It’s done a lot. We have a lot of prisoners in there totally naked. — Timothy Swanson, Sheriff of Stark County, Ohio.

For the past several months, Sheriff Tim Swanson has refused all requests for interviews about the Hope Steffey case, claiming that it was inappropriate to comment on the case in the media while it was still being reviewed in court. Of course this was complete bollocks; as he just proved, the real issue was that he had an election coming up in November, and he didn’t want to say anything on teevee that could be used against him, and now that he has been safely re-elected he is happy to wallow around in front of a camera and say any damn thing he pleases about the case. For example, that his gang of hired muscle down at the jail are doing this sort of thing all the time, and it’s not his fault because he can’t ship people down to the local mental ward anymore and that it’s O.K. for his crew to strip down women with men in the room because he just can’t be bothered to figure out how to hire enough women that he won’t be routinely sexually traumatizing women in his jail, for their own good, but, hey, it’s all O.K. for the Stark County Sheriff’s office to be running their own personal Abu Ghraib, because the mixed-gender hired muscle that strips women down in cells and leaves them there naked for hours at a time has a nifty four-letter acronym, which makes it all official and O.K.

There is absolutely no conceivable excuse for treating anyone this way, ever. Whether man or woman, calm or belligerent, nice or nasty, crazy or sane. This is gang rape, professionalized and excused by Official Procedures. What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad, not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it. They are a pack of dangerous predators, and their uniforms and badges don't make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.

See also:

• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform
• GT 2008-03-07: Rapists in uniform #2: four more women come forward
• GT 2008-03-08: In Their Own Words: Just following orders edition
• GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in uniform #3: a sixth woman comes forward
• GT 2008-06-23: We need government cops and government courts because private protection forces and private arbitrators would be accountable to the powerful and well-connected instead of being accountable to the people. (#2)

More startling are Suskind's revelations about the Iraq war and the handling of prewar intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction. In one instance, Suskind says that denials by the foreign minister of Iraq, Naji Sabri, that his country possessed W.M.D. were simply rewritten — almost certainly altered under pressure from Washington, Suskind writes — into a false assertion that Sabri had substantiated suspicions about active Iraqi biological and nuclear programs.

Even more disturbing is the story of a former Iraqi intelligence chief named Tahir Jalil Habbush. Suskind describes in gripping detail secret meetings between Habbush and British intelligence in January and February of 2003. Habbush insisted that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his weapons programs but would not publicly admit it, so as to maintain a facade of deterrence against regional rivals like Iran. Not only did the White House dismiss Habbush's statements, Suskind writes, but an irritated Bush even asked whether the Iraqi could be asked for something we can use to help us make our case. A subsequent $5 million C.I.A. payment to Habbush, disclosed by Suskind, has the smell of hush money.

Then comes what may be the ultimate bombshell: that the White House in­structed the C.I.A. to forge a letter, backdated to July 2001, stating that the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had trained in Iraq and, furthermore, that Iraq had received suspicious shipments (presumably of yellowcake) from Niger with Al Qaeda's help. The letter was to be written and signed by Habbush on Iraqi government station­ery and addressed to Hussein himself. This preposterously convenient summary of what a perfect case for war might look like almost resembled some wry gag from The Onion. But at the end of 2003 the letter did, in fact, turn up in a British newspaper, before seeping into the American media.

Suskind does not establish who dreamed up this pernicious document. But he says one of his sources, a former senior C.I.A. operative named Robert Richer, recalls being ordered directly by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to have Habbush transcribe it himself from a draft produced by the White House. ­Richer even remembers the creamy White House stationery on which the assignment was written, as Suskind puts it. Since the book's release, however, Tenet, Richer himself and another key source have adamantly denied that such a thing occurred. (Tenet also denies that Habbush's prewar claims were muffled.)

Even in the context of the past seven years, the stupid brazenness of a forged letter drafted on White House stationery does test credulity. But any claims made by Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a Pulitzer Prize winner, should not be casually dismissed. That no credible challenges have been made to numerous other scoops in his book suggests an attempted covering of exposed der­rières. Still, his release of partial transcripts from recorded interviews with Richer has not definitively affirmed his reporting.

