Keeping the Machine Running
The Mundanity of Recalibration
This week, Notes from the Beautiful Periphery welcomes its first guest contributor. Sito Negron is a longtime border resident and policy advisor to El Paso County Commissioner David Stout. Vanessa Johnson will return next week.
When ICE and federal immigration squads were rioting in Minneapolis in January 2026, and the administration’s signature issue - hating immigrants - was losing support every day, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott stepped in to save the day.
The White House needed to “recalibrate,” Gov. Abbott said after federal officers were caught on video executing a second person and then lying about it. The lies could not stand, because everyone could see it for themselves.
Of the many ways Trump has debased the presidency, his lies about immigrants may be the most corrosive. Consider the wasteful spending of billions with little or no oversight, explosive growth in paramilitary ICE, and creation of a parallel system of judging, warehousing, and shipping people off to who knows where. The lies create a class of people to whom, if this administration and its enablers have their way, basic constitutional protections will not apply.
It’s telling that Gov. Abbott’s response wasn’t to condemn the ultimate in government overreach - public executions by masked agents. No, the governor who once cultivated a conspiracy theory that then President Obama was setting up camps to hold conservatives, and rode to power largely by fomenting fear of immigrants, was teaching the administration how to “calibrate” the targeting of immigrants and advocates to keep it viable as a political issue. Gov. Abbott knows they cannot keep lying about the threat posed by immigrants when those images show the threat is this administration itself.
This is something with which we are well familiar in El Paso. When I moved here in the early 1980s, I found it shocking that we had to pass government highway checkpoints to venture out to the rest of the country. I learned in gradeschool that a basic freedom in the US was freedom to travel, unlike in authoritarian countries, but somehow, we made an exception here.
In the 1990s, after President Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 immigration amnesty, during a spate of anti-immigrant sentiment, it was Democratic President Bill Clinton who tried to appease the racial animus by militarizing the border in El Paso and San Diego. In June 2001, Time Magazine's cover featured Amexica, a place of hope, of exchange and opportunity. Months later, after Sept. 11, without substantial information to warrant the change, it suddenly became a national security threat, and Republicans hammered the term “border security,” with compliant Democrats tagging along.
The wheel turned. “Border security” launders “great replacement,” and Texas politicians show the country how to calibrate between “law and order” and racism, in ways Nixon and Agnew could only have dreamed. Trump saw an opportunity and descended his fake gold elevator.
Of the many ways in which he has done so, his lies about immigrants, built on the platform of lies that has driven Texas politics for the past decade, are the most corrosive to our democratic republic, allowing him to conflate national security, political opposition, and immigration in a way that leaves tens of millions of people, Americans and immigrants alike, vulnerable.
But maybe this is as bad as it gets. Maybe.
Without the theatrics, the media has moved on from Minnesota, and Trump’s approval rating on immigration, his signature issue, is still in the mid-40s. Maybe the sight of secret police snatching people at work and tearing families apart at home and schools irrefutably put a face on the lie that the system goes after only the “worst of the worst.” Maybe that will have staying power, despite the “recalibration.”
Delaney Hall in New Jersey may be the next flashpoint for media coverage. The facts about this place expose those lies, no matter how much they try to recalibrate your attention. In response to coverage of ICE agents attacking protesters, ICE repeats the lie that they are focused on getting murderers and rapists out. Here are the facts: Two of the approximately 10,000 detainees were convicted murderers, or .02 percent. Very few have even been accused of a crime beyond being in the country without authorization, much less convicted. In fact, many are here with authorization.
They can target true public safety threats without rampaging through communities. The truth is that they don’t want immigrants, full stop. They especially don’t want nonwhite immigrants. The courage of Minneapolis residents cut through the lies and showed the world this truth.
But since that disaster - invading a winter people in winter - this administration, following Gov. Abbott’s advice, is trying to “recalibrate,” to keep the machine grinding through people’s lives while limiting the images that show its inherent violence.
It remains to be seen whether their "recalibration" can keep the machine chewing through ever larger numbers of people without images that provoke a moral response.
In a better world, we would be calibrating to identify true threats, to spend money wisely, and to meet the needs of people – both those who are citizens, and those who are guests and future citizens.
We would reverse the growth of secret police, opaque courts, convoluted processes, and warehousing people and deporting them to countries they’ve never been. We would reorient to a welcoming immigration system that balances public safety, national security, economic growth and opportunity, and our heritage as a nation of immigrants.
Every turn of the wheel is a chance to change direction. We are in the midst of another turn. We each, in our own way, must push toward democracy and freedom, or the “recalibrators” of fascism will determine the direction we all go.
 | A guest post by
|