Reddit reviews The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Volume 36) (California Series in Public Anthropology)

From the Wall Street Journal (full text below):

>President Trump won two victories on his border agenda Friday, with the Supreme Court allowing the use of military funds to expand the barrier on the Mexican border while Guatemala agreed to serve as gatekeeper for asylum seekers trying to get to the U.S.

>In a 5-4 decision, the justices of the U.S. high court said President Trump can shift about $2.5 billion in military funds to construct an additional 100 miles of wall at the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to seal off the U.S. from illegal immigration.

>In February, Mr. Trump had declared a national emergency in order to divert a total of $6.7 billion from military and other sources, without the approval of Congress, which had signaled willingness to give him far less. Lower courts had barred the transfer of some of the funds desired by the president, but the Supreme Court on Friday ordered those lower court rulings to be suspended.

>“Wow! Big VICTORY on the Wall,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “The United States Supreme Court overturns lower court injunction, allows Southern Border Wall to proceed. Big WIN for Border Security and the Rule of Law.”

>Separately, under pressure from the Trump administration, Guatemala agreed to require migrants traveling through it to the U.S. to seek asylum there instead of at the U.S.-Mexico border.

>Mr. Trump joined Guatemala’s interior minister, Enrique Degenhart, and acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan in the Oval Office to sign what White House officials said was a safe third-country agreement.

>“They can make a protection claim, if they would like, in Guatemala,” Mr. McAleenan said. “So, if they arrive in the U.S. not having availed themselves of that opportunity, they will be returned to Guatemala.”

>The two developments represent hard-fought victories for the Trump administration in its effort to address a flood of refugees along the U.S. border with Mexico, which the Republican president described on Friday as “the crippling crisis on our border.” Mr. McAleenan said he expected the agreement with Guatemala to take effect sometime in August.

>The move comes shortly after a federal judge in California dealt a blow to a Trump administration rule that would have barred most asylum claims from migrants who had passed through any other country after leaving their home nations. U.S. Judge Jon S. Tigar ordered the administration to halt the rule, which had been in effect since mid-May.

>That put increased pressure on the Trump administration to come to an agreement with Guatemala that would block Hondurans and Salvadorans traveling north. In a call with reporters Friday, Mr. McAleenan said the agreement was “obviously part of a broader relationship with Guatemala.”

>Mr. McAleenan maintained that he believed that Guatemala was an appropriate country for asylum seekers from other places, and that the agreement, which he defined as an “agreement to collaborate on access to protection” was within the scope of the administration’s powers in the Immigration and Nationality Act.

>Guatemala’s government said the agreement seeks to prevent the threat of U.S. sanctions that would have inflicted severe economic and social damage to Guatemala. Under the deal, Guatemala will implement a plan to give asylum to migrants from Honduras and El Salvador.

>In exchange, Guatemala’s government said, the U.S. government agreed to expand an agricultural guest-worker program for Guatemalans, allowing them to travel legally to the U.S. The guest-worker program will also include construction and service-sector workers in subsequent stages.

>Under terms of the agreement posted online by the Guatemalan government on Friday, the U.S. government will arrange and cover transportation costs of asylum seekers sent from the U.S. to Guatemala. Unaccompanied minors are excluded from the agreement. The pact can be renewed after two years and it will be revised every three months.

>The Supreme Court order, which split the court along its conservative-liberal divide, allows the administration to begin constructing a barrier along the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border.

>Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, upheld a lower court ruling that blocked the administration’s plan. Friday’s order allows the government to move ahead while it appeals the Ninth Circuit’s decision.

>Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Mr. Trump’s two appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, voted to let the plan proceed. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented.

>“We are pleased that the Supreme Court recognized that the lower courts should not have halted construction of walls on the southern border,” said Justice Department spokesman Alexei Woltornist. “We will continue to vigorously defend the administration’s efforts to protect our nation.”

>The challengers vowed to press on. The decision “will wall off and destroy communities, public lands and waters in California, New Mexico and Arizona,” said Gloria Smith, managing attorney with the Sierra Club. ”The Sierra Club will continue to fight this wall and Trump’s agenda through and through.”

>Justice Breyer—who alone among the dissenters would have allowed the administration to take preliminary steps short of actually beginning physical construction—wrote a brief opinion offering a glimpse into the court’s deliberation. In it, Justice Breyer suggested that a principal question was whether the groups that challenged the administration’s plan to reallocate funds have legal standing to file the lawsuit.

>“This case raises novel and important questions about the ability of private parties to enforce Congress’ appropriations power,” he wrote.

>The Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition sued to block the reallocation in February, alleging that the wall project would inflict environmental harms and reduce the quality of life along the border.

>If private parties lack standing to challenge the president’s action, however, there may be no one who can. The House of Representatives, whose Democratic majority rejected the administration’s border-wall funding request, itself sued to stop the action; in June, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled the House lacked legal standing to file suit. The House said it plans to appeal.

>Justice Breyer’s Friday opinion observed that by issuing the order, “the Government may begin construction of a border barrier that would cause irreparable harm to the environment and to respondents, according to both respondents and the District Court.”

>He said that the government’s only response to the claim of irreparable harm was that the border wall could be taken down, but it doesn’t say where that funding would come from.

>“But this is little comfort because it is not just the barrier, but the construction itself (and presumably its later destruction) that contributes to respondents’ injury,” he continued.

>At the same time, he said, the Trump administration could suffer if its request to move ahead while appealing from the Ninth Circuit was denied. That is because the appropriations the government wants to shift to the wall expire Sept. 30, and there is little prospect that Congress would allocate any funds to the project.

>That political fact, however, formed a basis of the appellate court ruling against the government. Courts, the Ninth Circuit said, should defer “to Congress’s understanding of the public interest as reflected in its repeated denial of more funding for border barrier construction.”

>About 654 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border currently has some kind of physical barrier, and much of the rest of the border has natural barriers. Congress did allocate around $1.38 billion for 55 miles of wall; Mr. Trump deemed that insufficient for what he has described as a crisis of illegal immigration that requires a wall.

>The Trump administration has sought to replace some barriers with tougher materials and to erect some new barriers where there was previously no wall but hasn’t specified where all of the funded construction is to take place.

There are lots of CW angles here, though what I find fascinating is how most of those angles would not have been CW at all if Trump didn't famously make "Build a Wall" part of his platform in 2016. Every previous administration has dealt with illegal immigration over the US southern border by means not that much different. For example::

>No More Deaths depicts the border as a gauntlet which often condemns would-be crossers to grim and uncertain fates. It said the policy was rooted in a 1994 Clinton-era Border Patrol strategy called “Prevention Through Deterrence” which sealed off urban entry points and funneled people to wilderness routes risking injury, dehydration, heat stroke, exhaustion and hypothermia.

(This was also the central point of the "Land of Open Graves" book.)

In an alternative history universe, a different US president would have argued for the necessity of making the southern border impassable, based on humanitarian reasons.

Have you read this book? The Land of Open Graves

It could give you some good inspiration!