Suskind's point isn't about proving liabil­ity. Rather, the Habbush episodes, if accurate, illustrate a creeping amorality in the way America has managed its war on terror.

–from Michael Crowley’s New York Times review of Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World

Posturing macho warrior cops in Chicago, Miami, Palm Beach County, Montana, Johnson City, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. are all now starting to carry are all now starting to carry AR-15 or M4 assault rifles with them on ordinary street patrols, for all those tactical situations that they expect to find themselves in when they’re out there peace-making.

Now, in Phoenix, the police department is ordering more semiautomatic AR-15 rifles for patrol cops to tote on the streets. The goal is to make sure that there will be at least 3 cops carrying an AR-15 in every patrol squad.

More patrol officers on Phoenix streets will soon be carrying semi-automatic rifles, a move that officials say will provide a better match for criminals and more accurate tool in high-risk encounters.

… Phoenix council members on Wednesday approved a request for the police department to purchase 60 Bushmaster .223-caliber rifles from Clyde Armory at a cost of $44,813.28. Officials anticipate having the order fulfilled in time for the first set of 20 officers to train with the rifles in early November.

There are currently 60 rifles assigned to patrol officers. Once the additional 60 are implemented, each squad will have access to a rifle. The eventual goal is to have three per squad, said Sgt. Andy Hill, a Phoenix police spokesman.

Special units have used the high-powered gun for years, and some patrol officers have been carrying them since 1999.

— Lindsey Collom, The Arizona Republic (2008-10-02): Police Department to get more rifles

Meanwhile, cop press outlets like POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine continually run stories proclaiming that there aren’t enough cops swarming the city streets, and print demonstrably false claims about violent crime rates–for example:

Consider the widespread belief that violent crime rates are dropping in America. This stanza of the sociologists' catechism is backed up by the statistic that the murder rate is declining. . . . But as recently pointed out by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his keynote speeches at TREXPO West, we actually live in the most criminally violent period in American history. The murder rate is down, not because Americans have stopped trying to kill each other but because emergency medicine has advanced far enough to keep the victims of deadly assaults alive when just years before they would have died.

The claim about violent crime rates is demonstrably false; the attempt to explain away declining murder rates is pure bullshit. If you check the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports data from 1992 to 2007, you’ll find that total violent crime rates per 100,000 have fallen every single year for the past 15 years, except for small upticks in 2005 and 2006. (Small enough that the rate never even reached where it had been in 2003.) Absolute numbers of violent crimes reported decreased every year except for 2001, 2005, and 2006, in spite of continuous increases in total population. The total numbers include not only murder, but also robbery, rape, and all forms of aggravated assault, with attempted murders being counted under the aggravated assault category, so advances in ER procedures and technology make no difference at all. And you see roughly the same trends when you break the figures down by each category. In other words, this is a complete lie which could have been proven false by spending a couple minutes perusing easily-read tables on the FBI’s own website. The interesting question, then, is what kind of purpose it serves for heavily-armed government cops — who are stocking up on assault rifles and tanks, cordoning off whole neighborhoods, training themselves in warrior mindset, and calling for a surge by inner-city police forces explicitly modeled on the military occupation of Iraq and funded by Department of Homeland Security — for these cops, I say, to go around trying very hard to convince each other, in spite of the evidence of their senses, that we actually live in the most criminally violent period in American history.

Do you feel safer now?

See also:

• GT 2008-09-25: How cops see themselves
• GT 2008-09-19: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#6)
• GT 2008-08-22: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#5)
• GT 2008-07-12: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#4)
• GT 2008-06-05: Neighborhood Safety Ghettoes in D.C.
• GT 2008-05-15: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#3)
• GT 2008-05-12: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#2)
• GT 2008-05-06: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter...
• GT 2008-04-28: Is it just me or is the water in this pot getting a little hotter?

… But it must just be the summer heat, right?

