people are now being handed off to FBI agents for interrogations about their political views. theintercept.com/2020/06/04/fbi…
Just this week, four men who were arrested in Brooklyn for curfew violations were questioned by the NYPD and FBI about their involvement in protests against police violence.
"We want to know who’s hijacking your movement and making it violent," an FBI agent told one of the men.
All of this comes on the heels of the attorney general labeling anti-fascists as domestic terrorists.