STOP the Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants and the Militarization of the Border!

U.S. Ramps Up Vicious Persecution of Immigrants

April 1, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Every month, thousands of people from Latin America make the dangerous trek north to the U.S. border. They are searching for jobs and very often safety. Countless hundreds die every year on this journey.

Why do these human beings risk themselves and even their children? Because the U.S. and its imperialist system has made their countries a living hell. And what does the U.S. do in response? It persecutes, demonizes, attacks, and murders them. It does this because its system requires it, and today it does it on steroids.

It is as if someone robbed their neighbor and set their neighbor’s house on fire, and then when their neighbor tried to escape, they locked the doors and sicced their dogs on them.

Let’s look at what’s been going on.

On March 19, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that immigrants, including permanent residents and others with legal status, can be detained without bail while facing deportation, even if the proceedings take months or years. This can be for the pettiest offenses, and even long after they have served their sentences. Right now, they basically have NO rights. This law was put into place by the Democratic president Bill Clinton and further cemented by Obama—and now Trump has taken this already unjust violation of civil rights even further, backed by the Supreme Court.

On March 6, it came to light that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) investigators have created a “secret database” with information on 10 journalists, at least one attorney, 47 immigrant rights organizers, and activists referred to in the database as “instigators.” DHS has been carrying out warrantless searches on journalists’ laptops and phones and rummaging through what are supposed to be confidential case files of refugees who are trapped in Mexico, trying to get in.

Just this week the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) began holding hundreds of immigrants outdoors, behind fences topped with concertina wire, under the Paso del Norte bridge in El Paso, Texas. Temperatures dropped to 40 degrees at night, as children slept on dirt and concrete. A CBP spokesman claimed, “We are doing everything we can to simply avoid a tragedy in a CBP facility”—so, they’ve just dumped people in this outside detention camp, like animals or worse. Just look at this picture and tell us it doesn’t look like something out of World War 2. [As we went to press, the camp was evacuated—with no word as to what happened to the people.]

This is on top of the ongoing way that the Trump/Pence regime has tried to use the census to gather information on the legal status of immigrants and combine that with Department of Homeland Security information and a host of other government information that could be used to create a “registry” of every immigrant. Such a registry could be used to organize police or military sweeps of immigrant areas for the purpose of carrying out the mass deportations that Trump has promised his followers.

Finally, this week Trump finalized plans to take money that had been allotted for other purposes to build his fascist wall, he cut off aid to certain Central American governments to pressure them to more forcefully repress would-be immigrants to the U.S., and he has now gone so far as to threaten to shut down the border itself!

This system, through its economic plundering, has turned a large part of the world into deserts and dumps. The imperialists and the workings of their system have destroyed the social structures in these countries. They have installed brutally repressive regimes to serve their interests. And they have launched wars and invasions when one or another of these countries “gets out of line.”

It is no wonder that people risk life and limb to leave these parts of the world and—with environmental destruction getting even worse—it is almost certain that this will increase tremendously. The fascists, under Trump and Pence, are waging something close to an open war on these immigrants. The Democrats have no answer but to slightly modify it.

They say, “‘We’ have to stop crime.” “Crime”? The crime here is what America has done to these countries and the people in them, and the crime on top of crime of what it is now doing to the immigrants.

They say it’s to help “the economy.” The “economy”—that is, the capitalist/imperialist system—has grown fat off the blood and bones of the masses in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Then they skin the ox twice by playing off the people here that they exploit and fuck over against these immigrants.

They say it’s to “protect our culture.” And what culture is that? A culture of white supremacist lynch mobs, pornography, money-grubbing, and violence.

What we need is a revolution against this criminal system and its worldwide exploitation, and against all the social relations and ideas that reinforce that rotten system. Listen to Bob Avakian break things down in these clips:

 

The demonization, criminalization and deportations of immigrants.

 

 

Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) held hundreds of immigrants outdoors, behind fences topped with concertina wire, under the Paso del Norte bridge in El Paso, Texas. (Photo: AP)