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The myth of Obama’s ‘disappearance’

by Paul Sperry
If you believe recent media accounts, the former Democratic president has suddenly transcended the political fray. It’s as if a newly “Zen-like” Barack Obama is content to just write his memoir and let Donald Trump and Republicans write the next chapter of history.
In a cover story asking “Where is Barack Obama?,” for example, New York magazine concluded that the 44th president has “virtually disappeared” from the political scene and is sitting idly by as his legacy is dismantled piece by piece. From an exclusive interview, the periodical concluded Obama was “modeling his political engagement out of office after George W. Bush’s” — that is, staying out of the rough-and-tumble of politics, maintaining distance from his former office and resigning himself to be an elder statesman fading into the sunset.
Don’t buy it.
Obama is doing far more to shape the political landscape than is visible. In fact, for an ex-prez, he’s taking an unusually active role in politics, including helping radical protest groups fight Trump and his policies and devising a scheme to flip the GOP majority in the House and permanently turn red seats blue.
From his sprawling DC office not far from the White House, where he oversees a full-time staff of 20, Obama has held regular meetings with Democratic lawmakers, as well as DNC chief Tom Perez, whom he personally helped install to run the Democratic Party. Obama has also met with his attorney general, Eric Holder, to craft a strategy to redraw congressional district maps in Democrats’ favor, according to Politico. Holder now runs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which Obama helped his old friend launch.
Obama, who maintains a home in Chicago, originally said he only planned to stay in Washington temporarily, until his younger daughter, Sasha, now 17, finished high school there. But the family is clearly putting down deeper roots. They recently bought their DC rental home and erected a massive security wall around the property, which includes offices, and are installing a swimming pool.
While it may be true Obama does not want to engage directly in Washington politics, including personally protesting Trump’s policies, he is using a political organizing group he founded to do that for him.
That nonprofit — Organizing for Action — is not exactly a household name. But it is no less than the organizing and training hub of the anti-Trump resistance.
Most recently, OFA helped stage rallies across the country against the administration’s border policies, which it has decried as “cruel and inhumane.” OFA describes itself as a “nonpartisan grass-roots-driven organization,” but it clearly has a pro-Obama agenda. In fact, it’s run almost entirely by alums from Obama’s campaign and White House, including Jon Carson and Jim Messina, who co-chair the group, and Katie Hogan, who serves as its executive director, according to recent tax filings by the nonprofit.
Though Obama has no official or legal role in OFA, he features the group along with his foundation on his post-presidency website and rallies its foot soldiers, who wear blue T-shirts with big white “OFA” letters, in conference calls. After Trump won, for example, he phoned to “fire up” Carson and his team and told them not to worry, that they would “cook up all kinds” of strategies to reclaim the agenda, according to a Nov. 14, 2016, White House transcript of his OFA conference call. More recently, Obama sent an email to “OFA supporters” urging them to “keep going in 2018,” because “there’s simply too much at stake this year.” Obama has tweeted from OFA’s account before and after leaving the White House, and while he was in the White House, he let OFA control his Twitter account, according to The Atlantic.
Earlier this year, moreover, he met with Hogan to discuss how the group can flex its muscles during the midterm campaign to help Democrats recapture the House, according to the New York Times. To that end, OFA plans to train and deploy organizers in 27 Republican-held congressional districts, many with heavy Latino populations, that could be key to a Democratic takeover of the House. With offices in DC and Chicago, OFA has already trained more than 40,000 leftist agitators in person or by webinar, according to tax records.
Behind the scenes, he really may be coordinating the resistance
“We’ve seen grassroots organizing make a big difference this past year, it will again in November,” Hogan recently tweeted.
Meanwhile, OFA has formally partnered with one of the angriest resistance groups, Indivisible Project, which has been criticized for using overly aggressive protest tactics against Republicans at town-hall meetings. Indivisible plans to deploy OFA-trained agitators to storm Republican districts during the Fourth of July recess, starting this weekend, to shout down “Trump’s racist policies,” according to its website.
