A Bottomless Pit of Cruelty: Fascist Regime Deports Central American Children – to Mexico

November 2, 2020 | revcom.us

 

This week the New York Times reported that the U.S. has expelled at least 200 children from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to Mexico—a country where they have no family connections and have never lived. The children, who were taken into custody by the U.S. Border Patrol, seem to have been placed with Mexican child welfare authorities, who oversee shelters operated by religious and private groups.

Word of these expulsions reached the Times when it came into possession of an internal Border Patrol email written by an official critical of the policy. For the eight months this policy was in effect, there was apparently no whisper of objection from anyone charged with carrying it out. This is exactly the mentality that led Nazi officials to carry out deportations and eventually mass murder of millions of Jewish people, including children.

The Trump/Pence regime not only drew on its bottomless pit of immigrant-hating cruelty to inflict this torture on children, it violated its own laws and diplomatic agreements, including one with Mexico that prohibited it from expelling to Mexico people who aren’t from that country. This action illustrates a profound and compelling analysis Bob Avakian recently wrote: “For that is what fascism is: open and aggressive dictatorship, trampling on and perverting the rule of law, relying on violence and terror, on behalf of the predatory capitalist system and as an extreme attempt to deal with profound social division and acute crises (both within the country and in the global arena).”

As Revolution has reported, 545 immigrant children whose parents were deported under the regime’s “zero tolerance” policy have still not been re-united with a parent. Then, beginning in March, child deportations escalated as the Trump/Pence regime seized on the coronavirus pandemic to expel thousands of immigrant children quickly and without hearings.

In March, when harsh new measures to expel adults and children alike were put in place, a top Border Patrol official said “This is a public health order that we’re operating under right now. This is not about immigration. What’s transpiring right now is purely about infectious disease and public health.”

This is not just hypocritical bullshit from people who clearly don’t give a damn about the health of the masses of people in the U.S., much less Mexico and Central America. Right now, the Texas border city of El Paso is under a curfew as it tries to stem the rampaging virus, and border towns from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico have high rates of contagion and death.

No, this is the language of genocide from a functionary of a fascist regime, a regime that has demonstrated over and over that it will stop at nothing in its persecution of immigrants, including children.

 

Sources:

U.S. Expels Migrant Children From Other Countries to Mexico, New York Times, October 30, 2020

New report finds U.S. is deporting Central American kids to Mexico, PBS, October 30, 2020

A U.S. Customs and Border officer polices asylum-seeking migrants from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. The U.S. has expelled at least 200 children from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to Mexico where they have never lived. (Photo: AP)