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Democratic lawmakers pay tense visit to Texas migrant facility
By Rafael Bernal - 07/01/19 07:52 PM EDT
Democratic members of Congress visiting a Clint, Texas, Border Patrol station to denounce mistreatment of migrants were greeted with harsh words and insults from Trump supporters as well tense interactions with Border Patrol agents.
Activists used racist language against Rep. Rashida Tlaib Rashida Harbi TlaibBiden and the new Congress must protect Americans from utility shutoffs Overnight Energy: EPA rule exempts many polluting industries from future air regulations | Ex-Michigan governor to be charged over Flint water crisis: report | Officials ousted from White House after papers casting doubt on climate science Ex-Michigan governor to be charged over Flint water crisis: report MORE (D-Mich.), a member of the 21-strong Democratic delegation convened by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
The protesters, who also chanted "Trump 2020," made derogatory references to Tlaib's Muslim faith, and one man yelled for her to "go back to [her] country." Tlaib was born in Detroit.
Members were at the station run by Border Patrol, a division of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), to investigate reports of mistreatment of migrants.
Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), who spoke at a press conference following the tour, told The Hill there was tension between members of Congress and the officials assigned to show them the facility and provide security.
"There was definitely some bad blood between the members and the agents," said Barragán, pointing to one incident in particular.
Lawmakers were asked to relinquish their phones before entering the facility to prevent them from taking pictures, but once inside, an agent tried to take a surreptitious selfie with a member in the background.
"That's why we don't feel safe with them," Barragán said.
Members asked officials present whether the protesters could be removed for being disruptive or whether a question-and-answer session with members of the press could be held on federal land to avoid interruptions.
Both requests were denied.
"CBP played no role in organizing or running the press conference per the Hatch Act," CBP spokesman Roger Maier told The Hill in an email.
Tensions were already high following reports about a private Facebook group where people believed to be Border Patrol agents made multiple racist and sexist remarks, including against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Alexandria Ocasio-CortezOcasio-Cortez: Facebook, Zuckerberg 'bear partial responsibility' for insurrection Belfast's Troubles echo in today's Washington AOC's Ministry of Truth MORE (D-N.Y.), who also spoke at the event.
One protester had earlier invoked Ocasio-Cortez's name as Rep. Madeleine Dean Madeleine DeanPelosi names 9 impeachment managers House Judiciary Democrats ask Pence to invoke 25th Amendment to remove Trump Eyes turn to Ocasio-Cortez as she seeks to boost Biden MORE (D-Pa.) spoke, criticizing her "green deal bullshit," a reference to the Green New Deal.
When Ocasio-Cortez herself stepped up to the microphone, she was greeted by competing chants of "AOC!" from supporters and boos from protesters.
In a series of tweets after the visit, the New York Democrat decried what she saw inside the Clint facility, including the fact that migrant women told her they expect to be punished by officials for speaking to the lawmakers.
CBP made us check our phones.
But one woman slipped me this packet to take with me.
It says "shampoo," but she told me that this is all they give women to wash their entire body. Nothing else.
Some women's hair was falling out. Others had gone 15 days without taking a shower. pic.twitter.com/OsaKS0YD9a
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 1, 2019
What's haunting is that the women I met with today told me in no uncertain terms that they would experience retribution for telling us what they shared.
They all began sobbing - out of fear of being punished, out of sickness, out of desperation, lack of sleep, trauma, despair.
The visit was arranged in response to reports of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions at the Clint facility, following an earlier visit by lawyers conducting inspections under the terms of the Flores Agreement, a court settlement that delineates how federal officials should treat migrant detainees.
The members, speaking after their tour of the facility, questioned if they'd seen the true conditions at the center or whether they'd been shown a sanitized version.
"I know that the Flores attorneys who talked to 60 kids talked the truth. This system is broken and the Border Patrol was just trying to show what they wanted to show: lots of supplies, and also I think that they reduced the number of children for this occasion," said Rep. Judy Chu Judy May ChuWhy Biden's diversity efforts fall flat Asian lawmakers set sights on Biden's Labor secretary pick House Democrats introduce bill to address diversity at State Department MORE (D-Calif.).
