U.S. war on migrants accelerates
By Chris
Fry, Workers, May 29, 2018
Claudia
Patricia Gómez González, a Maya-Mam woman from Guatemala, killed by the U.S.
Customs Border Police in Rio Bravo, Texas, on May 23.
 |
| Family members and neighbors in the Indigenous community of Claudia Patricia Gómez Gonzáles, dead in Texas, grieve in her home in Los Alonzo, near San Juan Ostuncalco, department of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. |
Karina
Alvarez, the founder of Laredo Immigrant Alliance, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s
rhetoric on migrants had emboldened agents in border towns: “He was describing
us the other day as animals and look now, they shoot us like animals.”
The U.S.
has stepped up a campaign of terror against im/migrant workers and refugees
fleeing the U.S-spawned violence in their home countries.
The
current campaign is spearheaded by President Trump, his arch-racist Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, his Chief of Staff John Kelly and his bigoted
presidential coterie. The new policies are designed, by intimidation and
terror, to prevent those facing repression and murder in their homelands from
traveling to the U.S. to find jobs or seek shelter. The violent policies are
rooted in white supremacy and clearly violate U.S. and international law.
The
administration’s racism was rampant in Sessions’ May 7 speech at the U.S.
border in San Diego: “Today, we’re here to send a message to the world that
we’re not going to let our country be overwhelmed.” Sessions announced that
every person stopped crossing into the U.S. “illegally” will be arrested and
reviewed by the Department of Justice for prosecution. As for families,
children will be taken from parents and turned over to govenment agencies. (San
Diego Tribune)
The San
Diego Tribune commented: “The decision to prosecute asylum seekers who cross
illegally into the U.S. goes against the [U.N.] Refugee Convention of 1951.”
The convention states that countries signing the agreement, as the U.S. did,
will not penalize asylum seekers for illegal entry if they go immediately to
authorities and show “good cause” for their presence. (May 7)
Both U.S.
and international laws declare that asylum seekers who cross the border are not
violating any law and dictate that U.S. officials must allow refugees to have a
legal hearing to rule on their application for asylum. Trump and his henchmen
are openly defying those laws.
Settler-colonial
borders
Beyond
legality, many migrants from Central America are Indigenous, like Gonzales
herself, or have Indigenous heritage. The borders they are crossing exist only
as a result of the genocide and land theft carried out by Spanish and English
settlers. The extreme force being used by the U.S. to police its border comes
from a racist settler-colonial mindset.
The new
DOJ policy authorizes border agents from the CBP and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement to strip all children, even infants in arms, from parents seeking
work or asylum in the U.S. and to place the children in military bases in Texas
and Arkansas. (tinyurl.com/ycynjtye)
An April
20 New York Times article reported: “On Feb. 20, a young woman named Mirian
arrived at the Texas border carrying her 18-month-old son. They had fled their
home in Honduras through a cloud of tear gas, she told border agents, and
needed protection from the political violence there. She had hoped she and her
son would find refuge together. Instead, the agents ordered her to place her
son in the back seat of a government vehicle, she said later in a sworn
declaration to a federal court.” The boy was driven away.
In just a
13-day span after Sessions’ speech, 658 children were separated from their
parents and placed in detention centers. This represents a huge increase, as
700 children were separated from their parents from October 2017 through April
2018. (immmigrationimpact.com, May 25)
“What are
we becoming? Totalitarian regimes take children away from parents to punish
dissidents,” tweeted Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration
advocacy group America’s Voice. “America is taking children away from parents
to punish refugees.”
In fact,
U.S. law and policy for hundreds of years has legalized the inhuman separation
of parents and children — both through breaking up families in “property sales”
of enslaved Black parents and children and through the “legal” kidnapping
of Indigenous children from parents and placing them in “boarding schools”
structured to sever them from their culture and people.
At the end
of March, the Trump regime announced that they would not release pregnant
migrant women from detention centers, notorious for their poor medical care.
“This new policy further exposes the cruelty of Trump’s detention and
deportation force by endangering the lives of pregnant immigrant women,” said
Victoria Lopez, senior staff counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.
(ACLU release, March 29)
On May
25, Trump nominated Ronald Mortensen, founder of the Utah Coalition on Illegal
Immigration, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group, to
be the new secretary of state for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and
Migration. “He has accused undocumented immigrants of ‘destroying the lives of
American men, women, and children.’ And now Trump wants him to lead the federal
agency whose mission is to ‘provide protection, ease suffering, and resolve the
plight of persecuted and uprooted people around the world.’” (New York
Magazine, May 25)
Outrage
over Trump’s atrocities must be converted to militant mass action and
solidarity with im/migrants. This is the only way to stop this racist demagogue
and his administration in their tracks.
Open the
borders and #ShutDownICE!