OFA brings in between $6 million and $14 million in donations a year, and is funded in part by Democracy Alliance, which is connected to the radical group that dispatched agitators to march outside Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s Virginia town house, blaring an audiotape of crying immigrant children and chanting “No justice, no sleep!” The group, CREDO Action, also held signs calling Nielsen a “child snatcher” and shouted, “You’re a modern-day Nazi!”
With the help of 40 full-time staffers, OFA trains volunteers in the hard-core tactics popularized by the late Chicago radical Saul Alinsky, including smearing and intimidating opponents and mobilizing angry mobs to convey the appearance of a mass movement that enjoys a good deal of public support.
Alinsky trainers schooled Obama in these same tactics when he was an organizer in South Side Chicago.
Meanwhile, Hogan and OFA have partnered with Obama and Holder’s gerrymandering project to manufacture future Democrat victories.
Republicans are so alarmed by Obama’s permanent presence and political interference, they are raising money from donors based on these fears, warning in a recent fundraising newsletter about “his scheme to interfere in the 2018 midterms,” according to a June 22 email from House Majority Whip Steve Scalise.
In public, Obama has skillfully kept his distance from recent anti-Trump protests and politicking. But behind the scenes, he really may be coordinating the resistance — and acting as its organizer in chief.
Paul Sperry is a former Hoover Institution media fellow and author of the bestseller “Infiltration.”
Syria’s Assad to America: “What Do You Get From Supporting Terrorists in Our Region?”
Posted on February 15, 2015 by Raymond Ibrahim
In a recent interview, Syrian President Bashar Assad makes some interesting observations. When asked “If you were able to deliver a message to President Obama today, what would it be?” Assad responded (via VIE):
I think the normal thing that you ask any official in the world is to work for the interests of his people. And the question I would ask any American is: what do you get from supporting terrorists in our country, in our region? What did you get from supporting the Muslim Brotherhood a few years ago in Egypt and other countries? What did you get from supporting someone like [Turkish Prime Minister] Erdogan?…. You are the greatest power in the world now, you have many things to disseminate around the world: knowledge, innovation, IT with its positive repercussions. How can you be the best in these fields yet the worst in the political field? This is a contradiction. That is what I think the American people should analyze and question. Why do you fail in every war? You can create war, you can create problems, but you cannot solve any problem.
These last observations concerning the Obama’s administration’s many foreign policy failures are hardly limited to Assad and have been voiced by a myriad of world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Egyptian President Sisi, and Russian President Putin.
After accusing the Obama administration of “encouraging war between neighboring states,” Putin added:
American objectives have not been realized, nor have they accomplished anything, because everything has collapsed. Afghanistan faces problems, and Iraq and Libya are falling apart. Egypt also was going to collapse had President Sisi not taken matters in hand. And all this demonstrates the failures of the Obama administration.
At any rate, based on precedent, what the United States often “gets from supporting terrorists in the region” is terrorist attacks on its own soil, such as 9/11, which was the work of the “freedom fighters” the U.S. once supported in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Courtesy of RaymondIbrahim.com
Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education; he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, NPR, Blaze TV, and CBN. Ibrahim regularly speaks publicly, briefs governmental agencies, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and testifies before Congress. He is a Shillman Fellow, David Horowitz Freedom Center; a CBN News contributor; a Media Fellow, Hoover Institution (2013); and a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow, Middle East Forum . Ibrahim’s dual-background — born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East — has provided him with unique advantages, from equal fluency in English and Arabic, to an equal understanding of the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets, positioning him to explain the latter to the former.
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Amnesty shocker! The secret behind Obama’s ‘order’
President accused of ‘sleight of hand’ to protect self from impeachment
NEW YORK – Did President Obama just set up Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to be a candidate for impeachment instead of himself if conservatives convince the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate that his “executive actions” on immigration are unconstitutional?
The inquiry begins with the question: Where are the executive orders Obama supposedly signed to permit up to 5 million parents of young illegal aliens to remain in the United States for three years?
The White House appears to have engaged in administrative sleight of hand, changing U.S. immigration law not by executive order but by a memorandum “exercising prosecutorial discretion” Johnson signed the day of Obama’s Nov. 20 nationwide address that so far has not been filed in the Federal Register.
Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based watchdog institution Judicial Watch, told WND in an interview the legal status of Johnson’s memo is a serious constitutional question that deserves to be adjudicated.
