Barbarity and Needless Suffering Continues and Intensifies on the U.S. Border as “Surge” of Migrants, Particularly Children, Are Forced Into Inhumane Conditions

March 22, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Migrants at Mission, Texas, March 19, 2021. Photo: AP

 

From a member of the National Revolution Tour

As revcom.us reported last week, a “record number of migrants—mainly unaccompanied minors—children—are now in detention on the U.S.-Mexico border, being held in conditions unfit for human beings. The U.S. Border Patrol ‘facilities’ that these children are being kept in are effectively jails, and their stays there are increasing in length—with many detained far past the legal limit of 72 hours.”

These unaccompanied children have been arriving at the rate of 400 a day this month (March 2021), according to the New York Times.¹ The vast majority of these children come from the poorest nations of Central America—the “Northern Triangle” of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. These numbers do not include children who come with their families—families as well as single adults are being turned away altogether. Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said on Sunday, March 21, that “the border is closed.”²

Though the Trump/Pence regime has been removed from power, voted out in massive numbers (and it’s worth noting that millions of the people who did vote for Biden did so in no small part out of hatred and disgust for what was done to immigrants overall, and specifically to those children who were traumatized by the regime’s family separation policy), the nightmare for so many is not over, and every day needless suffering is being perpetrated by this system.

Bob Avakian spoke to the Trump/Pence regime’s genocidal thrust and horrific policies against immigrants in his series Donald Trump—GENOCIDAL RACIST, saying:

Since becoming president, along with unleashing vicious raids to deport immigrants, tearing apart families, Trump has put tens of thousands of immigrants—mostly from Mexico and nearby countries in Central America—in concentration camps on the border, while separating even very young migrant children from their parents.

Many people have pointed out that all this is the kind of thing Hitler did to “demonize” and “criminalize” Jews as he put them in concentration camps, and then murdered 6 million of them.³

Trump, in policies and in words, whipped up (and continues to do so, even out of power, as was demonstrated by his fascist braying about the border in his CPAC speech) a whole fascist movement that is primed to accept, and is in fact itching for, such genocidal policies. Where the Trumpist mass movement attacks Biden for his handling of this present “surge,” they do so out of fervent belief that the present administration is not cruel, racist, or thorough enough.

It has real consequences that, as Bob Avakian put it in his New Year’s Statement,⁴

nearly half this country has passionately, aggressively and belligerently embraced what is represented by “Trumpism.” The unavoidable truth is that this country, the much-proclaimed “Shining City on a Hill,” is full of fascists!—in the government at all levels and in large parts of the society as a whole.

This can be seen in the recent surge of anti-Asian, xenophobic hate crimes and assaults, and in the poison being produced by fascist outlets like Fox “News,” which paints a distorted picture of reality in which Biden has “opened the borders” to “illegal aliens” and claims that the desperate throngs of people coming to the U.S. are “terrorists.”

Let’s be clear. The concentration camps are not gone. They did not magically evaporate on January 21, 2021. Many of the children who were separated under Trump have not been reunited with their parents. The cruelty and barbarity continues, even if not in the most blatant and deliberately cruel fashion.

While Biden does not engage in the same rhetoric, and his policies are not the same as those carried out by the Trump/Pence regime, he and the Democrats—as a party of the rulers of this country which dominates and oppresses the masses of people all over the world, and as the “top-dog” enforcers of this system of capitalism-imperialism—head a system which is the root source of the tremendous, compounding crises that are causing mass migration of human beings, displaced and flung across the world by poverty, massive climate change, wars for empire and misogynist violence.

As revcom.us has posted previously⁵ on the conditions that drive people from Central America to the U.S.:

Direct U.S. support for vicious tyrants and their murderous armies and death squads in the 1980s led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in the Northern Triangle countries. This reactionary violence was aimed at suppressing resistance movements backed by the U.S.’s main global rival at the time, the Soviet Union (which had become a capitalist-imperialist power following the overthrow of socialism in the mid-1950s). The expansion of economic plunder by U.S. corporations in the decades that followed—aided by the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)...made it impossible for huge numbers of people to support themselves on the land. And the widespread violence by gangs (often working with the police) that is gripping whole sections of these countries today and has created world-record murder rates, is the result of decisions made by the U.S. in the 1990s to deport thousands of youth back to Central America, in the name of the “war on gangs.”

Add to all this the devastation caused by the crises of recent hurricanes⁶ and the economic and public health devastation caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and you can begin to see the sheer scope of desperation and misery which leads to such mass migration.

Both Democrats and Republi-Fascists Have NO Answers... The Revolution DOES

It is this system of capitalism-imperialism that all of the politicians serve that forces millions to uproot their lives in search of a livelihood and survival, driving many to countries like the U.S. and Europe. And the economies of these imperialist countries have become dependent on immigrants for cheap labor, as they are easier to exploit on account of their precarious position. And this in turn is seized upon by the fascists in their efforts to demonize, scapegoat, and exterminate immigrants, particularly from non-white countries.

Whether it is the outright genocidal fascism of Trump, the “close the border” while letting some immigrants in approach of Biden, or even Bernie Sanders who said he was against opening borders to immigrants because “there’s a lot of poverty in the world”⁷—it should be clear that the rulers of this system have NO answers to this crisis of mass migration. And the direction things are heading in now, with runaway climate change and the resulting mass migration, and the growth of a fascist movement in this country which has xenophobia as one of its key cohering elements, is one ripe with the potential for catastrophe. The only just solution, as Bob Avakian put it, “lies in the revolution to overthrow this system—a revolution aiming not just to abolish oppression, exploitation, poverty, and misery in one country but having as its fundamental goal the abolition of all this throughout the world, and the elimination of all borders and boundaries that erect walls between different parts of humanity.”⁸

 

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1. “Democrats Confront a Surge at the Border”, New York Times  [back]

2.  “Biden DHS chief says 'border is closed' but U.S. won't expel children”, politico.com  [back]

3.  Donald Trump—GENOCIDAL RACIST* Part 3, by Bob Avakian  [back]

4. NEW YEAR’S STATEMENT BY BOB AVAKIAN
A New Year, The Urgent Need For A Radically New World—For The Emancipation Of All Humanity  [back]

5. America Steps Up Barbarity at the Border: 12,800 Minors Detained, Migrant Families to Be Locked Up Indefinitely  [back]

6. Storms that slammed Central America in 2020 just a preview, climate change experts say, Reuters  [back]

7. Bernie Sanders: “[I]f your point is you open the borders, my God, you know, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re gonna have people from all over the world. And I don’t think that’s something we can do at this point. We can’t do it.” (https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1114971900269219841)  [back]

8. Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution, a speech by Bob Avakian  [back]

 

 

 

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Genesis Cuellar, 8, a migrant from El Salvador, sits in a waiting area to be processed by Team Brownsville, a humanitarian group which is helping migrants released from U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody. Wednesday, March 17, 2021, in Brownsville, Texas. She is with her mother, but was separated from the rest of her family in 2020. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Barbarity and needless suffering intensifies on the U.S. border with “surge” of migrants, particularly unaccompanied children. Here, migrants in El Paso, Texas, May 2019. Photo: US Customs & Border Protection

Migrants are being held in conditions unfit for human beings. Shelters on the U.S. side of the southern border are fully packed. Photo: @CarolinaChimo