For decades, the U.S.-Mexico border area has been a zone of death, pain, and suffering inflicted by U.S. imperialism upon tens of millions of migrants. People have died trying to reach it. People have died trying to cross it. People have died if they get across and then are hunted like animals over deserts, mountains, and raging streams, in searing heat or freezing cold. People have been run over by trucks on lonely rural blacktops. The corpses of people bitten by rattlesnakes have been left to rot, miles from help. Millions have been expelled or deported back to the U.S.-created poverty and violence they are trying to escape. The stories, songs, and poems of their anguish could fill volumes.

These are not random incidents. They are a direct result of the relentless exploitation enforced by brutal repression the U.S. has inflicted on the peoples and countries of this hemisphere for over a century.¹ They are a direct consequence of the policies and actions taken by the ruling class of this country, Democrat and Republican alike.

And now, a massive leap in that repression will quite possibly erupt soon. On May 11, “Title 42” expires. In preparation for that, the Biden administration announced on May 2 that the U.S. is sending 1,500 active-duty Army and Marine troops to the border, in addition to the 2,500 National Guard troops and the almost 17,000 Border Patrol (CBP) agents already there, with the vast arsenal of weaponry, walls and fences, and detention centers along the entire border.

Title 42 Ends, Mass Deportations and “Expedited Removal” Begin

Title 42 is a part of the U.S. legal code dealing with public health. During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, the Trump/Pence fascist regime used it to expel hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum in the U.S. This means they were denied even the charade of a legal hearing. The Biden administration also took up use of Title 42 and used it to expel about 2.4 million people, far surpassing the fascist Trump.

Leaders of both the Democrats and the Republi-fascists, and the major news media, have been warning of a “surge” of immigrants at the border when Title 42 expires. CNN reported that a senior CBP (Customs and Border Protection) official estimates that “several thousand” people are now in northern Mexico, waiting to cross the border. Lindsey Graham, a leading Republi-fascist senator, blared this week that “May 11 is a nightmare day for the American people, particularly people in New Mexico and Texas.… In the next 90 days, you're going to (see) from 900,000 to 1.1 million [migrants crossing the border].… America is under siege here.”

The Biden administration has been aggressively marshalling and positioning an across-the-board apparatus of repression to prepare for the end of Title 42. Earlier this year, it released a “preparedness statement” describing its “across the Federal government” approach. It features:

• “Surging resources” to the border—which means more thuggish Border Patrol agents, with more and more powerful weapons.
• Increased “faster processing”—which means deporting and expelling people more quickly.
• “New consequences” for unlawful entry—which means more arrests, more deportations, and more prosecution of more people.

Since then, they have been putting all that into place. Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s head of Homeland Security, said in late April to potential asylum seekers that the end of Title 42 will not mean they will be able to enter the U.S.: “Let me be clear, our border is not open and will not be open after May 11.” The Biden administration says they will deal with an expected “surge” towards the border with its own “surging personnel and resources” to where they are most in demand. The 1,500 troops will perform technical, logistical and administrative support to the notoriously racist and brutal CBP² so it can “operate more freely in the field”—meaning arrest, detain, incarcerate and begin the process of deporting the asylum-seeking migrants expected to arrive at the border in massive numbers, soon.

In late April, Biden officials announced that they are preparing to be able to quickly screen all migrants seeking asylum at the border, deport those they deem “unqualified,” and penalize people who cross illegally into the U.S. They call this “expedited removal.” Deporting people, as distinct from expelling them, means asylum seekers will go through a farcical (“expedited”) legal proceeding, as they are in the process of being “removed.” A bullshit façade of “compassion” and “legality” is what Biden and the Democrats think distinguishes them from the open racism, hatred of “foreigners,” unbridled brutality, and contempt for any legal asylum proceedings of Trump and the Republi-fascists.

Deportation also means that if people are caught trying to re-enter the U.S. after they’ve been deported, they will be banned from legally entering the U.S. and face being charged with a crime. The Texas Tribune reported that under Biden’s new post-Title 42 measures, “Anyone who doesn’t use one of the available pathways to enter the country legally also could be barred from requesting asylum in the future.”

Biden is also reviving a so-called “transit-ban”—a policy first proposed by the fascist Trump/Pence regime. Trump’s transit ban was struck down several times in court—but Biden’s lawyers have polished it up and rebranded it. It requires that people who pass through a third country (such as Mexico, which the overwhelming majority of people arriving at the southern border do) must first apply for asylum in that country before they can apply in the U.S.

