Intersections

Does U.S. deportation program put migrants in harm's way?

Originally published at World Now:

In an effort to further discourage illegal crossers, the United States says it has found success in the practice of transferring illegal immigrants and deporting them at a border crossing far from where they initially entered the United States, The Times reports.

But does the practice place undocumented migrants in harm's way when they are sent to a region of Mexico that is not familiar to them?

Under the strategy, deportees are often flown hundreds of miles from where they illegally entered the country and returned to Mexico through another port of entry, preventing them from reconnecting with human smugglers and attempting the crossing once more. 

Some, for example, have been apprehended in Texas and then transferred and deported through Calexico, Calif., Richard Marosi reports in The Times. U.S. customs authorities say the Alien Transfer Exit Program, as it is called, "breaks the smuggling cycle." 

It also brings to mind a troubling headline that largely slipped below the radar this summer.

In June, dozens of illegal immigrants held at a private detention facility in New Mexico wrote letters to a border activist group pleading for help to avoid being transferred and deported through Texas, which they said would place their lives in danger.

The Zetas cartel is said to control human and drug smuggling through much of northeastern Mexico, across from Texas, and is also known to commit atrocities against migrants making passage through the region. Zetas are believed to have massacred 72 mostly Central American migrants last year in a town in Tamaulipas state, in a case that drew international reproach.

They're also suspected in the hijacking of low-cost buses that run through the area, which may be connected to the many mass graves  that have turned up hundreds of bodies in Mexico's northern region, as The Times has reported. Cartels also practice forced recruitment of migrants, even slavery, Mexican authorities and immigrant advocates have said. (Links in Spanish.)

The number of migrants held at the Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico and who asked not to be deported through Texas this summer eventually reached 52, said Hannah Hafter, a coordinator for the No More Deaths project in Nogales, Ariz. 

"As far as I can tell, at this point all have served their sentences and been deported," Hafter said in an email message Thursday. It was not clear whether these migrants were deported to the Mexican state of Sonora, as some requested, or elsewhere.

"Since that time, we have not heard from any of them and have not had the capacity to follow up," she added. "To me, it demonstrates a severe inflexibility in the system including at the risk of human life."

In a statement to No More Deaths, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had said,  "While ICE recognizes the current situation relating to violence in Mexico, the agency is not in the practice of allowing detainees to request repatriation to specific locations in Mexico."

* Photo: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times / Sept. 20, 2011

⟢ Estrella Cercana, Part 2 ⟣

Los contenidos del primer num. de Estrella Cercana ya estan en línea. Checkanlo! El periódico se puede conseguir imprentos en kurimanzutto, y varios otros locaciones entre el Centro, la Condesa, Roma, y por los alrededores.

Follow @StrellaCercana for the details. 

* More info here. cc: The one and only ... Zemmoa. ("Fun Fun Fun.")

Nuevo Laredo: Killing social media users in Mexico

** Originally published at World Now at the L.A. Times, the paper's new international news blog. My recent base at LAT.com, La Plaza, is hereby retired, but links remain live and available. Thanks for the follows and re-posts and continued tips and feedback.

REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- A woman found decapitated in the border city of Nuevo Laredo is being mourned as an apparent member of a social networking site used by local residents to share information on drug cartel activity.

The victim was found early Saturday with a note nearby saying she was killed for posting messages online about violent or criminal incidents in Nuevo Laredo.

The Tamaulipas state attorney general's office identified the woman as Maria Elizabeth Macias Castro, 39, and said she was an editor at the newspaper Primera Hora (links in Spanish). The Associated Press, however, quoting an employee of the newspaper, identified the victim as Marisol Macias Castaneda, and said she held an administrative and not an editorial post at Primera Hora.

A web search of the newspaper's website found no mention of the woman's death or the discovery of a decapitated female body on Saturday.

But on the website Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, a banner image appeared memorializing a member known as NenaDLaredo. "You'll always be present," the display says.

⟢ Estrella Cercana ⟣

Here's the site for Estrella Cercana, our experimental newspaper underway now at kurimanzutto. At the site, the main editorial crew and I are posting images and links to stuff we're thinking about, talking about, laughing about, cringing at, all through the production process for the weekly periódico con fin de vida.

We'll also be posting the issue's content on the day we publish, planned now for Saturdays through Nov. 5, as well as .pdf files of how the paper looks in print once distributed here in Mexico City.

What is Estrella Cercana, you ask?

