Meet the people battling border patrol cruelty...And a new book on Steve Mnuchin
We just published a new book on Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, by Rebecca Burns and Dave Dayen, that takes a hard look at this very-weird-man’s life in Hollywood and banking before he became a key figure in the Trump administration. Because nobody wants to read an entire book-length book on Mnuchin, it’s just 80 pages, and selling for 8.99 in paperback and 5 bucks in ebook form. It’s part of our swamp creature series on Trump’s cabinet, which previously covered Betsy DeVos, Tom Price and Gary Cohn. It’s really good, I promise it’s worth your 9 dollars.
For Strong Arm Press’s next book, we’re looking at the crisis on the border, recently brought into tragic relief by the death of a 7-year-old girl in border patrol custody.
One of the border patrol’s explicit missions is to make the border more dangerous for people trying to approach, whether legally or illegally. Remember, it is 100 percent legal to approach and apply for asylum, but a recent group that attempted to do so was met with tear gas at the port of entry. The trip to the border often requires walking many miles through open desert, so humanitarian and religious organizations do what they can to make that journey less deadly, by leaving supplies -- food, water, clothing, etc. -- for people in need.
The border patrol, meanwhile, looks for those supplies and, as The Intercept has reported, destroys them. That hostile approach resulted recently in the death of the seven-year-old in the custody of border patrol, who died of dehydration after being picked up and not treated quickly enough. (It’s not certain that if she had received immediate attention -- not necessarily medical attention, but immediate access to water -- that she would have survived. But she wasn’t treated immediately, because that’s not how people at the border are treated.)
Since this past summer, Daniel Blue Tyx, a writer based in McAllen, Texas, has been working on a book about the organized effort to push back on the border control behavior, help keep families together and help keep people alive in the desert. It’s a ground level look at the story you see play out in the news only when something extraordinarily tragic happens, or a member of Congress visits an area to bring attention to it. The book is in the final reporting and editing stages, and if you want to help support it (and get a thank you in the acknowledgments) you can help fund the writing, editing and production of it here.
The book is being edited by Laura Moser, a Houston-based writer and editor who ran for Congress in 2018, and sponsored by UltraViolet, the women’s advocacy group. (The Swamp Series was sponsored by CREDO.)
The goal of the book -- aside from telling a compelling narrative -- is to spotlight the groups and people doing life-saving work at the border, making sure people there have the food, water, supplies and legal protections they need. A lot of people want to help the situation at the border, but don’t know how, and this book aims to solve that.
One of the groups that is central to the book, Angry Tías and Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley, is collecting donations that are used to buy those supplies. They’re legit, and if you want to help them beyond (or apart from) supporting the book, you can do that directly here.