A Vigilante Militia Defends an Imaginary Border

“Is that what we think it is?” gasped a woman on the Patriot Caravan. The MAGA- and Trump-hatted group of about 25 people were on a walking tour of the U.S.-Mexico border in the desert near El Paso, Texas. It was led by a large, garrulous man named Jim Benvie, a member of the Guardian Patriots, which used to be the United Constitutional Patriots, or UCP.

“Oh sh … It might be the coyotes bringing them in!” said another woman.

“It is what you think it is,” said Benvie. As he lectured about immigrants invading America to the caravan members and the livestream audience on his phone, Benvie gazed south, past parched hills and rocky outcrops, past an invisible line dividing the U.S. from Mexico.

Just on the other side of the line, several men, women, and children were gazing north into the U.S. at Benvie and the MAGA hats.

Terrorizing Women and Children

Until last month, Benvie was the spokesperson for the now-notorious UCP. The group consisted of about nine people who set up camp on land in southern New Mexico that borders Mexico, as well as Texas near El Paso. The UCP arrived in late February. For weeks, local media uncritically reported the group’s claim that members were on the border merely to “observe” migrant crossings and notify the Border Patrol. In late April, however, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico discovered one of the group’s online videos of their activities, which showed that they were involved in detaining migrants while carrying weapons. The ACLU issued a press release denouncing the UCP as armed, fascist vigilantes.

By then, the UCP had published some three dozen videos in addition to the one the ACLU had gotten a hold of; the videos are on Facebook and other sites. They typically show migrant men, women, and children looking terrified and humiliated as UCPers chase them, bark loud commands, order them to sit in dirt, and then stand menacingly over the migrants, wearing military camouflage clothing with their faces covered and some of them packing handguns, rifles, and AK-47s. Posted at least daily on social media, the videos were something new for border militias. They were like post-modern Breughel paintings, depicted darkness and chaos, with a demonic focus on migrants. Their images were often livestreamed, with viewers posting running tirades such as “Those children are not Vassanated [sic],” “Send them all back,” and “This makes me SICK!”

Following the media uproar about the UCP,  the group was evicted from its camp — it turned out that the land members were staying on belonged to a railroad company that hadn’t known the vigilantes were there. The eviction came a few days after the arrest of a man who had claimed to be the vigilantes’ “commander,” Larry Mitchell Hopkins, who was jailed on federal weapons charges that predated the group’s border activities. Then PayPal and GoFundMe shut down the UCP’s accounts for violating policies banning promotion of hate and violence. In response to the ban and the bad publicity, the UCP rebranded itself as the Guardian Patriots.

They still hang out on the border near El Paso, and they pull out their phones and record videos. But most Guardian Patriots no longer wear camouflage or carry weapons. Nor do they habitually chase after immigrants. Instead, they generally focus on people the Border Patrol has already apprehended. Benvie, who narrates most of the videos, continues to livestream images of tired, frightened people squatting in desert sand as a backdrop for his running patter about how America is being invaded and the country needs Donald Trump’s wall.

A man who said his name was Juan Zamora and his dog Spud attend a tour of the U.S.-Mexico border with Trump supporters on May 11, 2019.

Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

Benvie came to border militia activity with a checkered past. In 2018, he did hurricane relief work in areas including Texas and floated down flooded streets in small boats to people trapped in homes. But his history as a heroic volunteer is sullied by civil and criminal charges of fraud and theft. In 2012, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that Benvie was involved in coin-selling schemes that involved stealing and selling customer lists to unscrupulous telemarketers. (Benvie acknowledged to The Intercept that he was “absolutely” involved). Last year, he was charged in Oklahoma with felony possession of a stolen vehicle (he said the charge was due to a clerical mistake at a truck rental office). Disposition of that case is pending, but according to records, Benvie got a court-appointed attorney after declaring that he was a pauper.

Since then, when making and broadcasting videos about the crisis on the border, Benvie asks viewers to send money to the Guardian Patriots, ostensibly so that he and his activists can help to secure the border. The address the group provides for donations has been used by a disbarred Oklahoma attorney, Lewis B. Moon, who has a long list of charges, including disturbing the peace, impersonating a federal law enforcement agent while shooting guns, and making terroristic threats (Moon allegedly told a man he didn’t like that “I’ll put you through a shredder” and “Nobody will ever find anything of you except for your tooth.” He also allegedly said to the man, “You’ve got pretty daughters, don’t you? … I’ll have five niggers rape your daughters. … They’ll rape your daughter and they’ll murder her.”

The vigilantes’ numbers have dwindled since they were the UCP. The nine activists with that earlier group mostly were white and lived in northern New Mexico and Arizona, far from El Paso. Many of those out-of-towners have apparently returned home. The Guardian Patriots now have only three active participants on the border besides Benvie. All are Latinx and two of the three are from El Paso. Although Benvie has told reporters that he’s staying in a camp, Moon has taken a hotel room near a racetrack close to the border, which he apparently shares with Benvie. I recently called the room early in the morning, and a man answered who said he was Moon. He declined to talk, so I asked if Benvie was present. After a silence, a voice that sounded exactly like Benvie’s said that Benvie wasn’t there. When asked if he in fact was Benvie, he replied, “It’s not me,” and hung up.

With his militia chastened and shrunken, Benvie seems to have pinned hopes for expansion on people who actually live on the border. So far, the most active among them is a man who seethes with anger and has a criminal history of violence. Unlike Benvie, he is Latino and local.

Jim Benvie, spokesperson for the newly named Guardian Patriots, left, and Anthony Aguero walk along the banks of the Rio Grande, just outside El Paso, Texas, on the outskirts of Sunland Park, N.M., on May 11, 2019.

Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

His last name is Aguero. He goes by the first name Anthony, but legally he is Pedro Antonio Aguero. He speaks border-accented English and rolling Spanish. He is ensconced in El Paso’s Republican Party establishment as a precinct captain and has worked on local Republican political campaigns. Even so, he said he has not voted in years because he has been too busy.

Aguero, who nicknames himself “Conservative Anthony,” wears vests and T-shirts branded as Border Network News. He calls himself a journalist. But in practice, he is a videographer for the militia who has made a practice of hunting migrants with Benvie. He livestreams by hooking up his smartphone to a small steady cam, and his videos are high quality. He also regularly excoriates El Paso’s Democratic representative to Congress, Veronica Escobar, as a traitor to her country, and he has screamed at her at public events — also via livestream.

Many of Aguero’s videos are startlingly creepy, even by militia standards, and sadistic. Some show him stalking asylum-seeking migrants and the humanitarian aid workers who assist them.

He has recorded these videos outside of hotels and shelters where migrants stay after their release from Border Patrol custody, the locations of which the aid workers try to keep confidential. He has also videoed the bus lot of El Paso’s Greyhound station, apparently intending to film migrants preparing to travel to their sponsors. It is as though Aguero is attempting to dox the immigrants rights movement in El Paso.

It is as though Aguero is attempting to dox the immigrants rights movement in El Paso.

Most disturbingly, he has livestreamed himself chasing migrants in the desert, screaming and bellowing at them to stop and sit down. After Border Patrol agents arrive, his videos show him castigating the migrants as “roaches” and “motherfuckers,” and continuing to yell orders — as the agents look on and do nothing.

The El Paso Republican Party has also done nothing about Aguero’s activities. Local party chair Adolpho Telles sits on prestigious nonprofit boards in the community and co-owns Rosa’s Cantina, the iconic bar made famous by the Marty Robbins song. Telles said that he has known for months that Aguero has been working with militias. But he said that Aguero’s work is independent of what he does for the Republican Party. (Telles also said it is not the party’s business that Aguero doesn’t vote, notwithstanding that he is a precinct chair). Telles said he hopes that in the future, Aguero will behave “in a professional manner instead of a thug.”

