“EAGLE PASS, Texas—A toddler is dead and a baby is in critical condition after a tragic border crossing on Monday. The dead body of a 3-year-old boy was recovered around 1 p.m. from the Rio Grande near International Bridge II by U.S. Border Patrol Agents. A 2-month-old boy was also recovered from the river. Paramedics performed life-saving measures on the infant.” SA4News (San Antonio), August 23, 2022

“A 5-year-old Guatemalan girl drowned when the waters of the rain-swollen Rio Grande ripped her from her mother's arms while they attempted to cross the El Paso-Juárez border on Monday afternoon, Mexican officials said.” El Paso Times, August 23, 2022

The deaths of these small children are just some of the bitter fruits of U.S. immigration policy, on a single day last week. Yet what has been the response of the U.S. government to this horror?

Fascist Repression, Democrat Demagogy… Systemic Inhumanity

Over the past several months, over 170 buses from Texas and Arizona have unloaded thousands of asylum-seeking immigrants in New York City and Washington, DC. The buses are packed with people, including entire families, who were taken into federal custody at the U.S.’s border with Mexico. Their 2,000-mile plus trips are “often without food, water, medical supplies, or rest stops.” As of this writing, buses continue to arrive in both cities.

An angry dispute has erupted between Greg Abbott, the Christian fascist governor of Texas, and Eric Adams, New York City’s Democratic mayor, over how to respond to the flood of immigrants trying to reach the U.S. Abbott sneers open contempt for immigrants, says the Biden administration is not enforcing the U.S.’s laws to control the border, and vows continued repression. Adams responds that Abbott is using “innocent people as political pawns to manufacture a crisis,” and posts pictures of himself greeting immigrants.

Their spat spotlights a defining feature of today’s sharply polarized political landscape. The capitalist-imperialist system both Abbott and Adams represent has no solution other than violent repression for the millions of people seeking a chance at a decent life.

“The Deadliest Land Crossing in the World”—United Nations International Organization for Migration

People on these buses are mainly from countries such as Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Haiti, but also from African and Asian countries like Angola, Ghana, and Afghanistan. They are a small fraction of the millions of desperate immigrants who have tried to enter the U.S. in recent years, and an even smaller fraction of the millions of people who have been dislocated from their homes worldwide.

Those who make it as far as the U.S.-Mexico border are met by massive, multidimensional repression, enforced by federal, state, and county governments—repression that has inflicted incalculable suffering on millions, and escalated, seemingly without end, for years. (See articles from Revolution this year here, here, and here for fuller exposure of this.) A recent study by the United Nations International Organization for Migration concluded that the U.S.- Mexico border is “the deadliest land crossing in the world.”

Federal authorities have carried out over 2 million “expulsions” to Mexico or the home countries of immigrants in a little over the past two years—most of that during Biden’s presidency. (Some people are “expelled”—sent across the border without a legal hearing—more than once.) In Texas, under “Operation Lone Star,” Abbott has mobilized “a systematic fascist onslaught of repression, militarization, mass arrests and incarceration, and denial of basic rights recognized by U.S. and international law,” and imposed it on the border and 100 miles inland. “Lone Star” has resulted in “more than 292,700 migrant apprehensions and more than 18,400 criminal arrests, with more than 15,700 felony charges reported,” according to a recent Abbott press release.

Repression Intensifies Under Biden

But, contrary to claims by fascists like Abbott that the Biden administration has a policy of “open borders,” Biden is not “soft” on immigrants. Deportations, deaths, and suffering along the border have intensified during the Biden years. Attacks on Haitian immigrants are a particularly brutal concentration of Biden’s approach.

By February this year, using a provision of federal legal code first implemented by Trump that allows the U.S. to “expel” immigrants without any legal hearing, Biden had “expelled nearly as many Haitians in 12 months as were deported during the previous 20 years… under three different presidents …” The New York Times reported that in January this year, an infant died shortly after arriving in Haiti on one of these “deportation flights.” Then, in May, this torment went to a whole other level—the Biden administration “expelled nearly 4,000 Haitians on 36 deportation flights….”