Spent the morning in TX at Clint and El Paso detention facilities. Big takeaways -- 1) @CBP was very resistant to Congressional oversight. They tried to restrict what we saw, take our phones, block photos and video. Atmosphere was contentious and uncooperative.
— Rep. Joe Kennedy Joseph (Joe) Patrick KennedyFive centrist Democrats oppose Pelosi for Speaker in tight vote LIVE COVERAGE: House votes to name Speaker Government spending bill to include bipartisan energy provisions MORE III (@RepJoeKennedy) July 1, 2019
We can't just focus on the children anymore. I met grandmothers, mothers and fathers who are suffering. This is devastating. The look in one father's eyes broke me. I can't look away. #CloseTheCamps
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) July 1, 2019
Preliminary reports indicate that the number of migrants crossing from Mexico to request asylum in the United States dropped in June, following an agreement President Trump Donald TrumpIran convicts American businessman on spying charge: report DC, state capitals see few issues, heavy security amid protest worries Pardon-seekers have paid Trump allies tens of thousands to lobby president: NYT MORE reached with Mexico to increase immigration enforcement south of the border.
Part of the deal expanded the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols, by which Central American asylum-seekers are sent to Mexico to wait out their immigration court cases.
Congress last week passed a $4.6 billion supplemental emergency package to help CBP, Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement deal with the record numbers of migrants.
Barragán said the lack of migrants at the detention center showed that Congress's rush to approve funds was misplaced.
"I asked [an agent], 'What are you going to use this supplemental money for?' And he just stared at me with a blank stare," said Barragan.
"It was a very heated, uncomfortable visit," she added.
Tags Facebook Border Patrol Customs and Border Protection CBP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Madeleine Dean Rashida Tlaib Donald Trump Joe Kennedy Judy Chu Border crisis Immigration Illegal immigration


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Incident at US Embassy in Mexico City Reveals Deep Tensions Within Student Strike Strategy
MEXICO CITY-In the afternoon of Dec. 11, some 200 people rallied outside the U.S. Embassy here. Some of the protesters threw tomatoes and stones at the facade of building.
The rally had been convened to protest Mumia Abu-Jamal's condemnation to death. It had been called by the General Strike Council (Consejo General de Huelga, CGH), which was the organization that the students of Mexico's National University (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM) had formed at the beginning of 1999 in order to oppose a rise in tuition.
As the demonstrators were leaving the rally area, they were attacked by the city police and 98 were arrested. Twenty-two young people were soon freed, but as many as 73 were released on bail to await trial.
This incident reveals the tip of an iceberg of a national cultural crisis in Mexico. What follows is an attempt to explain what UNAM is, how the conflict developed, and the present perspectives of the student movement.
UNAM was founded in 1910 as the national Mexican university par excellence. It was then supposed to educate youths as professionals not only in law and medicine but also in engineering, architecture and other disciplines-particularly in the sciences and humanities, which were then taught for the first time with a non-religious orientation.
As the country grew, this university grew accordingly and by 1990 it had developed into an educational system with 13 high schools, five university campuses, some 20 research institutes, approximately 300,000 students, and a faculty of 20,000 people. Since then, however, its size has declined and a tendency to close or, at least separate, the high schools has become noticeable.
A government that has in practice renounced important portions of its independence, through NAFTA, seems in consequence to consider a national university and a local development of science as a useless luxury. Moreover, since 1982, neo-liberalism has invaded the country, as it has most of the rest of the world, and a trend has developed to consider education as worthy of existence only insofar as it can be turned into a commodity.
In light of these factors, government subsidies to UNAM began to decline, and at the beginning of this year, the chancellor ("rector" in Spanish) took this as a pretext to raise the token student tuition of two U.S. cents per year.
The tuition was then raised to $100 (U.S.) a year. The lack of funds was only a pretext, because the spectacular rise was not enough to cover the deficit caused by the lack of government support, though it would have been very efficient in excluding large numbers of students. It must be pointed out that most UNAM students are part time, since they have to earn their own living and, in many cases, help to support their families.