Aguero, 34, has a thuggish past to match his present actions. In 2008, according to a sworn police affidavit, a woman was at a bar in El Paso with friends when she saw Aguero and recognized him as someone she used to date. She noticed that he was drunk and offered to drive him home. On the highway, Aguero tried to kiss her and she refused. He punched her so hard that she blacked out. She managed to pull the car over near an exit, and then Aguero punched her again, kicked her, and fled the scene. The woman ended up at a hospital and Aguero was charged with assault.

He pleaded guilty and was put on probation (he said he pleaded because he got tired of fighting the case). A few months later, he was accused of assaulting another woman. (“Anybody could just make up anything about you, without there ever being any kind of evidence,” Aguero told The Intercept.)  His probation was rescinded. But after contesting the charge for almost two years, he was sentenced to only three days in jail.

He served the jail term in 2012. Later that year, he was driving drunk on the highway, going in the opposite direction of traffic, when he caused a collision that seriously injured three people.

He was convicted in 2015 of vehicular assault while intoxicated, a felony, and sentenced to two years in prison.

Aguero says that he has since maintained a clean record. But his videos, with their talk about immigrants as insects and a woman politician guilty of treason against her country, smolder with a rage that sounds as though it could ignite. Even so, Aguero is out and about in El Paso — a community that is so overwhelmingly Latinx that outsiders, including national media, imagine it as impenetrably Democrat. They are mostly right, but that image hides some real numbers. It also hides the fact that the current war on immigrants is also a war on traditional border life, which has always been known for its easy boundary-hopping and affection for neighbors to the south. Now, though, life on the border under Trump free-floats with anguish and fear — including among the U.S. Latinx community.

In 2016, El Paso County was about 82 percent “Hispanic” and, according to the Latino Decisions polling organization, 14 percent of El Paso Latinx voters voted for Trump.

He got even more support in Latinx-dominant communities in other Texas border counties. In Starr, for instance, deep in South Texas, 98 percent of the residents are Hispanic and less than half a percent are white. Trump got almost a fifth of Starr’s vote. Across the country, according to a random poll of Latinx registered voters interviewed in April by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, or NALEO, over a quarter “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with Trump that there is a national emergency on the border, and that a border wall should be built. A roughly equal proportion said they thought migrants were a security threat. And a fifth said they would vote for Trump in 2020, or that they were leaning toward voting for him.

Sam Esquivel, far left, gathers with other supporters of the “Patriot Caravan” near Monument One at the U.S.-Mexico border on May 11, 2019.

Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

Among that fifth are two El Pasoans: Nancy Esquivel, 59, and her husband, Sam, 60. I met them at a bustling El Paso restaurant where the Patriot Caravan was holding a meet-and-greet for people who planned to attend the caravan’s big event the next day. The Esquivels were going. They’d been watching Benvie’s and Aguero’s videos on rightwing social media, and they were eager to meet up with “Jim” and “Anthony,” as they affectionately called the two.

The restaurant was crowded and very loud. The Esquivels sat by themselves in a booth because a table with a big group of Patriots was too full to accommodate them. But it was hard to imagine the couple sitting with a bunch of shouting people: They seemed reserved, introverted. I had to sit close in the booth in order to hear them. Nancy said her family was Mexican and she grew up in a little farm town just north of El Paso. “When we were little, my cousins had to pick,” she said, referring to agricultural work in the fields. Sam is half Latino and spent his boyhood in rural New Mexico. He said he had family who came to the U.S. undocumented.

Nancy talked about Sam’s chronic health problems and the couple’s difficulties paying his doctor bills because of unaffordable insurance in Texas. They’d moved back to the El Paso area after spending years in southern California, where Sam had been laid off from a well-paid job he’d held for a long time. Then he got sick, and Nancy worked for a while in a warehouse to try to keep the two of them afloat.

Nancy’s main preoccupation besides Sam’s illness and difficult medical bills, she said, were the changes she’d seen on the border in the past several years, particularly with immigration. She’d worked at the warehouse with Guatemalan women who were undocumented. She had tried to talk to them about their lives, but she did not speak Spanish and couldn’t really communicate. She said she suspected that the immigrant women’s conversations with each other were about scamming the American welfare system.

Nancy believed that we simply could not afford to support the incoming migrants, to allow them and their children to freeload off America.

Lately, she said, she’d been watching UCP videos on social media, showing large groups of migrants crossing the border and then sitting in the dirt, waiting to be processed by the Border Patrol. “There used to just be a few people coming over,” Nancy said. “But now there are so many!” She believed that we simply could not afford to support them, to allow them and their children to freeload off America. She had never in her life been involved in anything political. But now she and Sam had decided to get out of the house and get involved.

A chatty, middle-aged white woman from the packed table came over. She was also from El Paso and was meeting Patriots tonight for the first time. She offered us some of the homemade pecan pie she’d brought to the meet and greet. It was delicious. I left the restaurant at 8 p.m. As it turned out, I missed the first impromptu Patriot Caravan event.

According to videos later posted on social media, at about 10 p.m., a white male Trump supporter who rides horses with a group called the Patriotic American Cowboys started talking with two women who wore little or no makeup. The man called the women “dudes in dresses.” Furious, they loudly denounced him as a homophobe and a racist. A heated exchange ensued, and management asked the cowboy and the other Caravan Patriots to relocate to another area of the restaurant.

The Patriots were indignant. In their videos, Benvie and Aguero accused the two women of being operatives of Rep. Veronica Escobar. (At the meet and greet, some Patriots were holding up signs calling Escobar “Veronicaca” — “caca” being Spanish for “shit.”)

The Patriots livestreamed themselves relocating in the restaurant. Sam Esquivel appeared in one video, but off to the side of the fray, again looking reserved.

Trump supporters gather on land owned by the American Eagle Brick Company, along the U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso, Texas, and Sunland Park, N.M., on May 11, 2019.

Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

Facing Down the Tourist Threat

The Patriot Caravan kicked off with a disruption, led by Aguero, of Escobar’s monthly town hall meeting in a high school auditorium. The Patriot Caravan, dressed mostly in MAGA hats and American flag-themed clothing, sat clumped together. Sam and Nancy sat with them, but Sam’s brows were knitted. He wore a T-shirt with the letters L, G, B, T — and graphics depicting the Statue of Liberty for “L,” a gun for “G,” and Trump for “T.” The “B” was a bottle of beer.

Escobar knew in advance that the Patriot Caravan was coming. Many other people also showed up, and the congresswoman’s staff instructed all the attendees that if they wanted to be called to the mic to ask a question, they would have to be among the first five people to sign the question sheet. When time ran out for questions, Escobar explained, the meeting would end, but within a week, her staff would personally contact everyone who signed up and answer their questions.

Aguero was No. 16 on the sign-in sheet, according to Escobar’s office. Toward the end of the meeting, he walked up near the podium and raised his hand. Escobar asked him to stop. He raised his hand again. A security guard pulled him out of the meeting hall. As he was led out, Aguero yelled about how something called the “U.N. Open Migration Pact” was causing chaos and ruination. The other Patriots rose up behind him, yelling, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and they marched out of the auditorium.

Aguero was quickly freed, and then he and his group got into cars, drove off, and minutes later were flush with the border, staring at a family on the other side, with Benvie excitedly warning that what they were seeing there “is what you think it is.”

The Patriot Caravan had gone to an area on the U.S. side of the border that included a century-old brickyard with whole and broken bricks strewn helter-skelter on the hills — hills over which the UCP used to film itself chasing people, including, in one production, a terrified woman dragging a suitcase, running, stumbling, and falling onto bricks. The Mexican side of the tour site lay just feet away and featured a museum: compact and homemade-looking, called La Casa de Adobe.

