The Border Shell Game
Zoom out for a second: The outrage over the Trump administration’s $32 million expenditure to deport migrants to 'third countries' is, frankly, quaint. It spotlights a phenomenon that the mainstream media often presents as a unique aberration, rather than a well-worn playbook. Democratic lawmakers, in a rare moment of introspection, apparently found the price tag for outsourcing human misery a bit
steep, forgetting perhaps that the strategy itself predates their current indignation. This particular shell game, shunting asylum seekers to nations like Guatemala and Honduras, echoes the 'Mexican Repatriation' campaigns of the 1930s, which forcibly removed up to 2 million people, including 1.2 million U.S. citizens, during the Great Depression. The method evolved into Title 42 — a CDC order
that blocked asylum during the pandemic, allowing over 2.8 million expulsions from 2020 to 2023 without due process. Curiously, that policy began under Trump but was defended by the Biden administration well into its tenure—a bipartisan embrace of border brutality that often goes unmentioned. This isn't about solving a 'border crisis'; it's about making the problem disappear from American soil, at
whatever cost. The $32 million, chump change compared to the Pentagon's daily budget, funded a system designed to circumvent international and domestic asylum laws. It’s a classic American foreign policy double standard: demanding other nations abide by human rights while actively outsourcing our own violations, all under the guise of national security. One might wonder why, after such