The Biden administration is also opening “processing centers” in Guatemala and Colombia, where people are supposed to be able to apply for U.S. asylum. Think what a cruel joke this is. Desperate, impoverished people are supposed to walk into a U.S. government building in a country unknown to them, and begin going through the lengthy process of claiming the need for asylum. They are supposed to wait there, probably with few or no resources of their own, in a country that itself is impoverished. And if they are from Guatemala, for example—walking into a U.S. government facility and applying for asylum to be protected from your own government is the equivalent of turning yourself over to the very authorities you claim are persecuting you.

To top it all off, the U.S. is mandating asylum applicants must use a specific app that has proven to be a fiasco for almost all who use it. One example out of thousands: Erlin Rodriguez of Honduras has been trying for months to get asylum for himself, his wife, and their two children, told a reporter, “We’re going to continue trying, but it’s a failure for us. There’s no hope.”

At the same time as the opening of these processing centers was announced, the U.S. also “announced plans to double or triple the number of deportation flights [from the U.S.] to some countries.”

A Border in Crisis, Intense Fighting Among the Rulers

Even before the end of Title 42, larger numbers of migrants than usual have been crossing the border. On April 29, about 20,500 migrants were in CBP custody along the border. The CBP said its lower Rio Grande Valley sector of South Texas had about 7,000 in custody, crammed into facilities with a capacity for 4,000. The mayor of El Paso, a Texas border city, declared a state of emergency. He called the influx immigrants in his city “bothersome,” and added, “We’re not opening the borders. The borders are not open today and they will not be opened on May 12.” The mayor of Brownsville, Texas, another Texas border town more than 800 miles from El Paso, also declared a state of emergency, as did cities between the two and as far west as Yuma, Arizona.

Last week, the New York City mayor complained that the thousands of asylum-seeking migrants sent by bus by Texas’s fascist governor, Greg Abbott, to New York (and other Democratic cities) were “destroying” the city. In response, a spokesperson for Abbott said, “The real crisis isn’t in New York City—it’s on our southern border, where President Biden’s open border policies have allowed record-high levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and weapons to surge into our state and country.”

Biden is preparing and initiating intense new levels of repression against what could be unprecedently large numbers of migrants trying to enter the U.S.—but to the Republi-fascists, this isn’t nearly harsh enough. Fascist Senator John Cornyn argued that the U.S. military needs to patrol the border and actively hunt down, round up, and arrest immigrants, complaining that if “they can’t enforce immigration law, all they can do is change diapers and push paper.”

The same week as Title 42 ends, Congressional Republi-fascists are presenting bills that one of their sponsors claims will be the “strongest border security package that Congress has ever taken up.” Among other things, they call for restarting Trump’s infamous “border wall,” hiring thousands more Border Patrol agents, instituting even harsher asylum regulations, and reinstituting a form of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that required most asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while awaiting hearings before U.S. immigration judges. Fascist senators are demanding that Biden issue an executive order that puts in place a Title 42-type measure enabling massive expulsions.

This System and Its Rulers Have no Answers—the Revolution Does

There is an enormous humanitarian crisis along the border, and throughout this hemisphere. Quite possibly, it will enter entirely new and more horrific levels of human suffering and violent repression quite soon. This crisis, and the anguish it perpetuates, is caused and driven by the global functioning of capitalism-imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism—a system that has impoverished tens of millions of people across Mexico, Central, and South America. It has poisoned the earth and water and made agriculture more difficult or even impossible in some rural areas, and supported death-squad governments that have murdered, brutalized, and raped countless people.

Democrats often express a hypocritical façade of “concern” and “compassion” for immigrants; Republicans seethe with racist hatred and openly call for the most brutal and violent measures along the border and against many immigrants within the U.S.

But both, as Bob Avakian (BA) said in an interview published last June:

… have no answer to this, other than more horror: brutal apprehensions, detention camps of unspeakable misery and cruelty, family separations, border enforcement that spawns migrant smuggling rings that morph into trafficking for forced labor and sexual exploitation.

It doesn’t have to continue this way. As the broadsheet “We Are the Revcoms” states: “Bob Avakian has sharply expressed this profound reality: We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. And it is a scientific fact that humanity does not have to live this way—a whole different way to organize society, a whole better world, is possible.”