True to its name, it’s made of adobe, and during the Mexican Revolution, it housed Francisco Madero, a hero of the revolution whom Mexico holds in a place of esteem similar to that ascribed to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in America. The Casa is a Mexican version of the log cabin in Springfield, Illinois. Or Monticello in Virginia.

Also on the site, but spanning both sides of the border, is Monument One. It’s a dazzlingly white little obelisk — only five or six feet tall — ringed by leafy flora native to the nearby Rio Grande. Monument One is so named because it is the first marker in the area that delineates the international boundary. A plaque communicates to visitors that if they stand on one side, they are in Mexico, and on the other, the United States. There’s something magical about the little obelisk. It feels like a binational, miniature version of the Washington Monument.

As Benvie continued talking on the U.S. side about immigrant invaders, the group of men, women, and kids on the Mexican side wandered around La Casa de Adobe and over to Monument One. Children romped and parents pulled out their phones. Smiling, they began photographing Benvie and the Americans who stood a few feet away, shouting incomprehensibly in English.

Benvie told his tour attendees and livestream viewers that the Casa was a “fake museum,” a shill prop for people whose true motive for getting near it is to illegally enter America. He also claimed that Monument One was just a set piece for false narratives. Immigrants, Benvie said, “are coached very well” to lie about their motives for approaching and crossing the border. “They have American attorneys on the other side.”

Benvie appeared to know only a few words of Spanish. One is “alto,” in English “stop,” which he yelled at migrants when he was chasing them for his UCP videos. The other word is “siento,” which he also used to yell. He thought it meant “sit down,” but he was mistaken. He didn’t realize that he was actually telling the migrants, “Sorry!”

The white people on the Patriot Caravan tour, mostly non-Spanish speakers, seemed titillated by Benvie’s talk of the fake museum, the perverse boundary marker, and aspiring illegal aliens whom they could videotape, just a few feet away, preparing to dash into America. Border Patrol helicopters buzzed overhead, adding to the sense of apocalypse.

But the El Paso Latinos reacted differently — even Anthony Aguero. They might believe in Trump and his dark myths about the border, but they also knew about the border’s bright realities. How could they not? They had friends and family just on the other side, in El Paso’s sister Mexican city, Juárez, and had crossed back and forth countless times. They’d been crossing since childhood — some even at Monument One.

Anthony Aguero, center, glances back at Jennifer Phelps, left, and Nancy Esquivel as he moves to speak to Mexican tourists at Monument One.

Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

Aguero immediately knew that the smiling people by the Casa and the Monument were not destitute refugees from Central America, but middle-class tourists from Mexico. They were well-dressed, they had no backpacks or suitcases, one of the kids said, “How are you?” in English, and the adults said they were visiting relatives in Juárez, from the interior city of León, in Guanajuato (“The shoe manufacturing capital of Mexico,” a woman bragged). They’d driven to the Casa de Adobe and the Monument because they had the same desire that the Caravan tourists, standing a few feet north, had — to get right up to the border.

In English, Aguero told the non-Spanish-speaking Patriot Caravan that the people facing them were just tourists. Some Caravan participants smiled and tried to angle their phones at Monument One for binational photo and video ops with the Mexicans.

In Spanish, meanwhile, Aguero lectured the Mexicans about how their country’s lax immigration policies toward Central Americans were severely hurting Mexico, and didn’t these folks agree? They nodded politely and blankly. He shook their hands.

Benvie stood off to the side, continuing to insist that “those people are not tourists.”

“If we walked across, we’d be arrested?” asked a Caravan member, a young, blond woman.

“Yes,” Benvie assured her.

But Nancy and Sam Esquivel were having none of it.

“Hey, hey, hey, hey!” Benvie yelled to the couple as they walked dreamily into Mexico. “Come back!” A cacophony of desperate advice followed from the U.S. side: “Come back!” “You need to be on this side! Seriously!”

Sam returned to the United States immediately, but Nancy lingered, walking up to Monument One and hanging out with the Mexicans a bit, then drifting back to America. The Mexican police did not question or arrest her.

Nancy Esquivel, left, and her husband, Sam, walk along the U.S.-Mexico border after both crossed into Mexico and back.

Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

When I asked what she had been thinking when she walked into Mexico, Nancy spoke about her childhood. “As a kid, my cousins would bring us,” she reminisced. “We went all over. Why can’t we just cross? What’s out there? What did I have to fear? I’m not used to this border.”

Minutes after the Esquivel incident, Benvie got into a protracted shouting match with a reporter from Mother Jones, who grilled him about the rash of civil suits and other complaints against him for fraud and unpaid debt. Benvie denied everything and the reporter persisted. Benvie livestreamed the exchange as his Facebook followers posted hostile comments about the reporter including, “Get his stupid liberal ass,” “Punch his lights out,” and “THAT IS WHAT THE DEMONS DO.”

The argument lasted so long that the Patriot Caravan, including the Esquivels, got bored or embarrassed, and most walked back to their cars and horse trailers. Anthony Aguero went with them. He suggested that the group go for lunch to a hamburger place — or better yet, Tacos Don Cuco. “The Patriot Caravan’s going to be a thing now,” he said to the camera. “Always, your country first.”

The post A Vigilante Militia Defends an Imaginary Border appeared first on The Intercept.

Border Official Admits Targeting Journalists and Human Rights Advocates With Smuggling Investigations

When first confronted with evidence that it was collaborating with Mexican law enforcement in a sweeping intelligence-gathering operation targeting journalists, activists and attorneys along the U.S.-Mexico divide, Customs and Border Protection was silent. When still more evidence emerged, in the form of documents leaked by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower, the agency dismissed the significance of the revelations as routine law enforcement work.

Now, more than four months after the story broke, CBP is owning up to its operations — in a way — and raising new questions about its treatment of the press and immigrant rights advocates on the border.

A summary of CBP’s review of its own operations, detailed in a letter from the head of the Office of Field Operations and obtained by The Intercept, now confirms several components of the motivations behind the controversial border crackdown, including Mexican law enforcement’s suspicion that journalists were facilitating illegal migrant crossings and violence against the authorities; collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico in response to those concerns; and CBP’s targeting of last year’s migrant caravans as a potential hotbed of human smuggling.

“In October of 2018, the threat level of the Central American migrant caravan in Mexico reached higher than normal levels, they demonstrated violent tendencies, and presented transportation, medical, and housing demands to the Government of Mexico,” Randy J. Howe, executive director of OFO, wrote in a letter to Mana Azarmi, an attorney at the Center for Democracy and Technology, last week.

Earlier this month, Azarmi’s organization led a coalition of more than 100 groups seeking answers regarding CBP’s targeting of journalists. “It cannot be a crime to advise asylum-seekers about their rights, or to report the government’s abuse of those rights,” Azarmi told The Intercept. “DHS is criminalizing compassion.”

In his letter, Howe confirmed that “CBP partnered with the Government of Mexico and other law enforcement agencies” to counter the purported threat emanating from the migrant caravans. At the time, in the midst of the 2018 midterm elections, migrant caravans were a rallying cry for President Donald Trump, who described their approach as a “national emergency” and used their advance to launch “Operation Faithful Patriot,” a military maneuver involving the deployment of thousands of troops to the border.

While many on the political left dismissed the president’s actions as a stunt, that was not the case among White House-aligned media outlets. Breitbart News, the sponsor of a Border Patrol union podcast, published multiple stories in October 2018 reporting on violence associated with the caravan. The coming migrants were also a frequent topic of alarm on Fox News, from which the president is known to draw much of his understanding of world events, which later trickles into policy on the ground.

“It cannot be a crime to advise asylum-seekers about their rights, or to report the government’s abuse of those rights. DHS is criminalizing compassion.”