“The entire implementing authority involves a memorandum published by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson that changes the immigration law, directing federal money to be spent that has not been appropriated by Congress,” he said.
“In my view, there is a serious question whether Jeh Johnson should be impeached for taking this action, and a criminal investigation should be initiated to determine how and why federal funds are being misappropriated,” he declared.
Fitton said DHS “is being hijacked to implement actions Congress has neither authorized nor appropriated funds to accomplish.”
“All remedy options need to be on the table when attacking this threat to the Constitution,” he said.
On Wednesday, attorneys general in 17 states joined in a lawsuit filed by Texas attorney general and governor-elect Greg Abbott that charges the Obama’s immigration action violated the U.S. Constitution’s “Take Care” clause and failed to follow the Administrative Procedure Act’s guidelines for implementing new policies, including a comment period to outline the changes’ benefits, National Review’s Andrew Johnson reported.
Abbot said in a statement the president “is abdicating his responsibility to faithfully enforce laws that were duly enacted by Congress and attempting to rewrite immigration laws, which he has no authority to do — something the president himself has previously admitted.”
The 16 other states are Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Showtime in Vegas
The White House drew attention to President Obama’s trip to Las Vegas Nov. 21, where he was expected to sign two executive orders that would revise his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. But a close examination of the executive actions Obama actually signed shows they had nothing to do with implementing the move he announced in his Nov. 20 White House address to the nation.
According to the White House website, on Nov. 21 Obama signed a presidential proclamation titled “Creating Welcoming Communities Fully Integrating Immigrants and Refugees” and a presidential memorandum titled “Modernizing and Streamlining the U.S. Immigration Visa System for the 21st Century.”
The first of the presidential actions, “Creating Welcoming Communities Fully Integrating Immigrants and Refugees,” filed Nov. 26 in the Federal Register at Vol. 79, No. 228, in the category “Presidential Documents” at page 70769, created a White House Task Force on New Americans to “engage with community, business, and faith leaders, as well as State and local elected officials.” The task force is designed to “help determine additional steps the Federal Government can take to ensure its programs and policies are serving diverse communities that include new Americans.”
The second of the presidential actions, “Modernizing and Streamlining the U.S. Immigration Visa System for the 21st Century,” filed Nov. 26 in the Federal Register at Vol. 79, No. 228, in the category “Presidential Documents” at page 70765, empowered the secretaries of State and Homeland Security, in consultation with the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the director of the National Economic Council, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the attorney general, and the secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor and Education, to make a series of recommendations “to reduce government costs, improve services for applicants, reduce burdens on employers, and combat waste, fraud, and abuse in the system” of issuing immigrant and non-immigrant visas.
The only Obama administration document relevant to altering DACA to accommodate the legislative changes announced in Obama’s address to the nation Nov. 21 is a DHS memorandum signed by DHS Secretary Johnson titled “Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children with Respect to Certain Individuals Who Are the Parents of U.S. Citizens or Permanent Residents.”
The Federal Register lists 26 executive orders President Obama has signed this year, with the most recent being “Improving the Security of Consumer Financial Transactions,” signed Oct. 17 and published in the Federal Register Oct. 23.
The last item DHS filed in the Federal Register relevant to DACA was a form revision filed April 4 that had nothing to do with the actions Obama announced Nov. 20.
Who has the authority?
“What is clear is that Jeh Johnson was the vehicle chosen by the Obama administration to extend temporary residency status and work authorization to millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country,” Fitton told WND.
The “Guide to the Federal Rulemaking Process” published by the Office of the Federal Register specifies agencies “get their authority to issue regulations from laws (statutes) enacted by Congress.”
The guide states further:
In some cases, the President may delegate existing Presidential authority to an agency. Typically, when Congress passes a law to create an agency, it grants that agency general authority to regulate certain activities within our society. Congress may also pass a law that more specifically directs an agency to solve a particular problem or accomplish a certain goal.
An agency must not take action that goes beyond its statutory authority or violates the Constitution. Agencies must follow an open public process when they issue regulations, according to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). This includes publishing a statement of rulemaking authority in the Federal Register for all proposed and final rules.