It's a publishing project built around Distant Star, the show currently up at kuri, inspired by the literature of Roberto Bolaño. (See Intersections posts on Bolaño from 2007 here and from 2009 here). We're building a weekly newspaper, primarily in Spanish, partly in spirit of the Infrarrealists, but sort-of-actually-really-not-all.

("I haven't even read 2666, and that's so infrarrealista!")

Our newsroom is roaming between the gallery space and various points in the city, and so far always jussied up with the proper editorial bottles and snacks. The first issue of EC drops this Saturday, Sept. 24, and we haven't quite yet figured out how we're going to get it into people's hands. But it's definitely coming. Each issue will feature a beautiful full-color visual piece as a centerfold, and will also come with a link to a special audio track from one of our many beat-oriented comrades and collaborators.

We're all super excited, super nervous, and super busy (everyone on the small team has regular gigs or is juggling various other projects). So let's report it out, be nosy, read, not read, burn books, have a dance party, start a reality TV propaganda show, I dunno!

Update soon.

* NOTE: We are accepting pitches for your Highly Newsworthy stories, photography, cartoons, comics, info-graphics or maps, anything! Write us at prensaestrellacercana at gmail. Or to advertise in our pages, to reach our very classy would-be readers, please write publicidadestrellacercana at gmail.

** ABOVE: A Polaroid shot I've been holding onto for years. West Temple Street, Los Angeles, Calif., circa 2004. It lasted only a day, if not hours.

'Miss Bala' and Independence Day

At least ten people were reportedly killed during fiesta patrias celebrations across Mexico last night.

That's an extremely low figure relative to Mexico's population and relative to an expectation that rises quietly every recent mid-September when Mexico celebrates its Independence Day. Inevitably, some people worry that a narco-terror attack will strike somewhere around the Grito like in 2008 in Michoacan. (See here.)

This week at La Plaza, I used the occasion to consider the implications for Mexico's current drug war and its future as a nation bound on democratic principles (supposedly) through the new Canana release "Miss Bala."

Read my thoughts on the flick here. And definitely go see it.

La Plaza: More Mexico youths die from violence than car wrecks

** Originally published here.

As Mexico's drug war grinds on, violent homicide has overtaken car accidents as the leading cause of death of young people in the country, reports the Mexico City daily El Universal (link in Spanish).

Government statistics reviewed by the newspaper show that in 2008 and 2009, the second and third complete years of Mexico's drug war, violent deaths of people between 15 and 29 shot up about 150%. The figures rose almost equally across various narrower age brackets within that group.

Half of those homicides occurred in five states that include some of those worst hit by the current violence: Chihuahua, Baja California, Guerrero, Sinaloa and the state of Mexico, on the border with Mexico City. Violence is now the leading cause of death among Mexicans between the ages of 15 and 29, overtaking car accidents, the report said.

* Continue reading.

** Photo credit: Gael Gonzalez / Reuters 

9/11

I stayed away from the news on Sunday, then logged on and looked at pictures and newspaper front-pages. From Patrick Smith at Salon:

It's not the anniversary itself that irks me. The 10-year mark is -- or should be -- worthy of our solemn respects and a national timeout. But commemorating the attacks would feel a lot more meaningful if, in fact, we had ever stopped commemorating them. Our healing process has been never-ending -- occasionally introspective and edifying, but all too often maudlin and suffocating.

Yes, exactly. Where we going with all this? What happens to America on Monday? And every Monday thereafter? More of the same, seems to me. That's the truly sad part.

* Photo via Framework at LAT. * Salon link via FAY0LA.

La Plaza: Veracruz panic started before 'terrorist' tweets, reports say

Cracks are appearing in the case against the Twitter users in Mexico accused of terrorism for spreading rumors of an attack.

Local reports and claims suggest that the "panic" that spread over rumors of child abductions at school campuses started at least two hours before the online messages that could put a man and woman behind bars for 30 years.

** Read the rest of this story here. 

L.A. Times: In Mexico, harsh charges over Twitter

 

"Reporting from Mexico City—Thirty years behind bars for a few misinformed tweets? It's a possibility for the so-called Twitter Terrorists of Mexico."

Read the rest here.

Till the world ends

No one ever said Salem wasn't pretentious. This is their screwed-down take on the Britney Spears hit, dragging the Apocalypse home one more time.

Salem dispenses with the over-produced dancers and the studded shoulderpads and sensibly employs footage of what appear to be U.S. combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to illustrate their themes. Yay.