Amid the backdrop of frenzied political agitation surrounding the exodus of thousands of mostly Central American asylum-seekers, CBP began investigating “possible violations” of U.S. Code 1324, an increasingly favored prosecutorial tool of the administration prohibiting a range of activities under the umbrella of human smuggling.

“A number of journalists and photographers were identified by Mexican Federal Police as possibly assisting migrants in crossing the border illegally and/or having some level of participation in the violent incursion events,” Howe wrote. “Imperial Beach Border Patrol Station Agents were attacked multiple times by caravan groups on the border attempting to illegally cross.”

Howe went on to say that “CBP utilized various sources of information in assessing the intentions of the caravan upon their arrival in Tijuana,” and that those “varied sources of information helped identify a number of people involved in assisting migrants cross the border illegally,” as well as witnesses to the “violent actions taken against law enforcement at the border.” In November 2018, a month after Howe said the “threat level” associated with the caravan increased, NBC News reported that DHS was gathering intelligence on the caravan through paid informants and the monitoring of WhatsApp groups.

According to Howe, “CBP followed through with appropriate investigatory queries and compiled caravan information from various sources to determine if subsequent investigation was warranted.” The OFO chief added that CBP’s efforts to gather information were “standard law enforcement practice.” He said that journalists are not targeted for their profession or the stories they pursue, and that his agency has “specific provisions” in place concerning encounters with the press.

“Occasionally,” he acknowledged, “CBP may inconvenience law-abiding persons in our efforts to detect, deter, and mitigate threats to our homeland.”

Azarmi argued that what’s emerged in recent months reflects more than an inconvenience to travel. “Lawyers, activists, and journalists who associate with asylum-seekers have every right to do so,” she said.  “Surveilling them and searching their computers and cellphones could chill lawyers from providing necessary legal services and chill journalists who are reporting on the asylum system.”

Central American migrants stand on a mound before attempting to cross from Tijuana to San Diego, as seen from Tijuana on Dec. 31, 2018.

Photo: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images

“For the Americans”

Howe’s letter both confirms prior reporting and enlarges the backstory of how the gaze of the U.S. government’s border security apparatus fell upon journalists and advocates, while at the same time, raising new questions and leaving old ones unanswered.

In February, The Intercept published an investigation in which 19 sources — including journalists, immigration attorneys, and advocates — described a pattern of heightened law enforcement at the San Ysidro port of entry in San Diego beginning at the end of 2018 and continuing through the new year. Sources provided consistent accounts of their interrogations at the port, which included being shown photo lineups of known border activists and being asked to identify who they knew. In a number of cases, the phones or cameras of those being questioned were seized or examined by U.S. authorities.

Multiple migrant rights advocates described prolonged detention at the port. In one case, a U.S. citizen living in Tijuana said he was shackled to a steel bench for more than five hours. In addition to the ramped-up use of so-called secondary screenings, The Intercept investigation detailed the experiences of two award-winning photojournalists and two attorneys at a prominent immigrant rights office who were denied entry into Mexico during the period of heightened border enforcement.

Several photojournalists working near the wall dividing San Diego and Tijuana described U.S. Border Patrol agents filming them as they worked, accusing them of inducing migrants to cross and threatening them with human-smuggling prosecutions; videos provided to The Intercept supported these claims. Several described having their passports photographed by Mexican law enforcement. When asked who they were collecting information for, one of the photographers recalled, a Mexican police officer replied, “For the Americans.”

The Intercept made repeated and detailed requests for comment on the claims over multiple days but did not receive an on-the-record comment from CPB by publication. At the time, Sen. Ron Wyden’s office described the events detailed in the reporting as “extremely disturbing” and confirmed the opening of an investigation into the matter.

The following month, an NBC affiliate in San Diego published leaked documents provided by a DHS whistleblower that confirmed and advanced The Intercept’s reporting. The documents showed that CBP, working alongside Homeland Security Investigations, the powerful investigative wing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement otherwise known as HSI, together with the FBI, compiled a “secret database” of 10 journalists, a U.S. citizen attorney, and 48 other individuals as part of a joint investigation with Mexican authorities. The work was a component of “Operation Secure Line,” the campaign previously known as Faithful Patriot.

This time, CBP offered a general statement to the press, noting that “criminal events, such as the breach of the border wall in San Diego, involving assaults on law enforcement and a risk to public safety, are routinely monitored and investigated by authorities.”

In search of more concrete answers, Wyden, along with Sen. Chuck Grassley called on then-CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to provide an unclassified briefing on his agency’s targeting of journalists and advocates on the border. Members of the House Homeland Security Committee, meanwhile, sent the commissioner a letter seeking documents on his agency’s operations. McAleenan, who is now the acting director of DHS, missed his early March briefing with lawmakers.

The push for transparency escalated further last week, when Sens. Tom Udall, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Richard Blumenthal signed a letter again demanding answers from McAleenan. In addition to the surveillance of journalists and advocates on the border, the senators called on McAleenan to address a report published by The Intercept earlier this month, which revealed that DHS had received and disseminated information harvested by a private intelligence firm on more than 600 protests against the administration’s policy of family separation.

“The details behind CBP’s surveillance programs are shrouded in secrecy, leaving the public and Congress in the dark about the targeting of those working to shed light on immigration policies,” Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center, told The Intercept. “This follows a troubling overall trend of a lack of transparency and disinformation campaigns waged by the White House as DHS asks for more funding for hateful border enforcement programs.”

Migrants run from tear gas launched by U.S. agents, amid photojournalists covering the Mexico-U.S. border, at the Chaparral crossing in Tijuana on Nov. 25, 2018.

Photo: Rodrigo Abd/AP

Unanswered Questions

In his letter, Howe wrote of multiple attacks on Border Patrol agents stemming from last year’s caravan. While the OFO chief did not offer details or specifics, it’s likely that he had the events of November 25 and the early morning hours of New Year’s Day in mind — two moments when U.S. authorities launched tear gas at migrants, including women and children, on the San Diego-Tijuana border, and accusations swirled that radical American activists played a role in escalating tensions.

While it’s possible, if not likely, that these allegations piqued the interest of U.S. law enforcement agencies, Howe’s letter does nothing to explain why Nora Phillips and Erika Pinheiro, senior litigators with the Los Angeles- and Tijuana-based organization Al Otro Lado, were later barred from entering Mexico. Nor why award-winning freelance photojournalists Daniel Ochoa de Olza and Kitra Cahana were subjected to the same.

“CBP confirmed in writing that it targeted journalists for questioning because, CBP says, Mexican Federal Police identified them as ‘possibly assisting migrants in crossing the border illegally and/or having some level of participation in the violent incursion events,’” Linda Moon, a Stanton Foundation national security fellow with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told The Intercept. “If the Department of Justice received a similar tip, it would have to get the attorney general’s approval before questioning any of the journalists under longstanding internal policies that exist to protect news-gathering activities from undue law enforcement scrutiny.”

Moon, who is working on litigation with NBC San Diego to secure the release of documents related to CBP’s operations, said, “It’s high time for a set of meaningful, Justice Department-style news media guidelines for CBP and its sister agency ICE.”

The expansive view of what counts as harboring or smuggling has included the arrest of Teresa L. Todd, who was detained by the Border Patrol after pulling over to help three young migrants she encountered on the side of the road.

Howe’s letter provides the latest evidence that federal law enforcement is keenly interested in bringing criminal charges against opponents of the president’s immigration policies, on the grounds that those opponents’ activities have crossed a legal line. At the center of that effort is a statute known as 1324.

In April 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an order to federal prosecutors — still in effect — to ramp up the previously rare harboring and smuggling charges contained under 1324. The most dramatic example to date of prosecutors following through on Sessions’s order is the case of Scott Warren, a humanitarian aid volunteer in Arizona, currently facing 20 years in prison under 1324 harboring and conspiracy charges for allegedly allowing two undocumented men in a remote stretch of the Sonoran Desert access to food, water, and a place to sleep over two nights in 2018.