Johnson’s Nov. 20 implementing memo is technically the announcement of a decision to exercise prosecutorial discretion, not a change in rules.
“Deferred action is a long-standing administrative mechanism dating back decades, by which the Secretary of Homeland Security may defer the removal of an undocumented immigrant for a period of time,” Johnson’s memo noted.
Fitton said an important question is whether or not the Johnson memo is subject to public comment provisions.
“This is a legal question given the impact of the Johnson memo is to stop effectively deportations of illegal immigrants that have been in the United States prior to Jan. 1, 2010, and are parents of children who are U.S. citizens or legal U.S. residents,” he said.
Johnson’s memo attempts to make the deferred prosecution decision announced for the DACA program equivalent to an executive action taken by two recent Republican presidents.
“A form of administrative relief similar to deferred action, known then as ‘indefinite voluntary departure,’ was originally authorized by the Reagan and Bush administrations to defer the deportations of an estimated 1.5 million undocumented spouses and minor children who did not qualify for legalization under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986,” the memo said “Known as the ‘Family Fairness’ program, the policy was specifically implemented to promote the humane enforcement of the law and ensure family unity.”
The memo then attempted to further distinguish deferred action from rulemaking by noting the temporary aspects of the prosecutorial discretion involved:
Deferred action is a form of prosecutorial discretion by which the Secretary deprioritizes an individual’s case for humanitarian reasons, administrative convenience, or in the interest of the Department’s overall enforcement mission. As an act of prosecutorial discretion, deferred action is legally available so long as it is granted on a case-by-case basis, and it may be terminated at any time at the agency’s discretion. Deferred action does not confer any form of legal status in this country, much less citizenship; it simply means that, for a specified period of time, an individual is permitted to be lawfully present in the United States. Nor can deferred action itself lead to a green card.
Finally, the memo acknowledges that the actions taken with respect to the DACA program are not specifically authorized in any legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.
Although deferred action is not expressly conferred by statute, the practice is referenced and therefore endorsed by implication in several federal statutes.
Fitton told WND that while Obama has maintained that his administration has issued executive orders just as prior administrations have done,” he’s now saying the memo signed by Johnson ‘”changed the law.”
In a speech in Chicago after his Nov. 20 announcement, Obama told hecklers, “I took action to change the law.” Confronted with the statement by reporters, White House press secretary Josh Earnest insisted the president was “speaking colloquially.”
But Fitton said there is nothing comparable to Obama’s admission in recent presidential history.
“Obama’s statement is an admission of tyranny.”
In Search of a Strategy
Is it better to have no strategy or a delusional strategy?
The question arises, of course, after President Obama’s startling confession on Thursday that he has not yet developed a strategy for confronting the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda-rooted terrorist organization still often called by its former name, ISIS – an acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham refers to Greater Syria.
You may have noticed that President Obama calls the group ISIL, preferring the acronym that refers to the Levant to the one referring to al-Sham. After all, anything that invokes Syria might remind you of red lines that turned out not to be red lines and the administration’s facilitation of the arming of “moderate rebels” who turned out to include, well, ISIS. The fact is that the president has never had a Syria strategy, either — careening from Assad the Reformer, to Assad the Iranian puppet who must be toppled, to Assad who maybe we should consider aligning with against ISIS — ISIS being the “rebels” we used to support in Syria . . . unless they crossed into Iraq, in which case they were no longer rebels but terrorists . . . to be “rebels” again, they’d have to cross back into Syria or cruise east to Libya, where they used to be enemy jihadists spied on by our ally Qaddafi until they became “McCain’s heroes” overthrowing our enemy Qaddafi.
Got it?
No? Well, congratulations, you may have caught mental health, a condition to be envied even if it would disqualify you from serving as a foreign-policy and national-security expert in Washington. In either party.
The Islamic State’s recent beheading of American journalist James Foley is not the only thing that captured Washington’s attention of late. The Beltway was also left aghast at the jihadisst’ rounding up of over 150 Syrian soldiers, forcing them to strip down to their underpants for a march through the desert, and then mass-killing them execution style.
