Protesters camping out near an Arizona border wall construction site are now getting friendly press coverage from a New York outlet under congressional investigation for ties to China.
A BreakThrough News correspondent spent five days in the camp to document the demonstration against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and what she called “U.S. imperialism,” according to a Thursday post from the outlet. The explicitly anti-ICE outlet received millions of dollars from nonprofit groups tied to China-based Marxist donor Neville Singham in recent years, and it announced a merger in June with another outlet covering Shanghai events with promotion from Chinese state media.
The border wall protesters have persisted since mid-summer in trying to stall construction. Local news reports and the activists’ social media posts show them blocking vehicles, sitting on equipment, climbing in a tree, and getting arrested on charges of alleged trespassing and assault. Construction workers tore down a tree the protesters called “Grandmother” on Monday despite outcry, Tuscon Sentinel reported.
BreakThrough News described the crowd as including a “Palestinian land defender” and others who feel “so connected to this land.”
“Border Patrol has refused to answer questions about the arrests, and protesters returned Tuesday, occupying another tree and calling on the community to come out en masse to reinforce the camp and stop construction,” the outlet wrote.
The Department of Justice recently launched a grand jury investigation into Singham for possible violations of tax or foreign agent laws, anonymous U.S. officials previously said. Peoples Dispatch, which BreakThrough News merged with, has repeatedly covered Chinese geopolitical conferences in Shanghai that Singham was seen attending multiple times. A Chinese public university running the conference reprinted the Peoples Dispatch‘s coverage on its website in 2023.
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The Republican-led House Ways and Means committee also sent subpoenas to BreakThrough News and two other Singham-linked organizations in July to determine whether they should maintain tax-exempt status. BreakThrough News called the investigation unconstitutional and a “witch-hunt” in an August statement from Editor-in-Chief Ben Becker.
“There are miles and miles and miles of potential wall project that so far, just by showing up, people are able to shut down,” a masked protester told BreakThrough News in a video at the Arizona camp. The speaker expressed hope that they could “put a complete stop to major aspects, if not the entire border wall happening here.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
