The Language of Genocide
Trump Seizes on Coronavirus Crisis to Intensify
Attacks on Immigrants
| revcom.us
On March 20, Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will now turn back all migrants approaching the U.S.-Mexico border. No more pretending that “due process” applies; no more asylum claims allowed. Trump’s order will remain in place for at least one year, or until the “Department of Health and Human Services” determines it is no longer needed.
Last week, U.S. officials said this policy wouldn’t apply to minors. Instead, this week, there were news reports that the U.S. has begun sending unaccompanied immigrant children back to Mexico and Central America.
These children have made a treacherous journey of up to 1,000 miles to flee from violence, rape, persecution, hunger, and the threat of death. Now they are being put on a bus, taken to the “nearest point of entry,” and dropped off to survive (or not) in squalid refugee camps in one of the most violent regions in the world.
Trump sneered that immigrants “place a vast burden on our healthcare system, but during a global pandemic, they threaten to create a perfect storm that would spread the infection to our border agents, migrants, and to the public at large.”
There is in fact no evidence whatsoever that masses of immigrants are, or aren’t, carrying the COVID-19 virus. And if many of them are—shouldn’t people in such desperate straits be tested for the virus, given medical treatment if they were found positive, placed in conditions that minimize the potential for viral spread, and receive proper care? Instead, the American response is to use its armed enforcers to turn people away and to throw them into conditions and situations where COVID-19 and other diseases are almost sure to proliferate.
Trump’s words reinforce the language of genocide. His actions are founded on the ugly lie that American lives are more important than other people’s lives. He is using this lie to institute a regimen of extreme repression, fan racist flames of fear and hate, and tear apart longstanding principles of law under the pretext of confronting the spread of COVID-19.
“American Lives Are Not More Important than Other People’s Lives.”—Bob Avakian, BAsics 5:7
For tens of millions of people all over the world who have been forced out of where they live, every day is a life-and-death battle. They cross deserts, mountains, and oceans; flee armed soldiers and police; are preyed upon by violent gangs; find themselves unable to return to their homelands. Many are forced to crowd together in refugee camps without adequate sanitation, water, food, medical care, schooling—and now are facing the looming threat of COVID-19.
Huge inequalities of wealth and poverty, of luxury and misery, exist in the world in which the relentless exploitation of billions of people worldwide enriches a relative handful who live in splendor. The capitalist-imperialist system—dominated by its biggest power, the U.S.—crushes the lives of countless people. It poisons the environment they live in. Then this system persecutes them for trying to escape the living hell it has created.
One example: Agriculture in Honduras and Guatemala has been decimated by the influx of American produce imposed by unequal trade agreements and the growth of large plantations and ranches for export production. The remaining farmland has been ruined by rising temperatures, extreme weather, and crop diseases spread by one-crop farming. And if people fleeing these conditions make it as far as the U.S.-Mexico border, they are greeted by triple-deep razor wire and heavily armed border patrols.1
We face historic challenges—the coronavirus pandemic must not keep us from standing with these immigrants to STOP the outrages being committed against them.
STOP
The Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants and the Militarization of the Border!
1. Due to threats by the U.S. and the fascist Trump/Pence regime, the Mexican government, led by the “progressive” Andrés Obrador (AMLO), has taken on the role of America’s border security and guards, stopping Central Americans on their southern border, often at gunpoint and with violence, and taking on the U.S.-dictated role of having asylum seekers stay in horrific conditions in Mexico while applying for U.S. asylum instead of being allowed into the U.S. For more, see “AMLO Regime in Mexico: The Phony Socialist Who Does Trump’s Dirty Work.” [back]
Immigrants from Mexico seeking asylum are turned back at the U.S.-Mexico border. Photo: AP
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