Shocking, sure, but isn’t that what the GOP’s foreign-policy gurus were telling us they wanted up until about five minutes ago? Not the cruel method but the mass killing of Assad’s forces. Nothing oh nothing, we were told, could possibly be worse than the barbaric Assad regime. As naysayers — like your faithful correspondent — urged the government to refrain from backing “rebels” who teem with rabidly anti-American Islamic-supremacist savages, top Republicans scoffed. It was paramount that we arm the rebels in order to oust Assad, even though “we understand [that means] some people are going to get arms that should not be getting arms,” insisted Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Turns out that quite a lot of people who shouldn’t have gotten arms have gotten quite a lot of arms. And that is because Syria is not the only place as to which Republicans urged Obama to ignore federal laws against arming and otherwise supporting terrorists. They did it in Libya, too.
We have several times documented here that influential Republicans led by Senator John McCain were champions of Moammar Qaddafi before they suddenly switched sides — along with President Obama — in campaigning to oust the Libyan regime they had only recently treated (and funded) as a key American counterterrorism ally. The resulting (and utterly foreseeable) empowerment of Islamic supremacists in eastern Libya directly contributed to the Benghazi Massacre of four Americans on September 11, 2012; to the rise of the Islamic State and the expansion of al-Qaeda franchises in Africa, all of which were substantially strengthened by the jihadist capture of much of Qaddafi’s arsenal; and to what has become the collapse of Libya into a virulently anti-American no-man’s land of competing militias in which jihadists now have the upper hand.
The disastrous flip-flop was no surprise. When Mubarak fell in Egypt, Senator McCain stressed that the Brotherhood must be kept out of any replacement government because the Brothers are anti-democratic supporters of repressive sharia and terrorism. He was right on both scores . . . but he soon reversed himself, deciding that the Brotherhood was an outfit Americans could work with after all — even support with sophisticated American weaponry and billions in taxpayer dollars. The Brothers were in power because, in the interim, McCain’s good friend Secretary Clinton pressured Egypt’s transitional military government to step down so the elected “Islamic democracy” could flourish. When the Brothers took the reins, they promptly installed a sharia constitution, demanded that the U.S. release the Blind Sheikh (convicted of running a New York–based terror cell in the 1990s), rolled out the red carpet for Hamas (the terror organization that is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), and gave free reign to terrorist leaders — including the brother of al-Qaeda’s leader and members of the Blind Sheikh’s Egyptian jihadist organization — who proceeded to foment the violent rioting at the U.S. embassy in Cairo the same day as the Benghazi Massacre.
I could go on, but you get the point. While ripping Obama for having no Islamic State strategy, Republicans are now reviving the inane strategy of supporting the illusory “moderate Syrian opposition.” Those would be the same forces they wanted to support against Assad. The only problem was that there aren’t enough real moderates in Syria to mount a meaningful challenge to the regime. The backbone of the opposition to Assad has always been the Muslim Brotherhood, and the most effective fighters against the regime have always been the jihadists. So we’re back to where we started from: Let’s pretend that there is a viable, moderate, democratic Syrian opposition and that we have sufficient intelligence — in a place where we have sparse intelligence — to vet them so we arm only the good guys; and then let’s arm them, knowing that they have seamlessly allied for years with the anti-American terrorists we are delegating them to fight on our behalf. Perfect.
There is no excuse for a president of the United States to have no strategy against an obvious threat to the United States. But at least with Obama, it is understandable. He is hemmed in by his own ideology and demagoguery. The main challenge in the Middle East is not the Islamic State; it is the fact that the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda forebears have been fueled by Iran, which supports both Sunni and Shiite terrorism as long as it is directed at the United States. There cannot be a coherent strategy against Islamic supremacism unless the state sponsors of terrorism are accounted for, but Obama insists on seeing Iran as a potential ally rather than an incorrigible enemy.
Moreover, the combined jihadist threat is not a regional one merely seeking to capture territory in the Middle East; it is a global one that regards the United States as its primary enemy and that can be defeated only by America and its real allies. This is not a problem we can delegate to the basket-case governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, or to the “moderate” Syrian “rebels.” Yet the Obama Left’s relentless indictment of American self-defensive action in the Middle East has sapped the domestic political support necessary for vigorous military action against our enemies — action that will eventually have to include aggressive American combat operations on the ground.
