Mexico Cracks Down: Arrests Hundreds Of Central American Caravan Migrants

Mexican police arrested between 300-500 Central American migrants outside the southern city of Pijijiapan, Chiapas, according to DW.

Mexican police an immigration officials rounded up the undocumented migrants who had crossed illegally into Mexico in the hopes of obtaining asylum by the United States. The raid is one of the largest targeting a caravan since the exodus began last year, and follows pressure by US authorities on Mexico to curb the flow of migrants.

Mexico has stepped up migrant detentions since US President Donald Trump threatened last month to shut the US-Mexico border if the caravans weren't stopped. Several organizations have condemned the rise in arrests, warning that detention facilities were overcrowded and the rights of migrants were being violated. -DW

Those arrested were part of a caravan of around 3,000 Central Americans heading north. Witnesses described authorities wrestling men, women and children into vehicles - where they were then driven to buses. DW reports that they were likely headed to migration centers for deportation, according to activists.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-23/mexico-cracks-down-hundreds-central-american-caravan-migrants-arrested-mexican

‘I Was Set Up’: Papadopoulos Tells Sputnik He Was Target of US, UK Intelligence

George Papadopoulos, former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the first person to plead guilty in the Russiagate investigation, told Sputnik Tuesday that he was targeted by UK and US intelligence to serve as a “patsy” who would ease their targeting of the Trump campaign.

"I was set up to become some sort of patsy in this conspiracy, which I believe was designed for two reasons: one was to initially cover up that I was being spied on for other reasons," Papadopoulos told Radio Sputnik's Loud and Clear Tuesday, "and two, to then use me and frame me to eventually undermine the Trump presidency and use me as some sort of conspiracy person that connects all the dots that never existed in the first place."

In October 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI in what was the first guilty plea of those charged in the Russia probe. In the two years since, he has become a household name. A former volunteer foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, he came to the attention of the FBI regarding his contacts in 2016 related to US-Russian relations. In the end, he took a plea to the throwaway charge of making a false statement. He now has a book out called "Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump."

Papadopoulos explained that in the summer of 2015, he went to Europe for work after his initial approach to the Trump campaign was rebuffed and Ben Carson's campaign fell apart. When he was preparing to leave after Trump did eventually approach him with an offer of work, he was invited by Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the London Center of International Law Practice, to a conference on the Link Campus University in Rome, where he could meet well-connected people that would help him in future political work with the Trump campaign.

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201904241074402090-Papadopoulos-Tells-Sputnik-Target-US-UK-Intelligence/

Kushner: Americans’ Wages Are Donald Trump’s Top Immigration Priority

President Donald Trump’s first priority in immigration policy is protecting Americans’ wages, Jared Kushner told an audience at the #Time100 summit today.

“We have a lot of objectives … Number one, he wants to protect American wages,” Kushner said as he briefly described an immigration reform plan which he will present to the president in the next two weeks.

Kushner’s tied Trump top-level support for Americans’ wages to Trump’s other policies that help American investors and CEOs also reach their objectives:

We freed up companies to be able to invest capital, which is creating jobs — we’ve lowered the corporate tax rate and we’ve given a tax cut to individuals, which means there is more consumption. We’re working on trade deals … We’ve figured how to make our country energy independent. We’ve increased the amount of energy we are creating which geopolitically is very important. We’re investing in the industries of the future — Artificial Intelligence, 5G, quantum computing– a lot of things that allow us to be long-term competitive. And then also appointing a lot of conservative judges has allowed us and a lot of businesses to have certainty on what the law is, and so those things, if you couple them with maybe infrastructure [spending] and then immigration reform, I think that will keep out country competitive for the long run.

Kushner’s strategic combination of wages and competitiveness could be the political bargain which preserves the GOP coalition amid chaotic diversity, alienated young voters, and global competition for jobs.

That GOP coalition was broken by the high-immigration/low-wages policies which were pushed by the two prior establishment presidents. For example, those policies impoverished millions of Americans while boosting the GOP’s establishment, so causing the 2016 defeat of the GOP’s establishment candidates by voters who backed New York populist Donald Trump.

In 2018, Americans’ wages rose by roughly four percent, even as companies earned a rising sale, profits, and stock market values.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/23/kushner-americans-wages-are-donald-trumps-top-immigration-priority/

28 Years Ago, Our Enslavement Was Predicted… And We're Still Not Listening

“An untold future lies ahead, and for the first time, I face it with a sense of hope. For if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life; maybe we can too.” — Sarah Connor

I was a kid when I first heard this quote, and It was shocking how we could even think of machines having feelings. Even more, it was interesting the idea in that quote referring that human beings don’t appreciate life.

At that moment I wasn’t a big fan of terminator and to be honest I’m still not the biggest follower, yet, that bit of the end of the movie was nailed into my memory even -especially these days- several years after.

Some years after Terminator, the first movie of The Matrix was released and from the very first time, I was hooked into the whole concept, the world, the characters, the problem though never stopped to think about some of the reasoning behind that movie, just thought, “man, that’s cool!”

There was no literal messaging, just the whole concept to me was exciting and in part was what took me interested in programming and to be honest to try to be “different” because, you know, it felt good at that age to be Neo and I’m not going to lie it still does!

I’ve watched The Matrix so many times, but never really thought to myself what it meant to me or how I would connect it to The Terminator until these days.

It has been more than a year that I’ve been commuting to work. Takes me around 30 to 60 min to get there, during which I do some headbanging at the sound of metal music, read tech books or stare at the traffic jams going on the city. One thing I do from time to time is to watch other people behaviors while listening to music, just because sometimes is a good way to keep your mind away from work, to think of something else for a change. One of those days I started experiencing that the more people jumped into the train, the more evident was a particular behavior: Everyone on the train was holding their phones! I was shocked seeing how everyone would go through whatever they were seeing with just barely blinking. The most concerning part to me is I ignored this before because I was looking down to my phone.

You may think, well it’s 2019, it’s been like that for a couple of years now, so what’s the big deal?

One of my objectives for the previous year for me was to be more in contact with the external world. Doing so took me to really notice how bad it is. What I think it is sad, is that from the moment I forced myself to lay down my phone, was the moment I realized how the world looks like, how all these situations deeply connect with movies that date back at least 20 years behind the current times.

https://hackernoon.com/28-years-ago-it-was-predicted-and-we-are-not-listening-652c0be46df7