In Maryland, a state police Red Squad spent a year and change infiltrating anti-death penalty and anti-war groups, and put the names of nonviolent activists onto terrorist and drug-trafficking watch lists:

The ACLU released 43 pages of [Maryland] state police summaries and computer logs Thursday – some with agents’ names and paragraphs blacked out — that it obtained from the state attorney general’s office through a lawsuit based on Maryland’s Public Information Act.

The files depict a pattern of spying and surveillance over a 14-month period in 2005 and 2006. During that time, agents infiltrated the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, a peace group; the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty; and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, a death row inmate.

Police entered the names of activists in a law enforcement database of people suspected of being terrorists or drug traffickers, the documents show. Police officials said they did not infringe on the protesters’ freedom; the ACLU said that nothing in the documents indicated criminal activity or intent.

Many of the spies’ reports seem innocuous. In one, an agent who attended a gathering of the Evans group noted that activists discussed the stance that a candidate for Baltimore County state’s attorney might take on the death penalty.

Yesterday, [former Maryland Governor Bob] Ehrlich said on WJZ-TV that he was sympathetic to the principle that police should not spy on groups when there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

But he added, We pay state police to make decisions, and obviously they bring discretion with them to their jobs every day, so their job on a daily basis obviously is to weigh the relative value of intelligence they’ve received and to make decisions accordingly.

— Jonathan Bor and Gus G. Sentementes, Baltimore Sun (2008-07-19): State police spying decried

For example, one of the decisions that cops accordingly make is to harass, assault, restrain, and imprison innocent people who try to photograph them and document how the cops are treating the people they interact with. (Apparently this intelligence thing isn’t a two-way street.) They are, of course, happy to invent completely fictional crimes based on nonexistent laws in order to do so. Thus, in Johnson County, Tennessee:

Nearly everyone carries a cell phone and it's hard to find one without that camera feature. It's convenient when you want to take that impromptu photo, but a Tri-Cities area man ended up behind bars after snapping a shot of a Johnson County sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop.

The cell phone photographer says the arrest was intimidation, but the deputy says he feared for his life.

… A Johnson County sheriff's deputy arrested Scott Conover for unlawful photography.

He says you took a picture of me. It's illegal to take a picture of a law enforcement officer, said Conover.

… The deputy also asked Conover to delete the picture three times.

He said if you don't give it to me, you're going to jail, said Conover.

Under the advice of the Johnson County attorney, the sheriff would not comment and the arresting deputy said he didn't want to incriminate himself by talking to us.

— Darius Radzius, WJHL (2008-07-11): Man Arrested For Unlawful Photography

Carlos Miller elaborates on the same case:

Update: I talked to Scott Conover Wednesday morning and he said they delayed his court appearance to Sept. 3rd, which sounds familiar because they kept doing the same thing in my case. (I was arrested last year for photographing cops against their wishes). In my case, I took it as a sign that they were hoping the delay would cause the media interest to die down.

After arresting Scott Conover for unlawful photography in Mountain City, Tennessee last June, Johnson County Sheriff's Deputy Starling McCloud threatened to arrest Conover's 12-year-old daughter with the same charge after she snapped two photos of her father getting handcuffed.

As it turns out, she is a better photographer than her father because she actually managed to photograph the camera shy deputy.

… It won't be the first time [Scott Conover has] faced off against the Johnson County Sheriff's Office in court.

A couple of years ago, we had problems with the sheriff, so we sued them and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, he said.

But the problems started even before that, after he witnessed deputies beating a man in front of the restaurant/bar he owns.

They beat the shit out of him, he said. The guy's lawyer came back and took witness statements. When the statements made it back to the sheriff's department, they came by and asked me why I was getting involved.

Not long after that, deputies started staking out his business, Jammers Rocking Road House, which he said is modeled after the Tiki Bar in Key Largo.

They were wolf-packing my customers, he said. They would lie and wait for them to leave and then pull them over to see if they had been drinking.

Conover struck back by suing them.

… On the night of his arrest, Conover and his family had left the Last Chance Saloon after picking up the nightly earnings and were on their way back to Jammers. His wife was sitting in the passenger's seat. His son and daughter were in the back seat.