But the GOP should take note: The jihad is not a problem we can delegate to the Muslim Brotherhood, either. We will not defeat our enemies until we finally recognize who they are — all of them.
“La Bestia” :: Mexicans blame Americans for ‘Death Train’
NEW YORK – The infamous Mexican “Death Train” – also called “La Bestia” [“The Beast’] – on which tens of thousands of illegal alien children from Central America are traveling through Mexico to the United States – is being targeted by criminal complaints from Mexican authorities for allegedly violating the civil rights of passengers.
The Beast is owned and run by a Mexican wholly owned subsidiary of Kansas City Southern, a U.S. train company that acquired the Mexican equipment and routes in 2005 to create a “NAFTA Railroad” that was intended to fit into a multi-modal transportation technology so Chinese companies could deliver products into the heartland of the United States as an alternative to utilizing the West Coast ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Mexican prosecutors have filed criminal complaints charging railroad with complicity in violations of the civil rights of the thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America illegally hitching rides on the train in their efforts to cross into the U.S. over the border with Mexico.
That flood has surged over the last few months, and critics of President Obama say it’s being encouraged by his program to defer deportation proceedings for young illegal aliens, suggesting to them that if they are able to cross into the United States, housing, education, medical and even legal assistance await.
As reported at the time, Kansas City Southern (KCS, NYSE: KSU) completed on April 1, 2005, the acquisition of Mexican Railroad TFM, S.A. de C.V., an acquisition that gained for KCS all the common stock of Groupo Transportacion Ferrovaria Mexicana, S.A. de C.V., the holding company that owned TFM.
The 2005 KCS acquisition of the Mexican railroad occurred under the broad canopy of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, first announced by President George W. Bush in a meeting with the president of Mexico and the prime minister of Canada, held in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005.
In December 2005, KCS changed the name of TFM to Kansas City Southern de Mexico (KCSM), a key piece in putting together the “NAFTA Railroad,” a marketing brand KCS at that time used to describe its North American rail service bringing together KCSM in Mexico and the Kansas City Southern Railroad (KCSR) in the United States.
In 2006, WND reported that Kansas City Southern plans in creating a “NAFTA Railroad” sought to link Mexican deep-water port Lazaro Cardenas as an alternative route for Chinese product shipping containers to enter the United States through Mexico, instead of through the West Coast ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
The plans would use KCSSM and KCS multi-modal railroad links to transport the Chinese consumer goods to a Mexican government customs office operated by Mexico as part of what then was being designed as the Kansas City Inland Port, or SmartPort.
But in a press report from Veracruz, Mexico, dated March 31, 2014, the attorney general of the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Luis Ángel Bravo Contreras, filed a criminal complaint with federal prosecutors against the U.S. railway Kansas City Southern and Ferrosur, a Mexican rail line that operates the “Death Train” in the central part of Mexico.
The charges are that the railroad companies were complicit in the commission of various crimes against migrants jumping on the train for a ride to the Mexican border, including the crimes of robbery, human trafficking, kidnapping, murder and extortion.
A map produced by the Jesuit Migrant Service of Mexico and reprinted by the Washington Office of Latin America, WOLA, a Washington-based NGO [Non-Governmental Organization] aimed at protecting immigrant civil rights, demonstrates train routes into Texas are the shortest route for Central American unaccompanied minors to enter the United States through Mexico.
A WOLA report issued June 17, 2014, described the difficulty illegal immigrants taking “La Bestia” north as follows:
“Migrants in the southern border zone are drawn to ‘La Bestia,’ the train that heads northward to central Mexico and then on to the U.S. border. For hundreds of miles they ride on the roofs of the train cars trying to avoid fatal falls, hot days, frigid nights, and low-clearance tunnels. Every eight to ten days or so, trains depart from two routes that originate near the southern border.”
Not only is the ride physically dangerous, WOLA noted, but the lax security on “La Bestia” leaves migrants at the mercy of Mexican gangs, bandits, kidnapers and corrupt officials.
“The stunning frequency of kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking, rape, and homicide puts Central American migrants’ plight in Mexico atop the list of the Western Hemisphere’s worst humanitarian emergencies,” the WOLA report concluded.
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