Over the first weekend of July, four immigrants died in the Rio Grande, the river that forms the boundary between Texas and Mexico. One of the dead was an infant girl. Two other people, floating and unconscious but still alive, were pulled from the river and taken into Border Patrol custody.

None of the dead have been identified as of this writing. All are assumed to have been immigrants from Mexico or a country further south.

But we do know something about how they died. They drowned trying to cross a river that has been transformed into a watery death trap: filled with floating barricades and lined with razor wire.

Think about the hope and relief that must have surged in the hearts of the people found floating in the Rio Grande, when they could actually see their destination, and were separated from it only by 300 feet of water. Then think about the terror they must have felt when they suddenly realized their hopes had been transformed into a nightmare beyond imagination: their skin torn by razor wire, their bodies pulled under by the river’s current.

Sadistic Fascism Is The Official Policy Of The State of Texas

The details and scale of the brutality of Texas's official policy was recently leaked by a Texas trooper who blew the whistle, saying, “I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane.” 

The official Texas policy is to push children and babies back into the river if they reach the U.S. side. The official Texas policy mandates refusing water to dehydrated people in heat over 100 degrees (F). The official Texas policy places 1000-foot chains of floating river barricades in the Rio Grande. Each chain has netting extending to the river bed, to prevent people from swimming under it. It wraps river buoys in razor wire, and it positions razor wire to prevent potential rescuers from reaching endangered people.

All this is part of “Operation Lone Star,” a systematic onslaught of repression, militarization, mass arrests, and incarceration along the border, and up to 100 miles north of it. Lone Star has mobilized National Guard troops, state police, the Texas Department of “Public Safety” (DPS), county sheriff’s departments, fish and game wardens, and at least one heavily armed Christian fascist militia, to terrorize and arrest impoverished people carrying everything they own on their backs.

As of July 2022, at least 30 people have died directly under this policy.

Fundamental Unity... Sharp Divides

Biden’s Department of Justice announced on July 21 that it is “ready to sue” the Texas state government if it doesn’t remove the barriers in the Rio Grande. The Christian fascist Texas governor Greg Abbott basically said “fuck you Biden,” and argued that Texas has the “sovereign authority” over the state's border with Mexico. The political and legal battle among the rulers is intensifying. 

The irony is that while Biden pretends to stand up for immigrant rights and opposes the most outrageous of the fascist policies—he is out-Trumping Trump on closing the border, gutting the asylum process and carrying out mass deportations and expulsions.

But it's not that “there's no difference” between them. Indeed, the Republican fascists and the Democrats do have sharp and deep conflicts over how violently, how overtly reactionary and how all-encompassing their immigration policies should be constructed, packaged and executed. 

This reflects a major contradiction for imperialism: in a time of environmental destruction, droughts, flooding and intensifying heat waves, the imperialists of Europe and the U.S. have no answer for the mass migrations borne of growing desperation except for locking these waves of migrants out. But there's a big and serious fight about how this should be done.

What you see in Texas is the fascist solution—one that increasingly relies on what is more or less increasing the chances that you will die if you dare try to immigrate. The fascists are cultivating, and answering to, a xenophobic (“foreigner”-hating) social base, and cruelty for its own sake plays well with those racists. 

What the Democrats have to offer is a version of repression that is not as blatantly sadistic, and in which there is more emphasis on working with repressive regimes to keep out migrants in the first place. The murders are done out of sight and a very tiny percentage of the desperate are allowed in as salves to the liberal consciences—but overall the gates of the society that are responsible for the increasingly unimaginable suffering of 100s of millions are still locked tight. 

The fact that the solutions from the Democrats and the fascists essentially amount to the same thing for the desperate millions forced out of their countries does not lessen the conflict between the two ruling class forces. Nor does it lessen the divide between the fascist social base—which delights in and demands the cruelty—and the “decent people” who are revolted by the whole thing. Even as those decent people unconscionably resist fully confronting reality and putting the blame where it belongs—on the system. 

Two Futures Are Facing Off: Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating

This conflict is coming to a head. No matter what the Democrats do around the border or anything else, they are seen as illegitimate by the fascists. These fascists are preparing for a civil war, if they cannot take power “peacefully.” 

We, the revcoms, are determined to wrench a fundamentally different and emancipating future out of this clash. This system of capitalism-imperialism has no solution to its “immigration problem” other than violence: more walls and whips; more detention centers and deportations; more razor wire, and more bodies floating in the Rio Grande. 

This system must be overthrown by a real revolution. Its machinery of repression must be dismantled and the whole system replaced by one basing itself on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System speaks to what would become possible in this socialist society. On the basis of building a fundamentally different economy—based on wielding the collective resources of society “to meet fundamental needs and serve highest interests,” the new state power would work towards “eliminating discrimination, inequality, and oppression in every form.” One concrete policy would be that: “Immigrants, from all parts of the world, who have a sincere desire to contribute to goals of the new socialist republic will be welcome in this republic.”

Unless we seize on the very real openings that are making revolution more possible—and we can and we must—the kinds of things we see right now on the Texas border, and even worse, may soon be the future for the entire country. 

There is no time to waste.