Up ahead were a group of customers who had just left the bar. A Johnson County Sheriff's deputy, who was parked along side of the road, pulled over the car with the customers.

The lady who was driving doesn't drink, he said. Her husband, who does drink, was sitting in the passenger's seat.

Conover pulled up to the scene and stopped his Hummer in front of the traffic stop. He asked his son for his IPhone, then rolled the window down and said:

Hey fellas, I'm just getting your picture.

Then he snapped the photo. Deputy McCloud — who has been on the force only 18 months — told him that photographing him was illegal.

I asked, what planet are you from?, Conover said.

McCloud started threatening to arrest him if he did not delete the photo, which as it turned out, did not even capture the deputy.

Conover's wife even asked her husband to just hand the deputy the IPhone, but he refused. The deputy kept threatening him with arrest if he didn't delete the photo.

The deputy then ordered Conover out of his car.

I threw the phone back to my daughter and told her to keep taking photos.

By then, two Mountain City police officers had pulled up to the scene, including Kenneth Lane and Ben May, who is in the dark uniform in the above photos. McCloud placed two sets of handcuffs on Conover, who is six-feet tall and weighs 270 pounds, and apparently looked as if he could break out of a single pair of handcuffs.

Conover's daughter snapped two photos before McCloud threatened her with arrest.

He started trying to get in my Hummer and get to the back seat where my kids were. I told him, You better not go back there or else we're going to have some real problems, he said.

McCloud decided against arresting the daughter.

At the jail, Conover asked McCloud if had ever heard of the First Amendment.

He then turned to me and said, I’m charging you with disorderly conduct.

Thirty minutes later, after McCloud had left the jail — and had time to think of what other charges he could come up with — he called the jailer and added another charge against Conover; pointing a laser at an officer.

— Carlos Miller, Photography is Not a Crime (2008-08-05): Deputy threatened to arrest 12-year-old daughter for unlawful photography

Meanwhile, in Ohio, posturing macho paramilitary cops gunned down an unarmed woman holding nothing other than her baby boy. They fired high-powered rifles, blindly into a room they couldn’t see, because they saw a shadow on the wall during their cock-swinging commando SWAT raid. Please remember that cops are hired and trained to keep you and me safe, so obviously no matter how many unarmed women these heavily armed, trained professionals mow down in a wild attempt to save their own skins, the warrior mindset means never having to say you’re sorry.

A Lima, Ohio jury has acquitted police officer Joseph Chavalia of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson. Chavalia shot and killed Wilson and wounded her infant son during a drug raid last January. Wilson was unarmed.

During the raid, one of Chavalia’s fellow officers shot and killed the two dogs owned by Wilson’s boyfriend and the target of the raid, Anthony Terry. Chavalia testified that he mistook his fellow officer’s shots at the dogs for hostile gunfire coming from the bedroom where Wilson was standing with her child. Chavalia then fired blindly into the bedroom.

The jury concluded that Chavalia reasonably feared for his life when he heard the gunshots. I guess they were then willing to overlook Chavalia’s mistaking an unarmed woman holding a baby for an armed drug dealer, and the fact that he fired blindly into a room without first identifying what he was shooting at. It’s too bad that that same sort of deference isn’t given to the people on the receiving end of these raids when they too understandably confuse the police officers who wake them from sleep and invade their homes for criminal intruders.

— Radley Balko, Hit and Run (2008-08-05): Lima, Ohio SWAT Officer Acquitted in the Killing of Tarika Wilson

Over in Chicago, the arbitrary governor over the state of Illinois has declared that what Chicago needs is yet another elite tactical team to patrol inner city neighborhoods, complete with state troopers and military helicopters.

Calling violence in Chicago out of control, Gov. Blagojevich on Wednesday offered to lend state troopers and National Guard helicopters to the city to augment the Chicago Police.

The governor is considering forming an elite tactical team to help the Chicago Police fight gang problems, a source said, adding that the unit could later be sent across the state to deal with gang problems at any city’s request.

— Chicago Sun-Times (2008-07-17): Gov. says Chicago out of control

Meanwhile, the Fighting Uruk-Hai of Arizona proposes that we ought to combat inner city crime using the strategic hamlet surge tactics that have made for such a brilliant success in the occupation of Iraq.

We might look at what Rudy Giuliani did in New York City, when he became mayor of that city. … And some of those tactics, very frankly — you mention the war in Iraq — are like that we use in the military. You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement, etc, etc.

Do you feel safer now?

(Stories via Darian Worden (2008-07-18): Martial Law 2008, Manuel Lora @ LewRockwell.com Blog (2008-08-02): The Fascist McCain On Solving Neighborhood Crimes, Ali @ ThinkProgress (2008-08-01): McCain suggests military-style invasion modeled on the surge to control inner city crime, etc.)

See also:

• GT 2008-07-12: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#4)
• GT 2008-06-05: Neighborhood Safety Ghettoes in D.C.
• GT 2008-05-15: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#3)
• GT 2008-05-12: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter... (#2)
• GT 2008-05-06: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter...
• GT 2008-04-28: Is it just me or is the water in this pot getting a little hotter?

From GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S.S. St. Louis:

If you and your family are from Iraq, and, because of the crushing poverty and the tremendous danger to your life and limb which you face — due to the United States government’s own war and bombing and occupation in Iraq; or due to threats from the government-backed and freelance ethnic-cleansing death squads, which have flourished under that occupation; or due to the crossfire in the endless battles between the United States government’s occupying forces and Iraqi insurgents — if, because of all that, you are one of the 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled the country in order to try to find a new home (either temporarily or permanently) where you can live your life free of fear and starvation and unspeakable daily violence, and now you find yourself stuck — like 2.4 million of your fellow Iraqis — in some hellhole refugee camp or urban ghetto in neighboring countries like Syria or Jordan, where conditions are awful, where you are surrounded by suffering, where you cannot legally work for pay and have little or nothing to do other than take hand-outs and fill out paperwork for UNHCR, while you watch your life savings drain away in the effort to keep yourself alive for a few more months while you wait, and wait, and wait, and if you don’t happen to be one of the 500 people per year who are eligible for Special Immigration Visas in return for collaborating with the U.S. government’s occupying forces in Iraq, and you don’t happen to be one of the quota of only a few thousand Iraqi refugees that the U.S. government has agreed to accept each year — well, then, I’m sorry, but according the United States government that just isn’t a good enough reason to get out of your way and leave you alone to travel to the United States and live your life peacefully within the borders that the United States government claims the right to fortify. Your suffering, and the danger to your life or the lives of your loved ones, by any one of the countless armies and armed factions rampaging through Iraq, don’t matter enough to them for them to reconsider their immigration quota policy. So this government will keep you penned up in your hellhole ghetto, where you can die for all they care, or, if you somehow get to America, this government will march you out at bayonet-point, and ship you out of the country, back to the ghetto conditions or to the tormentors in Iraq who you risked everything to escape.

And the S.S. St. Louis sailed on from the United States to Sweden, and this is the safe harbor that they found:

But amid a refugee flood that has taxed even this Scandinavian nation’s traditional liberal compassion, Sweden has dramatically narrowed the standards for granting asylum to people from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

. . .

The change in policy stems from a new immigration law and an appeals court ruling this year that found, incredibly to many Swedes and refugee advocates, that legally there is no internal armed conflict in Iraq — allowing deportation of asylum seekers to their home country.

They say there is no armed conflict in any part of Iraq. There is no armed conflict in Somalia; there is no armed conflict anywhere in the Middle East. There is armed conflict in five or six of the most southern parts of Afghanistan, said Kalle Larsson, a Left Party member of Parliament who has sought to preserve asylum opportunities in Sweden.

I’m afraid that what is really happening is the system is sending political signals to the courts and to the migration board, he said. And these signals are saying, There are too many people coming to Sweden.

— Kim Murphy, Boston Globe (2008-07-21): Refugees find door to Sweden closing

Too many people for what? For a bunch of comparatively comfortable Swedes to maintain a particular level of wages, to find an apartment in a particular neighborhood or at a particular monthly rent, to go on living in the style to which they have become accustomed? Well, I guess that’s understandable. I mean, it’s not like those Iraqi, Afghan, or Somali refugees lose much by being forced out of the country at bayonet-point. It’s not like anything important hangs in the balance.

For hundreds of refugees across Sweden, the deportation orders seem to amount to death sentences.

How can we go back? After what happened to us, Iraq to me was no longer a country, Naseir, who does not want his last name published, said as he slumped over at a coffee shop one recent afternoon to hide the tears streaming down his face.

— Kim Murphy, Boston Globe (2008-07-21): Refugees find door to Sweden closing

The fact that this is done by comfortable men and women sitting in well-appointed offices, nicely dressed and with nameplates on their desks, does not matter. The fact that it is done with obfuscatory handwaving and bromides about the National Interest does not matter. What matters is that it is criminal–obscenely criminal–that even one man, or one family should be put through this in the name of some bullshit policy. It is criminal–obscenely criminal–that even one man, or one family, should be forced out of their new homes at bayonet-point, marched back to an almost certain death.

But of course, this isn’t personal; this is policy, which means that it won’t just be one man or one family being murdered by the fountain pen of Swedish immigration bureaucrats.

But the doorway is narrowing sharply. Not only have the new legal standards meant a drop in approvals, with only about 43 percent of applicants winning their cases so far this year, but those who lose are also booted out.

Since February, 290 Iraqis have been ordered expelled from Sweden and have returned voluntarily [sic!] to Iraq, according to the Swedish Migration Board. Ten others have been forcibly returned.

— Kim Murphy, Boston Globe (2008-07-21): Refugees find door to Sweden closing

From GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S.S. St. Louis:

This is life, such as it is, under government immigration controls. It is life as it always will be, as long as politicians and bureaucrats have the power to pick and choose whose reasons for wanting to cross an arbitrary line on a map are good enough, and whose are not.

But it is criminal that there is even one single refugee in this world who cannot immediately find asylum and a chance to make a new life and a new home for herself in a new country.

It is inexcusable that, in the name of the ethno-political system of international apartheid, the governments of the world continue to collaborate in violence against women, in forced starvation, and in ethnic cleansing, by forcing peaceful women and men into refugee ghettoes or, worse, by forcing peaceful women and men back into the maws of the very governments or violent factions who intend to devour them.

It is obscene that a bunch of politicians and unaccountable bureaucrats from the United Nations or the U.S. government would be invested with the power to sit in judgment, from their comfortable offices, on the most marginalized, the most exploited, and the most oppressed people in the world, so that they put all their conventional prejudices and political blinders to work in picking and choosing whose suffering should count as real, in the eyes of the governments of the world, or whose suffering, if acknowledged as real by the government, is important enough to let them into a tiny quota that the government will allow to cross an arbitrary line on a map.

The S.S. St. Louis still sails the seas today, a ghost ship with ghost passengers, without rest and without safe harbor. It will haunt the world forever, as long as this system of international apartheid is enforced.

And all for what? To avoid the voluntary co-mingling of people from different countries? To ensure that the people of the world hear only one language, live and work with people of only one nationality, remain segregated, either by penning them up in their government-appointed place or else by making sure you can monitor all their movements according to a government-created system of passbooks and minders? The idea would be laughable if not for all the ghosts–the ghosts of millions upon millions of real, living, irreplaceable and unique individual people, who were turned back, ruined, persecuted, mutilated, tortured, starved, and murdered for the sake of that idea.

There is another way. A way in which the living can finally live, and the dead can finally rest, in peace. But that other can only become a reality when people are free to move from one place to another, and their reasons, their suffering, and their lives cannot be measured and found wanting by entitled strangers with the power to turn them back and force them back to the tormenters that they risked everything to escape. It can, that is to say, only become a reality with the immediate, unconditional, and complete abolition of all government border controls, and with universal amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants.

There's no room for compromise or moderation in the politics of immigration when real people's bodies and real people’s lives are hanging in the balance. As they are all over the world today.