Strikes have always been a tradition in the UNAM. In 1929 striking students gained autonomy from the government; in the early 1950s they obtained cheap and efficient public transport to connect the new campus to the rest of the city; in 1966 they preserved the right of high school students of the UNAM to be admitted to BA studies without another exam.
In 1968, though defeated after a massacre of students and working-class supporters in Tlateloco, they gained important civil rights such as the right to a free press (which existed only on paper, but not in practice). In 1987 they got democratic internal reforms.
This year's strike was provoked by the chancellor's arrogance. On March 15 he used his majority in the University Council to approve-suddenly, unexpectedly, and almost in secret-the tuition increase. The uproar that this provoked was met by indifference and silence by the chancellor, which by itself prompted the students to form the CGH and begin the strike on April 15.
Today, after eight months, this strike has already become the longest in the almost 80 years of UNAM's history.
Another complication arises from the fact that the original chancellor (Barnes de Castro) presented his resignation by mid-November and was succeeded by the then Minister of Health, de la Fuente. Briefly, it can be said that Barnes's policy was to ignore the strike and the students who supported it-which served to strengthen the extreme left tendencies within the CGH.
This was compounded by a process of endless discussions. For example, it took the CGH almost two months to decide how the talks with the chancellor's representatives should be carried out, but it must be added that the university officials' intransigence on this issue was also responsible for the delay.
Some time later, the extreme leftists began to expel their opponents, but by then the great majority of students were absent from the movement.
These ultraleft tendencies have no clear ideology, but they do share a clear penchant toward Stalinism. Their force grew to such an extent that when the new chancellor changed the policy to favor negotiations, his move was disregarded. There now appears to be no clear solution to the conflict.
It is in this context that the incident at the U.S. embassy took place. This episode was facilitated by the meager numbers of demonstrators and by the undoubted presence of provocateurs.
The CGH rapidly repudiated violence and declared that their members threw only tomatoes, not stones. But it raised the upcoming trials of the 73 students as an obstacle in pursuing talks with the commission that the chancellor appointed to negotiate with the striking students. This further isolated the CGH-including from most people who initially supported the movement.
A week later, city officials dropped most of the charges against the 73 students, but then the chancellor's representatives were the ones who abandoned the talks-charging that two of the students' representatives were not really UNAM students.
The isolation of the CGH before public opinion has become all the more easy because, since June 7, the payment of tuition has been declared optional, and the new chancellor has said that all university problems will be discussed and decided upon by a university congress elected democratically.
And so, the strike is swiftly losing a sense of purpose and there is a danger it will become merely the modus vivendi of a shrinking group of ultra-lefts. Although the movement has already gained significant concessions, if this stalemate is not resolved, it can open the way for a serious defeat that will have wide repercussions in the Mexican political arena.
Julian Assange and the CIA-USA Daily Wars Against Humanity
By Jeff Mackler [Introductory note: The weekend of October 23-25, in anticipation of a UK court convening to re-consider a previous lower court decision to
With Military Actions in 159 Countries, America Is Now the World's Police Force
By JIM LAFFERTY
A couple of weeks ago, President Joe Biden stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations and said that "for the first time in 20 years, the United States is not at war. A damnable lie.
The Myth of a New "Cold War" Between the U.S. and China/Russia
By JEFF MACKLER
AUKUS, or the new and secretly negotiated $66 billion nuclear-powered submarine agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., has momentarily ruffled some political feathers around the world, particularly in France and China.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Why Carl Craig at Dia:Beacon is a Groundbreaking Moment for American Art Institutions
Normally siloed by stateside visual art gatekeepers, techno takes a step into high culture.