Over the past two years, there have been a number of signs that Trump administration officials were eager to bring 1324-based charges against other individuals and organizations affiliated with asylum-seekers and the caravans the president has railed against. As veteran border reporter Debbie Nathan noted last month, the number of people hit with smuggling and harboring charges jumped by nearly a third from fiscal year 2015 to 2018, with the bulk of the increase occurring after Sessions’s 2017 order went into effect. The expansive view of what counts as harboring or smuggling has included the arrest of Teresa L. Todd, a government attorney in West Texas, who was detained by the Border Patrol after pulling over to help three young migrants she encountered on the side of the road.

As recently as this month, a migrant rights advocate in Arizona was arrested while accompanying an asylum-seeker to the Lukeville port of entry. The volunteer, Ana Adlerstein, told The Intercept that CBP officers accused her of human smuggling while in detention, referencing the 1324 statute specifically.

DHS has appeared particularly interested in the group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the U.S.-based organization most prominently affiliated with the recent migrant caravans, and its leader Irineo Mujica (government attorneys prosecuting Warren’s case in Arizona have described him as an unindicted co-conspirator, though little evidence has emerged to support their reasoning).

“If anybody’s encouraging or inducing aliens to enter the United States illegally, it’s the U.S. government.”

In interviews with The Intercept in February, multiple individuals who were pulled into secondary screening in San Diego said Mujica and Pueblo Sin Fronteras came up during their questionings. Members of the organization, meanwhile, described being questioned about the asylum and know-your-rights trainings they provide to migrants south of the border. This line of interrogation suggested that some elements of law enforcement believe that organizations such as Pueblo Sin Fronteras and its volunteers have entered into prosecutable territory. Brandon Judd, head of the Border Patrol’s union and ally of influential White House adviser Stephen Miller, reinforced that view when discussing the issue of migrant caravans and the groups that support them in a radio interview last spring.

“They’re coaching them. They’re teaching them what they need to say when they cross the border illegally, and frankly, if any one of these individuals crosses the border illegally, those people that helped facilitate them to cross the border illegally need to be prosecuted,” Judd said at the time. “That’s smuggling. That’s furthering the entry of individuals.”

Alex Mensing, a Pueblo Sin Fronteras volunteer who was included in CBP’s photo lineup, told The Intercept that Judd’s accusation has been hovering around his organization for more than a year and that it’s false. “The simple answer is that that’s not true, and the less simple answer is that we encourage people to exercise their rights, and there’s a lot of ways in thinking about rights,” he said. The legal ground has shifted considerably under the current administration, Mensing noted, with critical restraints imposed on bond hearings once given to asylum-seekers. At the same time, CBP has used practices such as “metering” at ports of entry widely under the current administration, limiting the number of people permitted to apply for asylum each day. As the Associated Press reported recently, as many 13,000 asylum-seekers are currently waiting in Mexico for an opportunity to make their case in the U.S.

“If anybody’s encouraging or inducing aliens to enter the United States illegally, it’s the U.S. government,” Mensing said.

Brian Griffey, a researcher at Amnesty International, echoed that view. “We know those Trump policies are pushing asylum seekers to cross irregularly.”

For months, Griffey has investigated the crackdown on immigrant rights advocates and humanitarian aid providers along the border for a forthcoming report. In the course of that work, he said, “CBP has presented zero facts suggesting any human rights defenders supporting asylum-seekers in Mexico have committed any crimes,” adding that the agency was “grabbing at straws to find indicting information about anyone who’s been supporting asylum-seekers in Mexico.” The Amnesty researcher said that “the vagueness of the crimes of ‘encouraging’ or ‘inducing’ migrants and asylum-seekers to cross irregularly has clearly offered CBP a gaping loophole to intimidate, threaten, and harass anyone who explains to refugees their right to seek asylum in the USA — even if they cross irregularly.”

“Those crimes could equally be applied to the Trump administration’s architects of its illegal asylum and border policies,” Griffey went on to say. “CBP has not opened an investigation yet into Stephen Miller for aiding and abetting,” he said — but under the logic applied advocates and humanitarian aid providers, it could. “He is more responsible than anyone for the driving of thousands of asylum-seekers into the hands of smugglers in order to cross irregularly into the U.S.”

The post Border Official Admits Targeting Journalists and Human Rights Advocates With Smuggling Investigations appeared first on The Intercept.

The Hair Puzzle No Product Can Solve

I began to lose hope in my hair’s future while watching Friends in 2003. During a series of episodes in which the whole gang took a trip to Barbados, the expanding frizz of Monica Geller’s hair in the Caribbean humidity garnered its own narrative arc. The character, known for her exacting, control-freak tendencies, was powerless against her follicular shortcomings.

What this meant for my then-teenage self felt clear. If even Monica couldn’t control her hair—and if her frizz was relatable enough for an extended joke on an inescapably popular sitcom—my own destiny couldn’t be much better. Until that point, I had maintained some optimism: The women’s magazines I snuck into my mom’s cart at the grocery store contained so many smooth-hair tips and tricks that I’d assumed the flat-iron arts were a thing I could eventually master. But as Monica’s hair ballooned further from scene to scene, so too did my doubts that my own fluff-ball tendencies could be blamed on adolescent inexperience.

Many of you can guess how this story ends, a decade and a half later: I have bought many hair serums, tried many techniques, watched many YouTube tutorials, and moved out of the oppressive heat and humidity of my native Atlanta, and nevertheless, my hair persists. Looking down the barrel of another steamy summer, I decided to find the answer, once and for all: Can frizz ever really be defeated?

[Read: When “good hair” hurts]

To solve a problem, you first must determine the cause. In the case of frizz, the ultimate culprit is a hair cuticle that’s raised instead of flat. The cuticle is the outside layer of your hair, and when it lies flat, hair appears smooth. The more the cuticle is raised, the easier it is for moisture to penetrate the hair shaft. “Naturally, hair wants moisture,” says Vanessa Thomas, the CEO and senior chemist at Freelance Formulations, a Florida-based company that develops cosmetics, including hair products. “Part of the cause of frizzing is dehydration.” When the air around you is wet, your hair’s natural response is to suck up some of the ambient moisture to create equilibrium. That’s why frizzed hair feels thicker: Raised cuticles create a rougher texture, and each individual strand is, for lack of a better term, bloated.

But frizz doesn’t affect all people equally. Curly hair has a more raised cuticle, as does hair that’s been colored or otherwise chemically treated. Damage from heat styling can affect the cuticle’s integrity, and fine hair tends to be weaker than its thicker counterparts, says Thomas. Natural oils from the scalp can help ameliorate these issues by both coating and moisturizing hair, but that doesn’t work for everyone. “Curly hair specifically tends to be more susceptible to frizz because of the complexity of curl patterns,” explains Candace Witherspoon, a stylist and hair-care educator at Devachan Salon in Manhattan. “Oil from the scalp sometimes has a hard time traveling down the hair shaft.”

There are two different schools of thought on how to mitigate the untamable look of a misbehaving hair cuticle: Use synthetic chemicals to create a barrier layer that your hair can’t create itself, or moisturize hair into complacency with natural oils so strands are less likely to absorb moisture from the air. Thomas says that the best synthetic barrier chemical on the market right now is silicone, and it’s the one her clients most frequently request. “In about 85 percent of the cases, it’s an antifrizz treatment serum that contains silicone” that they want developed, she says.

Silicone is a controversial ingredient, however, and Witherspoon tells her clients to avoid it. “Sulfates, parabens, and silicones are all products that strip hair of its natural oils,” she says. Silicone can cause product buildup on hair, which means it might make it more difficult for strands to absorb much-needed moisture from oils or conditioners.

Even so, silicone remains “the highest-performing ingredient you can have for antifrizz,” says Holly Maguire, Freelance Formulations’ creative director. (The company develops both silicone and silicone-free frizz products for its clients.) Maguire says the chemical’s drawbacks can be managed: Periodic use of clarifying shampoos and rinses gets rid of residue, although some anti-buildup products also strip hair of moisture, which can put antifrizz efforts back to zero. The most important thing, Maguire emphasizes, is to be aware of the chemicals you’re using and how they can affect your hair.

[Read: My lifelong Frizz-Ease addiction ]

For her clients, Witherspoon recommends an approach that uses products with plant-derived oils that moisturize hair and help create a protective outer barrier. Beyond product, though, she says that the way people treat their hair on a day-to-day basis can have a big impact on creating or avoiding frizz. “It can also be a result of the amount of manipulation curlies sometimes tend to do to their hair from brushing, combing, fluffing, or touching just a bit too much,” she says. Often, she says, the best thing you can do is use moisture-rich products, sleep on a silk pillowcase to avoid friction, and not battle your hair’s natural tendencies so much.

Hair frizz might seem like a frivolous concern, but hair—and especially how black women, who constitute much of Witherspoon’s clientele, wear their hair—can have an outsize impact on the course of a woman’s professional and social life. Curly hair has a history of being viewed as unprofessional or ungroomed, an assumption with frequently racist undertones. The episodes of Friends that sparked my teenage hair-anxiety spiral feature an extended, derisive comparison between Monica and Diana Ross, as though viewers would surely understand that Diana Ross is embarrassing because of her hair. For many women, successfully controlling their hair goes far beyond aesthetics.

Still, both Thomas and Witherspoon agree with that sinking feeling I had in the mid-2000s, a period of time where American culture was particularly enamored of flattened hair: Frizz isn’t a problem that can be solved completely, at least with current hair-care technology. Even a silicone serum’s protective powers break down throughout the day or when confronted with too much moisture. In the two decades I’ve spent unscientifically product-testing my way through serums, sprays, shampoos, chemical relaxers, and keratin treatments, nothing totally does the trick for my fine, curly, color-treated, heat-damaged hair.

Part of that is because my head is a worst-case frizz scenario of partially my own making. But the larger issue might be that topical cosmetic treatments of any kind are imperfect fixes for the ways that human bodies naturally deviate from arbitrary beauty standards. There’s no fancy goo you can put in your hair on a humid day that will be as effective as simply refusing to worry about it. That’s Witherspoon’s approach: “I like to tell my clients to not be afraid of a little frizz.”

The 2020 Presidential Candidates’ Families Look Like Americans’

A particular variety of nuclear family has become recognizable as the “presidential” kind of family: a married father and mother, the kids they’ve begotten together, a handful of household pets. In the 20th century and beyond, such families have dominated the White House, from the Tafts to the (Franklin Delano) Roosevelts to the Kennedys to the Obamas, with only a few exceptions.

But a look back further in history suggests that this wasn’t always the norm. A number of 18th- and 19th-century commanders in chief had what we might now call “blended” families—George Washington himself, for example, had no children of his own, and was a stepfather to his wife Martha’s four children with her previous husband, who died. And the families on the campaign trail for the 2020 election suggest that the tidy, intact nuclear-family unit may not be the template for a first family much longer.

Today, “we’re still caught in this kind of post–World War II mold of what families look like,” says Barbara Perry, the director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for presidential scholarship. “People sometimes jokingly talk about the old-style ‘American family’ of the sitcoms in the 1960s. But that’s been the standard that we applied for our presidents, too, because that’s how society viewed the ideal American family—with the mother and the father and the 2.2 children.” Perry notes that in recent years, even candidates for local office have positioned themselves as members of relatively traditional families: When she gets mailings from candidates in local races in Virginia, “even those candidates almost always show themselves with their families,” she says. “It’s always a spouse, and sometimes children, and a dog—always a dog.”

But in the 2020 presidential election, a “traditional” presidential family will be just one option among many.

In the second decade of the 21st century in America, fewer than half of children live in a household with a married couple who have never been divorced or remarried, according to the Pew Research Center. (In 1960, by comparison, this figure was 73 percent, and in 1980, it was just over 60 percent.) Some 16 percent of children live in “blended family” households, with a stepparent, stepsiblings, and/or half siblings, according to the same report; one in five children lives with a single mom. Meanwhile, census data from 2017 indicate that more unmarried adults are living in the United States than ever before—and data from Gallup and the Census Bureau show that more than half a million same-sex married couples now live in the United States. In other words, American families and households look markedly different from how they looked just a few generations ago, and the 24 candidates running for president in the 2020 election have families and households that look remarkably like Americans’.

Of the 24 candidates, eight have blended families: Donald Trump has children with multiple partners; the candidates Elizabeth Warren, John Hickenlooper, Bill Weld, and Joe Biden are married and have children from previous marriages, while Bernie Sanders is married and has a son from a previous relationship; Sanders, Tim Ryan, and Kamala Harris all have stepchildren. Seven are remarried divorcés or divorcées (Trump, Warren, Hickenlooper, Weld, Sanders, Eric Swalwell, and Tulsi Gabbard), and four have no children of their own (Harris, Gabbard, Pete Buttigieg, and Cory Booker). One has a spouse of the same sex (Buttigieg), one is a remarried widower (Biden), and two are unmarried (Booker and the self-help and spirituality author Marianne Williamson). Two candidates have at some point lived as single mothers (Warren and Williamson).

Of course, as Perry points out, only some of these more “modern” family structures would be firsts. Buttigieg, for example, would be the first president married to someone of the same sex, and Warren and Williamson would each be the first woman ever to have been a single mother—or, for that matter, the first woman at all—to hold the office. But tellingly, there is less than a 50-50 chance that the president would be someone who is currently in a mixed-gender marriage with their first spouse and has had children only with that spouse. (See: Beto O’Rourke, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Wayne Messam, Seth Moulton, Andrew Yang, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, John Delaney, Steve Bullock, and Michael Bennet.)

That one-third of the candidate field is remarried after divorce or widowhood—and that six of the eight remarried candidates are over 55—should come as no surprise. Remarriage, especially among those over 55, is more common in recent years than in prior generations: Data from 2013 show that two-thirds of previously married adults ages 55 to 64 had remarried, and half of previously married adults 65 and older had. In 1960, those stats were 55 percent and 34 percent, respectively. That more than a quarter of the candidate field has been divorced also reflects a broader shift in American culture. While divorce rates have fallen among some age groups in recent years and risen dramatically among others, overall, being divorced is much more common, especially among older Americans, than it was a few generations ago.

[Read: Divorce and the family in America]

In some ways, the fact that Americans could soon see one of these family structures in the White House is a return to form. The early years of the United States saw more diverse first families; specifically, Perry says, more presidents had blended families or lacked wives or children, but that usually had more to do with high mortality rates from illness than with divorce. James Madison had no children of his own, but his wife, Dolley, a widow when they married, had one son. Of course, at that time, stepfamilies were so common that they were barely distinguished at all from other families, says Catherine Allgor, the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. “A man had dominion over all his children, whether they were his or not,” she says. (Other presidents are today known to have had children with multiple partners, though it wasn’t common knowledge at the time. Warren G. Harding, for example, was found in 2015 to have fathered a child with a woman who was not his wife. Thomas Jefferson, a widower when he took office, is now widely believed to have fathered multiple children with Sally Hemings, his slave.)

Allgor, whose research specializes in the lives of the first ladies, also notes that in early American history, it wasn’t so much the structure of a candidate’s family that mattered to voters so much as whether a candidate and his wife seemed like an effective governing team. First ladies, she says, often hosted the social gatherings where the unofficial political dealings of Washington took place at the time—so a worldly or charismatic first lady, such as Louisa Adams or Dolley Madison, could be a boon to her husband’s campaign.

Despite the long-held tradition of the president being a husband and a father, the American people have elected bachelor presidents—such as James Buchanan in 1857 and Grover Cleveland in 1885. (Cleveland famously got married while in office, becoming the only president to ever marry at the White House. He was also accused of fathering a child before he married, and not with the woman who eventually became his wife.) Still, Allgor notes, Buchanan appointed his niece, Harriet Lane, to the role of first lady during his presidency. “A male politician needed a woman by his side, and it didn’t necessarily have to be one he was married to,” she says. “In the 19th century, people recognized this—that for politics to happen, you needed these two spheres, the official and the unofficial.”

By the late 20th century, when advances in medicine, a prospering postwar economy, and a Baby Boom resulted in a higher rate of intact nuclear families, nontraditional family structures had become controversial enough that having one could nudge a presidential candidate out of contention. Perry, who has written three biographies of members of the Kennedy family, notes that John F. Kennedy’s father urged him to marry in his early 30s to preempt any unwanted questions that might arise about the sexual orientation of an unmarried candidate for political office. Adlai Stevenson was divorced, Perry points out, when he ran for president in 1952 and 1956; when his first wife died in 1972, her obituary said their divorce had been “considered a liability” to his campaign. And when Nelson Rockefeller, then the governor of New York, briefly left the presidential-campaign trail to be with his new wife for the birth of their first child in 1964, he drew attention to the fact that he and his wife had both left their previous spouses, and he narrowly lost the California Republican primary to Barry Goldwater. Though that isn’t necessarily why he lost, Perry thinks it didn’t help. “The people thought that was just so horrible,” she says.

Of course, the 1960s and 1970s saw climbing divorce rates in the United States, and in 1980, Americans elected their first divorced president, Ronald Reagan (who divorced his first wife, Jane Wyman, in 1949 and married Nancy Davis in 1952). The presence of Reagan’s two adult children from his first marriage on the campaign trail with him made his blended family especially visible, Perry says. Tellingly, though, whatever controversy they generated was never enough to threaten his viability as a presidential candidate in the eyes of the public.

Ultimately, Perry characterizes the “traditional first family” template as a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon, one that was part of a cyclical trajectory: Candidates didn’t have to adhere to it to be elected before the 20th century, then they did, and now they don’t once again.

“People had this sense, especially in the early and mid–20th century, of what a typical American family would look like,” Perry says, “and so our presidents reflected that.” But it is a direct result of various cultural reforms of the late 20th century (the sexual revolution, the rise of divorce, the legalization of same-sex marriage) that the country has ended up with such a diverse group of family structures represented in the 2020 candidate field—and such a notably modern family in the White House.

[Read: Inside Ivanka’s dreamworld]

But with respect to presidential-family diversity, the current occupants of the White House represent a new milestone, Perry says, “in terms of how many times you can be married and divorced and be president, and what the [first family] can look like, [and] in terms of [a president having] multiple children from multiple wives.” Trump’s relative openness about his extramarital affairs, she adds, also represents a break from presidential tradition (well, the openness more so than the affairs themselves). Because of Trump, she says, “one big mold is broken now.”

Perry wonders whether the Trump family’s time in the White House will further normalize the idea of nontraditional first families. But ultimately, she says, at any given time, the president’s family will tend to reflect the “ideal” or the “typical” American family of the day. “Because of where we are in our society, we see those kinds of families [in the race for the presidency]—childless, or married to a divorced person, or two people who are divorced, or a gay couple,” she says. “We’re always picking people that either we think we look like or we aspire to look like.”

Tanzania Was East Africa's Strongest Democracy. Then Came "The Bulldozer."

DAR ES SALAAM—John Magufuli began shaking things up on his first full day in office.

On November 6, 2015, the newly elected president walked unannounced into Tanzania’s Ministry of Finance, peering into empty offices and interrogating frightened staff—letting it be known that a government long characterized by laxity was in for a major change. He later canceled independence day celebrations and redirected the funding to fight cholera, purged more than 10,000 so-called ghost workers from the public-sector payroll, and initiated a crackdown on corruption and underperformance that saw numerous senior officials sacked, some following scoldings on live television.

Africa took notice: Twitter users across the continent adopted the hashtag #WhatWouldMagufuliDo to speculate how he might clean up their own governments. Ten months into his first term, polling by Twaweza, a regional civil-society group, found that 96 percent of Tanzanians approved of his performance. In a country that has long been one of the continent’s most stable democracies, where freedom of expression has historically been protected, that near-unanimous level of approval was astounding.

Since then, a more troubling pattern has set in: In its three and a half years in power, Magufuli’s government has jailed rival politicians, pop stars, and journalists; prevented teenage mothers from returning to school; and threatened mass arrests of LGBTQ Tanzanians. New regulations severely restrict social-media critics and criminalize the publication of data not endorsed by the government. Tundu Lissu, an outspoken opposition member of Parliament, barely survived an attempted assassination in 2017, and last October, Mohammed Dewji, Tanzania’s only billionaire, was kidnapped for 10 days. Mdude Nyagali, a young opposition activist, was abducted by gunmen on May 4; he was discovered last week dumped in a bush and showing signs of torture. Critics say that none of these acts have been thoroughly investigated by the authorities.

Now Tanzania’s 60 million people are beginning to realize that the honeymoon period is over, and that their country is more and more being governed by repression.

“There’s been a big shift to a much more constricted, constrained environment,” Aidan Eyakuze, Twaweza’s executive director, told me. “People are scared to say what they used to be able to say.” Eyakuze’s own passport was seized by the authorities after his organization reported last July that support for the president had plummeted to 55 percent.

[Read: The future of Kenya’s democracy is hanging in the balance]

In some ways, the 59-year-old Magufuli is hardly an anomaly in a region dominated by strongmen. Though much of sub-Saharan Africa saw sweeping democratic gains after the Cold War, political and civil rights have remained stagnant in West Africa, declined moderately in southern Africa, and fallen precipitously in the East and Central subregions since the mid-2000s, according to the think tank Freedom House. While new leaders in Ethiopia and Angola have made notable recent strides toward openness, democracy in Tanzania’s neighborhood is hardly robust. Leaders of three of its immediate neighbors—Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi—have clung to power beyond their original legal mandates and preside over some of the world’s worst human-rights records. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, former President Joseph Kabila has positioned himself to rule by proxy in retirement. Although Kenya, East Africa’s economic powerhouse, has avoided the “presidents for life” syndrome, its elections are regularly disputed.

Tanzania long stood out as an exception. A single party, known today as Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has ruled the country since Tanzania’s 1964 creation as a merger between the former British colony of Tanganyika and the British protectorate of Zanzibar. But Tanzania’s leaders have respected term limits, and tolerated a vibrant opposition since the adoption of a multiparty system in 1992. The country has never experienced major civil conflict. Many credit Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere, with forging a strong sense of national identity, which minimized the ethnic divisions that continue to plague many countries in the region.

Yet Nyerere’s economic policies, including a failed scheme that resettled millions of people into planned villages, also left a legacy of underdevelopment. Even as economic growth accelerated over the past decade, Tanzania remained notorious for its slow pace of life and a government often paralyzed by waste and dysfunction. Hassan Abbas, the chief government spokesman, says superfluous trips and unnecessary workshops—frequently at beachside resorts—were rife.

[Read: Nigeria’s militarized democracy faces a test at the polls]

Magufuli, the son of peasant farmers who earned the nickname “The Bulldozer” during his road-building tenure as minister of works, changed all that. He greatly restricted civil-servant travel and has yet to leave the continent as head of state. Few would dispute that accountability under his rule has risen—Abbas boasts that Magufuli has “relieved” more than half of his cabinet ministers. While some question the lack of due process, many Tanzanians support this drive against impunity. Twaweza polling in November 2017 found 85 percent of citizens believed that corruption had declined from five years prior. Felista Mauya, an attorney with the Legal and Human Rights Centre in Dar es Salaam, says stronger oversight has led to notable improvements in key public services, such as health care.

“This president came into power with a certain vigor and zeal to make sure things are happening,” Abbas says. “We want to see a Tanzania that is running.”

At the same time, Mauya and other civil-society activists say the assault on civic space has been sustained and vigorous—a result of both top-down decrees and legislation written by the CCM-dominated Parliament. Magufuli’s government has banned the live broadcast of debates in Parliament and enacted regulations imposing hefty fees on bloggers. It has also actively enforced a 2015 “cyber crimes” law, signed by his predecessor, Jakaya Kikwete, that was intended to combat the spread of false information but also designates jail time for “insulting” the president and has been used as part of a wider campaign against dissent. And it has severely restricted opposition rallies, despite the fact that they are allowed by law; several opposition politicians, including Freeman Mbowe, leader of the main opposition party, Chadema, faces charges of sedition.

[Read: Can a new president really solve South Africa’s corruption problem?]

Magufuli’s “muscular nationalism,” as Eyakuze calls it, includes an intensifying war on information. In February, authorities suspended The Citizen, a leading English-language daily, for a week after it reported a decline in the value of the Tanzanian shilling and a slight discrepancy between rates on the street and at commercial banks. Amendments to the national-statistics act passed by Parliament in September prescribe jail time for communicating or disseminating any data “intended to invalidate, distort, or discredit official statistics.” Critics fear that this will stifle independent research, like the polls carried out by Twaweza—which now has to seek permission to conduct its next round of surveys—and outlaw third-party oversight of crucial government data.

“Economic management in a democracy means that people need to have a shared understanding of reality,” says Justin Sandefur, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Global Development, who formerly advised Tanzania’s National Bureau of Statistics. “The government is working really hard to make sure it has a monopoly on that shared understanding.”

Coincidentally or not, these amendments come amid growing evidence that Magufuli’s top-down economic management has led to unintended consequences. Although the World Bank forecasts 2019 GDP growth to exceed 6 percent, Tanzanians from various walks of life report that money is tighter—in Twaweza’s July poll, 72 percent of respondents mentioned poverty as a major challenge for the country, compared with 34 percent before Magufuli took office.

Restrictions on the export of grain and a bizarre plan to cut out middlemen from the cashew industry have rankled farmers. Businesspeople  say the crackdown on corruption has had the unintended consequence of making it harder to do deals, and rising policy uncertainty has compelled banks to withhold lending. Acts of resource nationalism—such as the levying of an extraordinary $190 billion tax bill on London-based Acacia Mining, initially met with praise at home—are making foreign investors wary. Last month, the Tanzanian government blocked publication of an IMF report that warned of “unpredictable and interventionist policies” it deems likely to significantly hinder economic growth. The suppression of civil liberties has caused some development partners to withhold funding, while a drive to collect taxes, including from petty traders who have long operated outside the formal economic system, has further squeezed the poor. Richard Fabian, who sells kingfish, barracuda, and red snapper along the bustling Dar es Salaam waterfront, says the economic situation now is the worst he’s experienced in his 15 years on the job. Sales have been so poor that his wife and children have returned to their home village because he had to downsize his rental from a family house to a single room.

Fabian, like 58 percent of the electorate, voted for Magufuli in 2015, and despite his predicament says he appreciates his cleaning up of government and may support him for reelection next year—particularly if the economy begins to rebound. He may not have a choice: Newly passed legislation gives a state-appointed registrar sweeping powers over internal political-party matters, which opposition leaders say puts the country on a path toward becoming a de facto one-party state. Hashim Rungwe, an attorney and the chairman of the Chaumma Party who finished fifth in the 2015 presidential election and is considering running again, says the prospect of a free and fair vote next year is highly dubious. And democratic space, he fears, will only continue to decline thereafter.

“We are going backwards,” the 70-year-old says from his Dar es Salaam office. “Only one person is giving orders. And when he orders, you comply.”

Sunrise Movement Calls for Mass Climate Demonstration Outside Democratic Debate in Detroit

On Monday night, at the final stop on the Sunrise Movement’s “Road to a Green New Deal” tour across the United States, the group called for a mass youth-led mobilization to pressure Democratic candidates to make the 2020 election a referendum on climate change. On July 30, the scheduled date for the the second Democratic presidential debate, Sunrise hopes to bring tens of thousands of young people to Detroit to present all the Democratic contenders with three demands:

• Sign the no fossil fuel money pledge.
• Commit to making the Green New Deal a day one priority if elected president.
• Pledge support for a presidential debate on climate change so voters can hear where candidates stand on the issues.

Sunrise co-founder Varshini Prakash called it the “largest action our movement has organized to date for the Green New Deal.” Monday night’s event came exactly six months since Sunrise activists staged a protest in the office of soon-to-be-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, joined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had yet to be sworn in to Congress.

Some 1,500 people turned up for the sold-out event in the Cramton Auditorium at Howard University to hear Ocasio-Cortez, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey, policy writer Rhiana Gunn-Wright, and Intercept columnist Naomi Klein, among others. The event came just one week after a landmark UN report concluded that at least a million species are at risk of extinction due to human activity, and just days after carbon dioxide levels were recorded at the highest levels ever in human history.

“I wish as a public servant I could tell you everything is going to be alright,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who served as the final speaker of the evening. “But I can’t tell you that today, because I’m not interested in lying to you…frankly there is no reason for us to be comfortable right now.”

Activists at Monday night’s event were nonetheless hopeful and spoke unapologetically about the need to center frontline and vulnerable communities in the policymaking process. While none said his name outright, multiple speakers blasted taking a “middle ground” approach to climate change, a reference to Joe Biden, who reportedly told Reuters last week that he sought a “middle ground” approach on global warming.

Ocasio-Cortez ripped “conservatives on both sides of the aisle,” drawing laughs and applause from the crowd skeptical of Democratic intransigence on the Green New Deal. “No middle ground!” a man shouted, drawing agreement from Ocasio-Cortez.

“I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act then are going to try and come back today and say we need a middle-of-the-road approach to save our lives,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That is too much for me.”

At a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday Biden defended his record on climate and said he’d be releasing a detailed climate plan by the end of the month.

Activists say they’re ready to mobilize voters to show politicians there’s strong demand for taking bold action on climate. Recent surveys have shown that climate change is a top voter priority for Democrats, and other recent surveys have revealed increased climate change alarm among voters. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University reported that nearly three quarters of Americans said they grasped that global warming was happening, a jump of more than 10 percentage points from 2015.

While activists are now calling for a full presidential debate dedicated to climate change, in 2016, there were no questions dedicated to climate during the general election presidential debates at all, and in the primary the discussion was limited to fracking policy.

“I think we have talked about climate change more in the first two months of 2019 than in the last two presidential races combined,” said Prakash at the end.

Another speaker Monday night was Jeremiah Lowery, a D.C. native, the chair of DC for Democracy, and a board member for the DC chapter of the Sierra Club. He told The Intercept that the energy from the national Green New Deal “did trickle down and inspire [local] DC organizations and advocates” to push for a 100 percent clean energy bill, landmark legislation which the DC City Council passed in December.

Some D.C. advocates are also now in discussions about pushing for the establishment of “an expansive green jobs program for unemployed residents,” Lowery said, adding that the Green New Deal has also “done wonders”  to mobilize local youth into the climate fight. “I’ve seen so many youth,” he said, “who are organizing, locally and nationally for the first time.”

The post Sunrise Movement Calls for Mass Climate Demonstration Outside Democratic Debate in Detroit appeared first on The Intercept.