In LEFT TO DIE, we document how families of the disappeared face a negligent and hostile Border Patrol search and rescue response system.

Lacking adequate government emergency services, many seek help from aid groups.

Border Patrol routinely obstructs these efforts. 🧵⬇️

Families often receive urgent calls from loved ones who are lost and in distress in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, or from an eyewitness who was with them in the desert.

These calls can contain crucial details regarding the person’s location and medical condition.
Faced with an inadequate and discriminatory emergency response system controlled by Border Patrol, family members take on the monumental work of acting as emergency first responders.

Here’s a partial list of actions family members have taken to locate their missing loved ones...
1. Repeatedly calling police, Border Patrol, ICE offices, hospitals, detention centers, morgues, immigration attorneys, non-profits, and news outlets.
2. Taking out missing persons ads, putting up posters, searching and posting on the Internet, in hopes of hearing word of their loved ones whereabouts.
3. Hiring private detectives and private helicopter companies to search for their loved ones in deserts and detention centers.
4. Traveling to the border area where their missing loved one disappeared to search in person, or to meet with authorities and humanitarian groups to advocate for a search.

Family members have even made the dangerous border crossing themselves to search for lost loved ones.
Family members may also be undocumented and thus assume serious personal risk in reaching out to immigration enforcement or traveling to militarized border regions.

Families not only take on the burden of searching; their efforts face active obstruction from Border Patrol.
We found that Border Patrol obstructed family and humanitarian search efforts in at least 25% of cases.

We document numerous forms of obstruction and interference. These include…
1. Refusing to share important information.
2. Providing false and misleading information to families.
3. Directing families & advocates to non-working numbers and full voicemail boxes.
4. Denying access and refusing humanitarian parole to eyewitnesses in immigration detention.
5. Criminalizing and harassing families and humanitarian search teams, and numerous other forms of obstruction and non-cooperation.
This pattern of Border Patrol interference directly undermines urgent efforts to save lives when government actors refuse to mobilize, further fueling the crisis of death and disappearance in the borderlands.
For details, read the full report at https://t.co/JGdys8OMus.

This summer, No More Deaths is launching a search + rescue volunteer program. For more information and to apply, visit: https://t.co/i8u9O011qT

More from Government

This article by Jim Spellar for @LabourList misses the point about why Labour needs to think seriously about constitutional reform - and have a programme for it ready for government.


The state of our constitution is a bit like the state of the neglected electric wiring in an old house. If you are moving into the house, sorting it out is a bit tedious. Couldn’t you spend the time and money on a new sound system?

But if you ignore the wiring, you’ll find that you can’t safely install the new sound system. And your house may well catch fire.

Any programme for social democratic government requires a state with capacity, and a state that has clear mechanisms of accountability, for all the big and all the small decisions that in takes, in which people have confidence.

That is not a description of the modern UK state.

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"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics –
https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.