If you were blindfolded and led downstairs into the basement of Dia:Beacon, a modern art museum in New York state's Hudson Valley, you'd be forgiven for thinking you had wandered into a late-'80s or early-'90s warehouse in Detroit or Chicago. Formerly the bowels of a Nabisco factory, the cavernous space is gridded with brutalist columns and dark except for its Panorama Bar-inspired window shutters that intermittently open to let in sunlight. Neon poles in each of the four corners glow purple, blue, and red. A quadraphonic sound system pumps out a liquid techno composition by Carl Craig, with four speakers pointed at a white-painted X on the floor in the middle of the room. Suddenly, the chest-rattling bass fades into an overpowering whine, and white light beams from the ceiling to the X; it feels like you're inside someone's ears ringing after a rave. "I did think about having [the installation] as just [high-pitched] tones," says Craig, who suffers from tinnitus. "but it might've been way too intense for some people."
There's a lot riding on Party/Afterparty, Carl Craig's installation at Dia:Beacon, which opened to the public on March 6 and has recently been extended through summer 2021. Closed just a week later due to the state's quarantine lockdowns implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19, the exhibit is opening with the museum this week. "I think it's a fair assessment to say that this is one of the first installations in a museum by a techno artist in the United States," says curator Kelly Kivland, adding that other artists are "creating durational sound-based work in museums and art spaces."
A Chicago native and lifelong house music fan (her partner is from Michigan, with deep ties to Detroit techno), Kelly Kivland approached Carl Craig five years ago for a collaboration in line with Dia:Beacon's partnerships with minimal composers La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. "We knew that we wanted to engage with the next generation of electronic music," says Kivland. "That led us directly to techno, which I felt had a strong link to minimalist music." Over the course of five years, she and Craig worked closely together to realize his vision, inspired by Sarah Gregory's mural gracing a wall in the seminal Detroit club the Music Institute and Keith Haring's murals adorning the Paradise Garage.
Carl Craig at Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York. Photo: Eva Deitch, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York
For boundary-pushing artists like Craig—who says he'd rather perform at an opera house in Bologna than for "20,000 people at a festival"—working with museums represents a barely tapped creative frontier.
During the fall of last year, UK electronic music producer Lord Tusk co-produced (with Steven Julien, A.K.A. Funkineven) Yasiin Bey's Negus, a multimedia "album" listening experience that could only be heard at the Brooklyn Museum. He also DJed a live performance to accompany the exhibit, which received a standing ovation—a rarity outside of orchestral halls, theaters, and opera houses. "This was not a Yasiin Bey performance, this was an art installation," he says.
Hip-hop has arguably had a more prominent relationship than electronic music with galleries and other spaces of that caliber—from Jay-Z's 2013 performance with Marina Abramovic at the Pace Gallery to the Brooklyn Museum's Hip-Hop Nation exhibit in 2000—but the same possibilities for creative boundary-pushing apply. "You don't have to approach it in the normal ways," adds Lord Tusk. "You're able to take listeners into another zone, a portal into another dimension." Tusk and Bey also performed parts of the unfinished Negus at Banksy's dystopian carnival Dismaland in 2015, adding another notable entry to the oft-overlooked tradition of contemporary art and "popular" music crossovers, like Basquiat's DJing or Miles Davis' late-career painting.
Without the typical distractions of a venue or festival, a museum setting also elevates electronic music by providing a more immersive environment for listeners. "The vibe of the exhibition was intended to be very contemplative, especially in our contemporary moment, where we are so often distracted," says Lauren Argentina Zelaya, director of public programs at the Brooklyn Museum, who worked on the Negus exhibit. "Everyone's looking at their phones, and we are assaulted with images and sounds everywhere we go."
Though the vibe at Party/Afterparty's opening live performance was decidedly more ravey than reflective, sidebar conversations and phone usage were almost nonexistent. Craig and Moritz Von Oswald's simmering dub techno worked the sold-out, 600-person crowd from standing, splay-legged with arms folded (the standard art-viewing pose), to unself-conscious dancing. According to Kivland, that is the desired effect, during both after-hours and regular museum hours. "I went to parties as a young person," she says, "and I came from dance, so these collective gatherings are important to my understanding of experiential work."
