Over the past two years, more than 250,000 unaccompanied migrant children have come to the U.S. fleeing violence and starvation. These children have been met with brutality, barbed wire, detention centers, rape, and grinding economic exploitation in factories and farmlands.

When some of the people who work for the government wrote a memo calling attention to some of these abuses and questioning U.S. policy, Biden’s top domestic policy official—Susan Rice—irately replied that the memo was “bullshit” and that the conditions of these children were the result of “our generosity” to these unaccompanied children.

In the article that follows we will indeed separate bullshit from facts and we will get to the truth of the matter. And then you can decide who is right.

Why Have a Quarter of a Million Children Braved Terrible Conditions to Cross the Border?

Because their families are desperate for these children to have a chance at survival. And due to first Trump's, and now Biden's, immigration policies, these families have no other recourse than to send children on a perilous journey alone. A key part of the current immigration policy is called Title 42, which allows the U.S. government to deny immigrants the right to request and apply for asylum—a right supposedly guaranteed by U.S. and international law—and to “expel” them from the U.S. without a hearing.¹ In the past three years, more than 2.6 million migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border have been expelled. Huge numbers of people are left stranded in northern Mexico in filthy, disease- and crime-ridden “camps.” There are many thousands of reported incidents of rape, kidnapping, extortion and more—in official detention centers, in camps and on the streets.

***

As noted above, Susan Rice is a top official in the Biden administration. As director of Biden’s “Domestic Policy Council,” she oversees the program responsible for children taken into federal custody at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Recently, a memo to Rice by some of her staff became public. The memo was detailing the position of people advocating for migrants and was alerting Rice to the dire situation for migrant children. It said, “Mexican shelters are not good. No migrant in Juárez wants to be in a federal shelter—kids have been raped in those shelters.” It went on that these policies that force people to apply for asylum from Mexico are “meant to keep people out of the asylum process” which puts undocumented children in danger. “Let’s not lose more lives,” it urged her.

The memo said, “Title 42 is leading to family separation—parents are choosing to send their kids on the dangerous paths because the circumstances are so dire.”

Rice’s response? She crossed out a line that said, “Title 42 is leading to family separation,” and wrote, “This is BS. What is leading to ‘voluntary’ separation is our generosity to UCs!” (“UC” is government-speak for “unaccompanied child.”)

Let’s Talk About “Generosity”

Here are recent examples of American “generosity” to migrant children:

** Marvin Che, now 17, has been in the Little Village area of Chicago for the past year. He works full time overnight at a plastics factory, along with other migrant children. “We came alone, so we have to work hard,” he told a reporter.

** Several boys who were taken into custody at the ages of 12 and 13 were sent to Florida, where they immediately began working in construction. One told a reporter he “felt ashamed at not knowing how to read.” Another said he was released to a man he had never met, and “wished he could enroll in middle school and start learning English.” Another told a reporter, “People don’t know, but there are a lot of kids here living the same life.”

** “Dozens” of children were “released” by the government to the same “sponsor” in Alabama, then forced to work in poultry processing “without access to education.”

Think of the lives of these children. They journeyed for thousands of miles. They were taken into custody by federal authorities when they reached the U.S.-Mexico border. They were put in massive detention centers, sleeping on hard floors, with only a foil blanket for covering. Many of them were signed over to the custody of total strangers, who took them to far-flung places across the length and breadth of the U.S.

That is kidnapping—institutionalized, government sponsored, kidnapping.

Merciless exploitation of migrant children isn’t “marginal” to the functioning of imperialism. It is embedded in the heart of the U.S. economy, and the entire global system of imperialism. A recent article in the New York Times brought out how corporations whose products are made at least in part by child labor within the U.S. include: Ben & Jerry's, Fruit of the Loom, General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Frito-Lay, J. Crew, General Mills (whose brands include Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Nature Valley), PepsiCo (which owns Frito-Lay), Quaker Oats and JBS, the largest meat processing company in the world. Commodities produced by child labor are sold in Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, and other major store chains throughout the country.

