#border police

[labrecha]

#UltimasNoticias Me Deportaron por mi Reportaje sobre las Protestas en Columbia

Me Deportaron por mi Reportaje sobre las Protestas en Columbia

[readingsquotes]

The weird anger of these Border Patrolmen made me think about descriptions in the report of Argentine police and military officers who became addicted to interrogation, torture, and the murder that followed. When the military and police ran out of political suspects to torture and kill, they resorted to the random abduction of citizens off the streets. I thought how easy it would be for the Border Patrol to shoot us and leave our bodies and car beside the highway, like so many bodies found in these parts and ascribed to drug runners.

THE BORDER PATROL STATE    Leslie Marmon Silko (1994)

[sweetfirebird]

What to do if border police ask to search your phone

Know how much the law does—and doesn’t—protect your privacy rights.

[girlactionfigure]

During a Border Police activity in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem, police officers noticed a monkey tied with an iron chain next to a garbage container on the street. At the same time, a report was sent to the Nature and Parks Authorities.

Reminder! Illegal animal ownership is a serious offence.

[readingsquotes]

I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped

I was stuck in a freezing cell without explanation despite eventually having lawyers and media attention. Yet, compared with others, I was l

It was surreal listening to my friends recount everything they had done to get me out: working with lawyers, reaching out to the media, making endless calls to detention centers, desperately trying to get through to Ice or anyone who could help. They said the entire system felt rigged, designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to get out.

The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

This is not just my story. It is the story of thousands and thousands of people still trapped in a system that profits from their suffering. I am writing in the hope that someone out there – someone with the power to change any of this – can help do something.

[girlactionfigure]

A Border Police officer was lightly wounded in the stabbing attack at the Damascus Gate entrance to Jerusalem's Old City this evening, police say.

According to police, the assailant attacked the officer with a sharp object, before attempting to flee into the Old City.

Other Border Police officers then shot the assailant.

[readingsquotes]

Acclaimed Latino Author and Filmmaker Detained and Accused: Racial Profiling on the U.S.-Mexico Border

"We can’t do our job without taking ethnicity into account. We are very dependent on that." —DHS official

Examples of verbal abuse abound. In 2017, Border Patrol agent Matthew Bowen rammed a Guatemalan man twice with his truck. The investigation that followed revealed that Bowen had previously sent many racist texts to his colleagues, including one that called migrants “disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling in a fire.” In court, Bowen’s attorney defended him by saying that such language was part of the agency’s culture, that it was “commonplace.” The Border Patrol’s peculiar jargon includes tonk, a word for migrants that refers to the sound of a flashlight hitting someone’s head. According to a report by the ACLU, in 2014, 50 children in Border Patrol detention reported verbal abuse. “You’re the garbage that contaminates this country” was but one example. The sort of abuse also was reported in No More Deaths 2011 report, A Culture of Cruelty: Abuse and Impunity in Short Term U.S. Border Patrol Detention.

...

One big reason the Samaritans were there was because United States’ deterrence policies, implemented in the 1990s, have resulted in at least 10,000 deaths. One part of the deterrence is that the summer Arizona sun is deadly. Now where the film crew was stopped, that sun burned down on the hatless Mayer, who still was forced to sit at the back of the vehicle while Grande and Figueroa were baking inside the Border Patrol truck. When I interviewed them, both Grande and Figueroa recalled how earlier that day the Border Patrol lined up the people from the morning, who had just crossed the border, at the end of the wall. In a line, the asylum seekers stood in the hot sun for a long, long time. This was apparently because Border Patrol was going to take them to the processing center one small group at a time. Both Figueroa and Grande recalled a young boy in the line, playing with a blue balloon, and blowing bubbles. He was a six year old kid, just being a kid, diverting himself before being taken away.

[readingsquotes]

Where Do Many Police Departments Train? In Israel

U.S. law enforcement agencies need partners for effective training to strengthen their identified weak areas. Israel is not such a partner.

"This blog post is from August 25, 2016, authored by Edith Garwood, Amnesty International USA Country Specialist covering Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the State of Palestine.

When the U.S. Department of Justice published a report August 10, 2016, that documented “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement, and culture of retaliation” within the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), there was rightly a general reaction of outrage.

But what hasn’t received as much attention is where Baltimore police received training on crowd control, use of force and surveillance: Israel’s national police, military and intelligence services.

Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, as well as the DC Capitol police have all traveled to Israel for training. Thousands of others have received training from Israeli officials here in the U.S..

Many of these trips are taxpayer funded while others are privately funded. Since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

These trainings put Baltimore police and other U.S. law enforcement employees in the hands of military, security and police systems that have racked up documented human rights violations for years. Amnesty International, other human rights organizations and even the U.S. Department of State have cited Israeli police for carrying out extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings, using ill treatment and torture (even against children), suppression of freedom of expression/association including through government surveillance, and excessive use of force against peaceful protesters."