On Friday, May 20, Robert Summerhays, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Louisiana, issued an injunction that prevents the Biden administration from lifting a pandemic-related order called Title 42. Under the deceitful pretext of protecting the health of Americans during the COVID pandemic, Title 42 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.
Title 42 has been used by both Trump and Biden to expel almost 2 million immigrants since March 2020. If and when Title 42 is lifted, a large “surge”—perhaps as many as 18,000 people per day—is expected at the border. Summerhays’s ruling means that Title 42, which had been set to be lifted on May 23, remains in effect, for now. The Biden administration said it will comply with the injunction.
Bitter Conflict, Deep Divisions, Brutal Repression
On April 1 Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, announced that the Biden administration would not apply for renewal of Title 42 (which it is legally obligated to do every 60 days) because the threat posed by the COVID-19 virus has diminished. Mayorkas said at the same time that after Title 42 expires, the Biden administration would pursue “every avenue … to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and stay true to our values.” He added: “Let me be clear: Those unable to establish a legal basis to remain in the United States will be removed.”
But Mayorkas’s announcement set off intense, bitter conflict within a deeply divided U.S. ruling class. Within days, three states led by Republi-fascists had filed suits to continue Title 42. By the time the case went before Summerhays this month, Republican attorneys general from 24 states argued in a lawsuit that Title 42 should remain. Their lawsuit claims that Title 42 is “the only safety valve preventing this administration’s disastrous border policies from devolving into unmitigated chaos and catastrophe.”
Leading Republicans across the country, not just in border states, routinely whip up anti-immigrant hate among their mobs of fascist supporters. They blame immigrants for violent crime and drug trafficking everywhere in the U.S., and say the Democrats encourage them. J.D. Vance, a leading fascist running for the Senate in Ohio—1,600 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border—bellowed at a recent campaign rally that “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
The reality, as the Washington Post reported, is that “… U.S. authorities detained more than 1.7 million migrants along the Mexico border during the 2021 fiscal year that ended in September, and arrests by the Border Patrol soared to the highest levels ever recorded…” And as Revolution wrote recently, Biden’s recently released six-point plan for policing the border after Title 42 is lifted
… carries forward, and in some cases escalates, many of Trump’s policies on ‘controlling the border.’ The essential difference—Trump spoke with flagrant racism and boasted of his sadistic cruelty. His insulting language and calls for violence inflamed and further emboldened his fascist social base. Biden’s rhetoric, and even some secondary components of his six-point plan, are designed and intended to sedate people and keep them passive—especially people who have supported him and the Democrats, and who hoped for something better than Trump’s hateful bigotry.
When Biden was campaigning for president, he said of Trump, “This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. They’re sitting in squalor on the other side of the river.” But once in office, Biden has expelled even more immigrants under Title 42 than Trump did, into that squalor and despair.
A Mounting Crisis, a System with No Solution for It
In April 2022, 234,088 immigrants crossed the U.S.’s southern border, the highest number for any month since 2000. In past years, people attempting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico have overwhelmingly been from Mexico and Central America. But more recently, displaced and dispossessed people from all across the planet are arriving at the banks of the Rio Grande, or the militarized walls in Arizona and California. In April, over 40 percent of those arrested at the border came from countries like India, Senegal, Haiti, and Georgia.
Displaced and dispossessed people from all across the planet are arriving at the banks of the Rio Grande, May 20, 2022. Photo: AP
Thousands of these impoverished people “expelled” from the U.S. are forced to try to survive in filthy, disease- and crime-ridden “camps” on the Mexican side of the border. A 29-year-old woman from Honduras told a reporter she had wanted to seek asylum after gangs tried to recruit her brother and then “threatened to cut our tongues out... and kill us all.” Along with 600 other asylum seekers, she spends every day and night in a cramped Tijuana shelter, where her two children have been sick with fevers and infected with lice. “We’re stuck. We can’t go back home, and we can’t go forward. We are adrift. It’s traumatic. It’s desperate … I don’t know this place. It’s a strange country … I don’t have family here. Look at the state we’re in. I am crying out for help.... We have the right to seek refuge, give us the opportunity.”
When Biden was campaigning for president, he said of Trump, “This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country.... They’re sitting in squalor on the other side of the river.” But once in office, Biden has expelled even more immigrants under Title 42 than Trump did, into that squalor and despair.1
Migrants break through a line of Mexican National Guard trying to block them from leaving Tapachula, Mexico, April 1, 2022. Photo: AP
A Pending Eruption
Neither leading Democrats nor Republi-fascists are the least bit concerned with providing justice and the basis for a life with dignity to people who have been persecuted, raped, driven to the brink of starvation, robbed of everything they possess, forced from their homes and farms, and driven across the planet by the rapacious global system of capitalism-imperialism.
But how to contain and control this wave of human suffering is a huge dilemma for fascists and Democrats alike, and it has them locked in a bitter struggle. In the words of a senior official at the American Immigration Council, “… as the last two years of Title 42 have shown us, a failed policy isn’t going to get any better with time, and the longer Title 42 is kept in place the harder it will be for any administration to manage the border.”
Revolution recently wrote: “All this—the enormous anguish of millions of people trying to reach the U.S., the brutal repression used against them, and the sharp disagreements among the rulers—will possibly erupt soon.” As Bob Avakian emphasizes in a recent interview:
The imperialists 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.
… there are no international laws and protections that address this, that is, in any seriously humanitarian way. The laws in force are the laws of the imperialist dominators of the world: regulating and militarizing borders to safeguard imperial interests, and super-exploiting immigrants that do cross into the imperialist heartlands and are forced to “live in the shadows” without rights. It is a statement of our times that the U.S.-Mexico border and the Mediterranean have become burial grounds for migrants and refugees, that refugee camps become recruiting grounds for the global “sex trade.”