This does not just occur “in the shadows,” like remote rural areas of Alabama or the forests of Oregon—although it is there. It is happening in the heart of cities like Chicago, Dallas, and Nashville. It is possibly happening in the city or town where you live, maybe even in your neighborhood. Child labor is embedded in the clothes you have on your body and the food you put in your stomach.

And these examples don’t even take in the 160 million children around the world who work in factories, in fields, and in mines to enrich global capitalism-imperialism, in which U.S. imperialism remains top dog.

“They Just Didn't Want to Hear It”

Rice’s angry scrawl was not just some momentary fit of rage. Top leadership of different federal agencies responsible for care of migrant children routinely covered up, concealed, shoved aside, ignored and pushed blame for the horrific treatment of migrant children onto others. This goes all the way up to Susan Rice and Xavier Becerra, Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was told that “children appeared to be at risk,” and other senior White House aides who were “shown evidence of exploitation.”

Over the past several years many teachers, case workers, and even managers at the facilities where the migrant children work have reported violations of child labor law. What happened to them? They were threatened, they resigned, they were fired… and time, and time again, no action was taken.

Jallyn Sualog, who had helped design a federal program for unaccompanied migrant children, was removed from her position after she warned her bosses that children were being released to adults who lied about their identities. She said, “… short of protesting in the streets, I did everything I could to warn them (Biden administration leadership). They just didn’t want to hear it.”

The Bitter Fruit of “American Generosity”

The memo sent to Rice referenced a statement by the labor union for federal asylum officers that the U.S.'s current migrant policy “was contrary to the morals of the country.”

Actually, what the U.S. has been doing to migrant children is completely in keeping with the morals of a country that proclaims itself the “land of the free,” but has a long history of cruel exploitation, abuse, and murder of children within and outside its border.

** For about 250 years, almost every infant with a Black skin in what became the U.S. was a slave—the property of a white person—from the moment they were born.

** The nearly complete genocidal obliteration of Native Americans in the U.S. part of North America included countless horrors, like the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, in which many women and children were among the 148 Cheyenne and Arapaho people slaughtered and mutilated by the U.S. Army. After the most overt massacres ended in the late 1800s, “boarding schools” for those Native American youth who survived were instituted, to drill American values, culture, and religion into Native youth.² At least 500 children, probably many more, died at schools run by government and religious institutions.

** The factories of the 19th century routinely exploited many children, often those of European immigrants, to achieve the “takeoff” of U.S. capitalism-imperialism.

** Child labor has been embedded in U.S. agriculture for decades and continues to be. Between 300,000 and 800,000 children work in agriculture in the U.S., some as young as seven years old. Over 100 die of work-related injuries every year, and about 12,000 suffer serious injuries.

No More Children Who Have No Childhood

Anyone who looks at this—in its history to present day—and sneers about American “generosity” has no right to rule! No humanity or heart for these children. But this isn't a personal problem for the Susan Rice's of the world—this is because of the nature of the system she is part of justifying, administering and enforcing. A system of capitalism-imperialism which is based on the exploitation and super-exploitation of people in the U.S. and all over the world. A system that is driving millions to flee their homelands—to risk drowning in the seas, dying of heat in the jungles, or burning alive in the detention centers—for the basic ability to survive, to eat, and to raise their children. Millions are fleeing their homelands due to wars and environmental destruction caused by this very same system.

And this system has no answer to this “crisis” except more violence, repression, detention camps and vicious demonization—all while the labor, sweat, and tears of these children continue to flow into American factories and farmlands. This system needs to be overthrown through an all-out actual revolution, replacing this system with a radically different system based in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian. A system whose economy would put the great resources of society—not to the control of a small handful in the competitive drive for profit above all else—but collectively owned and controlled, and put to meeting the needs of the people, uprooting exploitation and oppression and acting as a base area for world revolution.

This new state would welcome immigrants from around the world who want to contribute to building the socialist society—struggling to uproot exploitation and oppression all over the world. This would be a society which recognizes that these children—with their hopes, dreams, aspirations, curiosity—are part of the great strength of humanity.

Over 20 years ago, Bob Avakian spoke these powerful words—which all those who want to see a better world should fight now to make good on:

No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that. (BAsics 1:13—from the book BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian)