"I don't feel free here. I came here with an American dream, I thought it would be different. My American dream finished when they [Border Patrol] gave me that paper telling me to leave and the whupping ... that I got."

—Roner Santana, a 26-year-old man from Venezuela, sleeping on a sidewalk outside a church in the border town of El Paso, Texas, where he was beaten by police and taunted by racists. Santana left Venezuela to try to support his wife and their two children after their third child, a three-year-old girl, died because they couldn’t afford medicine for her.

“All this sacrifice for nothing.”

—Sindy, a 34-year-old Colombian woman seeking to reach her sister in Houston. Sindy spent two months on the Mexican side of the border unsuccessfully trying to get an appointment for an asylum hearing in the U.S. When that failed, she crossed the Rio Grande into Texas just before Title 42 expired. Robbed and penniless, she was sleeping on a sidewalk in El Paso, when the mayor declared an emergency and began clearing the streets of homeless immigrants.

***

Facing Desperate Choices, Making Desperate Gambles

Title 42 is part of the U.S. legal code dealing with public health. During the COVID-19 crisis it was used by both the fascist Trump and the Democrat Biden to expel millions of people seeking asylum at the U.S. border. After a series of legal battles between fascists and Democrats, Title 42 expired on May 11. Beginning in late 2022, the Biden administration undertook months of intense preparation for massive repression as it readied itself for the end of Title 42.

Massive “surges” in the number of immigrants trying to reach the U.S.’s southern border had been widely predicted when Title 42 ended. Across the almost 2,000-mile length of the U.S.-Mexico border, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants gathered. They came from all over the world, but especially from Central American and Caribbean countries.

The life and future of each depended on the response they gave to questions that had no sure answer.

Should they risk crossing the border before Title 42 expired? They would have only the slimmest of chances to get past the Border Patrol, the concertina wire fences, the surveillance. If they were caught, they would be expelled from the U.S. and probably flown back to the very place they had been forced to leave. But… maybe they would be one of the lucky ones.

Or—should they wait until Title 42 expired, as the U.S. government was telling them to do? They could take their one very long shot that their asylum application would be heard, and then the even longer shot that it would be approved. If none of that worked—and it probably wouldn’t—they’d be deported and face prison time if they were caught trying again. But maybe, just maybe, they would get through it all and be in the U.S. legally, not as a hunted animal.

Thirty-four-year-old Yeiser Ramirez journeyed to the U.S. with several friends from their homes in Venezuela. He sold his house and car to provide for his family in Venezuela, but the money ran out, and still he had no job. He wept when he was talking to a reporter, thinking of what he had left behind. "I came here for a better future for them [his family]. I'm going to try to get a job [as a truck driver], but the truth is I'll do anything for them." Yeiser and several friends turned themselves in—he was given immigration “parole” for two years, while five others with him were put in a deportation plane and sent back to Venezuela. He had no idea why he wasn’t with them.

A New, More Intense Era of Border Repression

As Revolution reported last week, the Biden administration prepared for months for the end of Title 42. This meant assembling and putting in place an across-the-board apparatus of repression to maintain the stability of their empire, in a moment of stress. These included heavily armed Border Patrol and military forces, greater detention capacity, provisions for harsher punishment for people caught in its snare. As unprecedented numbers of people were thought to be preparing to approach the border, the Biden administration vowed to ensure that the “border is not open and will not be open after May 11.” They began “ramping up deportation flights” from border checkpoints—which already averaged 66 a week.

Nearly 28,000 people were in Border Patrol custody on May 12, going through the processes of “expedited removal” and assumed to be ineligible for asylum. Biden has sent troops to the border to oppress unarmed, impoverished families. The U.S. has retooled and begun cranking up the police and military capacity, and the bureaucratic apparatus, to carry out overwhelming repression against enormous numbers of suffering human beings. This is a machinery of repression meant to last, not a temporary response as was the use of Title 42. It has positioned the U.S. for even harsher enforcement of imperialism’s bloody border in the weeks, months, and years ahead.  

People in this country must be sharply challenged: either you are going to go along with what is a horrific present for literally tens of millions of people and an even worse future for hundreds of millions more in the next few decades; OR you will not only stand against it but join with the revcoms in not only resisting but building a movement to make revolution and END this outrage by ending the system that has caused it and will continue to make it worse.

As the leaflet issued by the revcoms says, “NO! NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL! These are our brothers and sisters! They are human beings, and no one should accept this as ‘the new normal.’” Get this leaflet and the poster from the revcoms (revolutionary communists) up and out everywhere you can. Another world, a better world, is possible.

Down with the Biden/Trump Persecution of Immigrants!

No Human Being Is Illegal!

We don't have an immigration problem, we have an imperialism problem. This SYSTEM Must Go.

NOW'S THE TIME TO GET ORGANIZED FOR AN ACTUAL REVOLUTION!