Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2024 i Mother Jones

THE DESERT AROUND Artesia, New Mexico, had cooled to a comfortable 79 degrees by the time local police officer Beth Hahn steered her black-and-white Chevy Tahoe into the parking lot of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. It was just after 9:40 p.m. on September 15, 2019. She surveyed the scene in front of her. Half a dozen people encircled a young woman in a parking lot near the dorms where hundreds of paid Border Patrol recruits stayed during their four-month training. Before getting out, Hahn clicked on her pocket recorder. She also left the Tahoe’s dashcam rolling, just in case. The call to Eddy County 911 dispatch had come earlier that night from Claude Claflin, a supervisory agent at the Border Patrol Academy. In a Texas drawl, Claflin said…

AT LEAST A FEW times a week, when no elections are underway, the Maricopa County recorder’s office hosts tours of the Tabulation and Election Center, or MCTEC, a gray, one-story concrete fortress on the edge of downtown Phoenix where as many as 2.4 million ballots will be sorted and counted this fall. Ever since the 2020 election, when President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the county helped Democrats flip the state, the site has been the subject of suspicion, threats, and conspiracies. In response to the chaotic scenes of 2020, when Alex Jones showed up with a megaphone and declared that it was “1776,” the county installed a 10-foot-high security fence with an intercom system around the entrance. People in four states have been arrested for threatening the recorder, Stephen Richer,…

THE WORLD’S FIRST Ohlone restaurant is nestled in a lush outdoor space at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Cafe Ohlone/mak-’amham (“our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language) tempts customers with soft-boiled quail eggs, black oak acorn soup, and chia-seed flour brownies. Also, Cowgirl Creamery cheese with herb bread. “Some people ask why these foods are on the menu, even though our ancestors didn’t have that,” says co-founder Vincent Medina. “It’s because Ohlone people like it.” Part of a growing movement of Indigenous restaurants dedicated to reclaiming cultural heritage and educating the public, Cafe Ohlone opened in 2018 with the goal of bringing oṭṭoy (repair) to a place where the Ohlone were long denied sovereignty. Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah runs Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, and there’s Mitsitam…

THE OTHER DAY I asked ChatGPT about a political story I’ll never forget: “What was the 47 percent issue about?” Its answer: The “47 percent story” refers to a controversial comment made by Mitt Romney, who was the Republican nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 election. In a private fundraising event that was secretly recorded and later leaked to the media, Romney stated that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government support, believe they are victims entitled to benefits, and consequently, would vote for then-President Barack Obama. That’s accurate as far as it goes. But there’s one glaring omission: any reference to Mother Jones, which uncovered the story that reshaped that election cycle. The summary contained no links or citations to our reporting. You’d have…

IN 2016, DONALD TRUMP vowed to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Once in office, he ordered sweeping worksite raids, enacted a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, and deliberately separated migrant families, many of whom have yet to be reunited. But thanks to outside resistance, internal opposition, sanctuary policies, legal guardrails, and sheer ineptitude, the Trump administration removed fewer than 1 million people from the country—far behind the number Barack Obama deported in his first four years in office. In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the…

IN 1986, Oxford University Press published The Uncensored War. An analysis by Daniel C. Hallin of media consumed in the United States during fighting in Vietnam, the monograph remains an important account of America’s first televised war. But a small diagram on page 117 would become the work’s greatest legacy: an illustration now referred to as “Hallin’s spheres.” To visualize the model, imagine a target made of two concentric circles, surrounded by a vast hinterland of white space. The smaller circle at the center represents the sphere of consensus, the region of “motherhood and apple pie,” Hallin writes. There, you can find all that is beyond question in US thought: democracy, American exceptionalism, American honor. The larger circle, the sphere of legitimate controversy, is where debates tend to take place:…

THE NATIONAL BORDER Patrol Museum, which sits inside a squat building on a decommissioned bombing range on the edge of El Paso’s Franklin Mountains, has a musty and scattershot feel, as if one of America’s most troubled law enforcement agencies has just emptied its pockets at the end of a long, hard century. Seized and donated artifacts fill every available nook—a hang glider and DIY motorcycles used to haul drugs; a collection of ladders and climbing ropes for scaling fences. There is riot gear belonging to the Border Patrol agents who, deputized as US Marshals, helped James Meredith integrate the University of Mississippi. Near the entrance, looking a little lost, is a miniature Statue of Liberty that once belonged to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The museum, which is privately operated…

TRUMP FRAMES IMMIGRATION as an existential threat to the United States. He has said immigrants are “taking our jobs,” are “not people,” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In fact, the nation’s undocumented immigrants grow and harvest the food we eat, construct our homes, and care for our young and elderly. They pay billions in taxes, start businesses that employ Americans, and help rebuild in the wake of climate disasters. Not only would Trump’s plan rip families and communities apart, but it also would have devastating effects on the economy for years to come. According to a 2016 report by the Center for American Progress, deporting 7 million workers would “reduce national employment by an amount similar to that experienced during the Great Recession.” GDP would immediately contract…

THE BORDER PATROL’S jurisdiction isn’t confined to southwestern deserts or isolated northern checkpoints: Federal law empowers agents to board vehicles and vessels “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States,” whether inland or offshore. “Reasonable” is 100 miles as the crow flies—meaning some 200 million people live within an expansive border zone. 37 states have at least some of their population covered by the border zone Only 13 states are completely outside the border zone. A CBP manual outlines 21 “articulable facts” agents can use to justify stopping a vehicle in the border zone, including if it: is close to the border is on a known smuggling route could have been trying to avoid a checkpoint appears to be heavily laden is from out of the…

AFTER MORE THAN 50 years on the list of the most dangerous illegal drugs in the United States, marijuana is due for a downgrade. In a historic shift earlier this year, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) moved to change the drug’s designation under the Controlled Substances Act from Schedule I, a category that includes heroin, to the less dangerous but still highly regulated Schedule III, alongside ketamine and anabolic steroids. By definition, Schedule I drugs have a “high potential” for abuse without any “currently accepted medical use.” The pending schedule revision, explains Harvard neuroscientist Staci Gruber, who studies the effects of marijuana on our brains, means “we’re no longer saying ‘no accepted medical value.’ That’s a big difference. It is an acknowledgment that there is some accepted medical value.” That…