Haitian immigrants arriving at the border are impoverished and exhausted; have few or no resources or legal protections; are on a continent where few of them speak the languages or are familiar with the cultures; and come from a homeland in chaos, wracked by almost universal poverty, lack of basic necessities like clean water and medical care, and by violent gang conflict, a country governed by rulers many of them don’t recognize as legitimate. And now the Biden administration is flying them back to the U.S.-created inferno they tried to escape in the first place.

Like a cowardly, malignant thug who singles out vulnerable people for his most vicious attacks, the oh-so-“humane” Biden administration is targeting Haitians seeking asylum with particularly heartless assaults precisely because of their desperation.

Heading for a Showdown

What is causing so many people from so many countries to take such desperate measures? As Bob Avakian stressed in a recent interview:

Imperialism has everything to do with the larger “refugee crisis”: the U.S. propping up brutally repressive regimes and sponsoring “death squads” in its so-called “backyard” in Central America; imperialist agribusiness and U.S.-engineered trade agreements like NAFTA ruining subsistence agriculture; U.S.-led invasions and occupations, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, that have decimated and destabilized society and economy; imperialist rivalry in Syria and Libya.

And the roots in history go deeper. The U.S. was founded—and its borders forged—through genocide, slavery, armed conquest, and merciless exploitation. For well over a century, the U.S. has plundered, invaded, and dominated countries across this planet. Its power and position in the world today sit upon a global network of “sweatshops, mines and corporate-controlled farms—‘that ensnares hundreds of millions, and ultimately billions, of people in conditions hardly better than those of slaves,’” as Bob Avakian has written.

But now Abbott and other Republi-fascists claim it’s the U.S. that is being “invaded”—by unarmed immigrants carrying everything they own on their backs. Ken Cucinelli, a leading fascist and former “Homeland Security” official in the Trump/Pence regime, said that states should invoke the “self-defense” clause of the U.S. Constitution to apprehend immigrants, and then “thumbprint them, give them food and water, and send them back.” A campaign ad for Blake Masters, running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, says, “We're gonna end this invasion.” These boasts and threats are not “political theater” or simply rhetoric intended to whip up fascist anti-immigrant hysteria and hatred.

These fascists are pushing for a showdown between fascist-led border states and the Democratic-led federal government over how and by whom the U.S. exercises control over its southern border, a showdown that could lead to a constitutional crisis. They argue that the U.S. Constitution provides states with the authority to stop immigrants at the border entirely with state law enforcement. And many of them say the states should exercise that authority, in defiance of the federal government, now.

The Polarization We Need

On the surface, the approaches taken by fascists like Abbott and by Democrats like Biden and Adams seem very different. No cruelty is too much for Abbott. He has offered jobs in Texas to Border Patrol agents who face discipline because they whipped Haitian immigrants. Meanwhile, Adams has waited at the bus station to greet arriving immigrants, saying that “New York is a city that has always represented the democratic values and the values of our city showing our compassion and that’s what we’re doing today.” ... and then does little for these desperate arrivals other than funnel them into NYC's already-overwhelmed system of homeless shelters!

But both the fascist and the liberal approaches are wrapped in the deadly lie that American lives are worth more than the lives of other people. Both represent and defend the exploitative system of capitalism-imperialism that causes and drives all this misery, whether with straight-up racist hate as in the case of the fascists like Abbott, or coated with fake sympathy and compassion in the case of the Democrats. Neither outright fascists nor Democrats have any humane solution to the catastrophic human crisis along the border. Meanwhile, the factors feeding this crisis—including environmental catastrophe and drought in Central America, along with the twin horrors of repressive regimes and the urban gangs with whom they work—are on a trajectory to get even worse in the years to come.

But there is another possibility. As Bob Avakian says in SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divison, The Looming Possibility of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed. A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For That Revolution:

The crisis and deep divisions in society can only be resolved through radical means, of one kind or another—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means or radically emancipating revolutionary means.

Revolution means overthrowing the capitalist state and building a new, revolutionary state, founded on radically transformed relations of production. It would enable people to go to work transforming all society. It would advance revolutionary struggle against the domination and rule of capitalism-imperialism, and other oppressive forces, world-wide. A key element of this is concentrated in Article II, Section 3, H, of the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian:

The orientation of the New Socialist Republic in North America is to welcome immigrants from all over the world who have a sincere desire to contribute to the goals and objectives of this Republic, as set forth in this Constitution and in laws and policies which are established and enacted in accordance with this Constitution.