Biden came into office promising to end Trump’s cruel immigration policy. What has the reality been? A year of escalating horrors for migrants.

Here are the facts:

• After initially saying ICE would only target “dangerous” undocumented immigrants suspected of things like terrorism and espionage, Biden has unleashed ICE giving them full discretion to arrest all undocumented immigrants at will. The number of immigrants in ICE jails has actually increased over 50% since Biden took office.

• Under Biden’s  “expedited removal” policy, agents of Customs and Border Patrol are able to expel immigrant families captured at the border immediately, without a hearing before an immigration judge—a blatant violation of due process and the right to asylum.¹

• Shortly after the coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump/Pence regime started using a “public health measure” called Title 42 to turn back all immigrants, including asylum seekers, at the southern border. Biden has not only kept Title 42, he has greatly increased the number of “expulsions.”

• In June, Kamala Harris slammed the door in the face of desperate Guatemalan immigrants, telling them, “DO NOT COME!” Like other migrants from other Central American countries, Guatemalans are fleeing poverty, political repression, violence—which are a direct result of over 100 years of U.S. imperialist domination, super-exploitation, CIA-backed coups, massacres—as well as climate disasters fueled by massive carbon emissions from rich capitalist-imperialist countries, above all the U.S.²

• In August the Supreme Court reinstated Trump’s fascist “Remain in Mexico” program, which enables U.S. border agents to immediately force asylum seekers not from Mexico back into Mexico, where they are supposed to wait until their cases come before an immigration judge. This fascist policy goes completely against international laws on asylum. It should be called the “DIE IN MEXICO” policy because it forces migrants into squalid refugee camps, putting them at the mercy of rape, kidnapping, torture, murder, and other violent assaults. Over 7,000 violent attacks on migrants in Mexico have been recorded just in the last year. While Biden initially ended this program, he recently negotiated with the Mexican government to expand it, so that asylum seekers from the entire western hemisphere (including Haiti) will now be sent to wait, suffer, and possibly die in Mexico.
• In September, horrific scenes were broadcast around the world—thousands of Haitian migrants penned in at the U.S. border in Del Rio, Texas. Videos of a U.S. Border Patrol agent on horseback using his reins like a whip against a Black man. As Revolution wrote, this outrage “evoked gruesome images from U.S. history, of mounted white slave catchers hunting down Black people; of people crammed into slave ships.”

• The U.S. has further pressured Mexico to step up it’s brutality against migrants, trapping tens of thousands from Central America, Haiti, and other countries at the southern Mexico border—“outsourcing” its dirty work to Mexico and preventing migrants from even getting to the U.S. border.³
• Our comrades from the Revolutionary Communist Organization in Mexico called this out here and here.
• On December 10 a truck carrying over 150 migrants, mostly Guatemalans, crashed in southern Mexico killing over 50 people. The blood of these migrants is on the hands of the U.S. imperialists, their Mexican accomplices, and this whole damn system!

• Through all this, Republican fascist forces in Texas have whipped up xenophobic hysteria against an immigrant “invasion,” and mobilized armed forces against migrants, challenging the federal government’s control over border enforcement. Read this and this.
• In case it wasn’t clear that there would be NO CHANGE from Trump to Biden, on December 16 Biden’s Department of Justice officially withdrew from any discussion of financial settlements for the traumatized and permanently scarred victims of Trump’s family separation policy.⁴

What has this led to? A bloodbath in Mexico. A bloodbath on the U.S. border—a record number of migrants have died this year in the desert!⁵

And fascist forces are even more unleashed to terrorize and murder immigrants and turn the U.S. into a white supremacist fortress.

To anyone snoozing through this bloodbath, or putting their hopes in Biden and the Democrats to stop it—wake the hell up! Atrocities like these will continue to happen, as long as this capitalist-imperialist system remains—and will get worse.