With Party/Afterparty, Kivland hopes more American institutions feel empowered to "consider how one can embrace other art forms." With a few exceptions, like the Museum of Modern Art's 2012 Kraftwerk retrospective, American high art institutions have been slow to embrace electronic music as an object of canonization and contemplation. It's far more common to see these types of exhibits in Europe, like Steve Goodman's ongoing collaborations as part of Audint, Nicolas Jaar's Shock Forest Group project at Amsterdam's Het HEM, and Dasha Rush's multidisciplinary A/V installations in Berlin and Paris.
Another such example is Electro, a traveling exhibit that envelops attendees in the history of electronic music, spanning from Kraftwerk to Daphne Oram and the Chemical Brothers. It premiered at the Philharmonie de Paris last year and was supposed to open at the London Design Museum in April, but due to the pandemic, it has been delayed until February 2021. "The exhibition is inspired by my specific experience of being a raver at the beginning of the '90s," says curator, journalist, and critic Jean-Yves Leloup. Before it closed in 1996, the American Center In Paris hosted Electro's precursor: Global Techno, which shares its name with a book, blog, festival and radio show hosted by Leloup around that same time period.
Unlike stateside museums, European cultural institutions have maintained a decades-long history of supporting electronic music that isn't necessarily avant-garde or in the fields of sound art and design. "This underground music has always had an audience among art and fashion people," says Leloup. "There has been a link between the art and the techno or electronic scene in France since the beginning of the '90s, so it's quite a long history."
That's not so much the case in the U.S., says Kivland, where techno has been unfairly "siloed" as the exclusive domain of the music industry by visual arts gatekeepers. "Techno is a significant cultural movement," says Kivland. "It's very much tied to the history of Detroit, the machine aesthetic as well as the labor movements, and yet it's been misunderstood by a lot of people."
Simone Merli of New York City and Berlin's Soundwalk Collective also agrees that this amenable attitude towards risk-taking is more characteristic of European museums. Like Craig's sound design, the entryway they envisioned for Electro–transformed into an "evocative tunnel dimension of sound" from 150 raw recordings gathered around the Philharmonie de Paris–was rooted in the architectural resonances of the exhibition's building. Such an experiment might not have been possible in the States. "We do some installations here in the U.S., but they tend to be less exploratory, or it's a bit more classic and conservative," he says, citing the geography-focused nature of their work. "Not necessarily because we're told to do it that way, it's just how we relate to the institution in this specific location."
One of the most defining features of these kinds of electronic music installations in visual and other high arts spaces is the possibility for audience cross-pollination and intergenerational learning opportunities, both of which can manifest in unexpected ways. Soundwalk Collective, a sonic presence at arts institutions like the Venice Biennale and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, has made multiple albums with fellow multidisciplinarian Patti Smith. "Stefan [Crasneanscki] met her on a plane some years ago, and they connected instantly," Merli says. "She allows us to also explore territories that we wouldn't really do otherwise."
Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald performance at Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York, Saturday, March 7, 2020. Photo: Eva Deitch, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York
At Electro, Leloup says he sees both young and old clubbers, often as part of the same family unit. "We had people around 17 or 25 who come with their parents to make them discover their own culture," says Leloup. "You have parents coming with their children, who are more into R&B or hip-hop, to make them discover the music of their generation."
Before Craig and Von Oswald's performance on Saturday, a smattering of Dia:Beacon patrons wandered around Party/Afterparty, standing stock-still at various points in the room to fully absorb the shifting sonics. They murmured approval or puzzlement respectfully as the music wound up to its apex like a pot about to boil. When the beat dropped, a little girl shrieked and ran across the room, joining her sisters in ecstatic dancing to 130-BPM techno, while their father watched over them, bobbing slightly on crutches. It was an odd and incredibly touching tableau.
"I know there's lots of questions like, 'Why Dia? Why Carl Craig? What is it going to be like?'" Kivland admits, "but also the response so far has been incredible. There's so many people out there that are so happy to see it in this context."
Carl Craig: Party/After-Party has been extended through summer 2021 at Dia:Beacon. Watch a video feature on the pioneering techno artist below.
Harley Brown is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in publications like the Guardian, NPR, New York Magazine and Billboard.
Published August 10, 2020. Words by Harley Brown, photos by Bill Jacobson Studio & Eva Deitch.