On 3 August 2019 a gunman who had just posted a racist manifesto onto right-wing message board 8Chan opened fire on predominantly Latinx shoppers in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas resulting in 22 deaths. Following the attack, US President Trump spoke out against ‘racism, bigotry and white supremacy’. This is breathtaking hypocrisy from the man who presides over a regime under which black and minority ethnic people are under daily siege as the climate of racist fear and aggression is ramped up. Between October 2018 and August 2019 over 430,000 people were detained on the Mexican-US border alone, and on 7 August in Mississippi US Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted the biggest workplace raid in a single state in US history, making 680 arrests. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Trump’s racist agenda
From the day he walked into the White House in January 2017, Trump made it clear that he viewed large sections of non-white Americans as the enemy within. Despite widespread protest and legal challenge, what seemed simply absurd attention-grabbing twitter outbursts about banning Muslims travelling to the country and building a wall between ‘north’ and ‘south’ America, rapidly became entrenched government policy.
In the past year repression on the border has been stepped up to the extent that Democratic Party congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aptly described the migrant detention facilities there as ‘concentration camps’. On 4 September the Inspector General for the US Department of Health and Human Services issued a report detailing the devastating effects on the physical and mental health of children separated from their parents and caged in filthy, inhuman conditions. The report explains how children didn’t know why they were there, felt guilt and fear, and cried inconsolably; unsurprisingly, the longer they were imprisoned, the more their mental health deteriorated.
Democratic President Barack Obama, whom Trump succeeded, was responsible for deporting a record-breaking three million people during his eight years in office, and although a minority of Democratic congress members like Ocasio-Cortez have genuinely tried to oppose the current barbaric treatment of migrants, the party as a whole has continued facilitating it by agreeing to pass the required funding bills.
On 21 August the Trump administration upped the antagonism, by announcing plans to keep thousands of migrant families in indefinite detention. Currently, US law forbids the detention of children for longer than 20 days. This has not prevented their parents remaining in prison, leading to further trauma due to enforced separation.
In the first week of September, 19 states filed a lawsuit in California in response. Testimony in the lawsuit included details of the routine denial of basic hygiene products such as soap and toothpaste, as well as the refusal to provide girls and women with more than one sanitary pad per day: ‘Although the guards knew the girls had their periods, they were not offered a shower or a change of clothes, even when [a] girl visibly bled through her pants.’
Trump also announced he would be looking into removing ‘birthright citizenship’, the policy whereby any baby born in US territory is automatically a citizen irrespective of its parents’ status (a right long gone in Britain).
On 12 September the US Supreme Court declared lawful a government policy whereby migrants arriving on the Mexican border from other countries can be turned back on the basis that they did not claim asylum earlier in the first safe country they arrived at.
ICE – the history
The US has had legislation in place whereby immigrants can be imprisoned pending investigation and/or removal since 1882. Despite this being clearly designated as separate from the criminal justice system and therefore not intended to be punitive, both the conditions and use of such detention grew progressively harsher throughout the 20th century. In the 1980s, the US passed legislation to detain any non-citizen convicted of a criminal offence after the termination of their sentence. As with similar laws in Britain, France and elsewhere, what began on the basis of targeting those convicted of the most serious crimes was rapidly extended to encompass even minor offences. As a result mainly of this and of anti-terrorism legislation, the daily average number of people in immigration detention increased from 5,000 in 1985 to 20,500 in 2001.
Anti-ICE protest, New York 2016 (image: Waging Non Violence/Ashoka Jegroo)
After the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US government transferred immigration policing to the Department of Homeland Security, within which three component parts were created to oversee immigration: Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Under ICE’s supervision there has been an expansion of immigration detention. During Fiscal Year 2018, 396,448 people were taken into ICE custody: 242,778 were detained by CBP and 153,670 by ICE’s own enforcement operations. The daily average number of immigration detainees held by ICE that year was 42,188: 40,075 in adult facilities and 2,113 in ‘family detention’.
Private prisons and profit
A major player in the increasing drive towards detention and deportation is the ever-growing private prison industry, which has spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions, seeking to sway the political process toward detention-focused policies.
Following Trump’s election in 2016, shares of CoreCivic Inc (CXW) and GEO Group (GEO) shot up 21% and 43% respectively. At the time, these two companies controlled 85% of the private, for-profit prison industry and ran the centres in which around 75% of immigration detainees were kept; their government-guaranteed profits averaged $3,000 to $4,000 per detainee.
Targeting workers
In July the US administration introduced a new fast-track deportation process whereby any migrant who cannot prove they have been in the US continuously for more than two years can be immediately deported without any type of court process. Previously, expedited deportation could only be applied to those detained near the border who had been in the US for less than two weeks.
Armed with this new power, ICE stepped up its activity against migrants away from the border, and on 7 August immigration cops arrested 680 mostly Latinx workers at seven Mississippi chicken processing plants. The raid coincided with the first day of the school term in the area and hundreds of children were left stranded at schools as those due to pick them up were under arrest.
Many of the workers targeted are members of the Food and Commercial Workers Union. Reporting on the raids, Workers’ World writes: ‘In rural Mississippi, poultry plants have now become the dominant employer as Latinx immigrants join a predominantly Black community and workforce in this white supremacist state.’
The same article cites a 2013 study in Southern Spaces which recounted how ‘The chicken plant replaced the cotton field…’ and describes how from the 1970s, African American poultry workers politicised in the civil rights and freedom struggles organised in defence of their labour rights. In retaliation the Mississippi poultry industry recruited immigrant workers ‘as a form of labour control’. This attempt to use migrant workers to break strikes and organisation by black workers failed and Workers’ World describes how: ‘in the poultry plants that ICE raided, Black and Latinx workers have continued to assert solidarity and fight back through union organising and legal cases against death-dealing capitalist working conditions.’ (‘ICE attacks migrant workers and their unions’, Workers’ World, 16 August 2019)
300 of the 680 arrestees were released within 24 hours with summonses to attend court; the rest remained in detention. Some of those released have been peremptorily sacked from their jobs, despite having done nothing to warrant this.
Resistance builds
None of this has gone without protest, whether from the workers in the factories under attack, asylum seekers on the border or solidarity activists across Mexico and the US. Every new racist law is met with legal challenges and protests. On 10 August, Jewish activists from the recently formed ‘Never Again Action’ group marked Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of communal mourning, by protesting at ICE facilities across the country, with placards declaring ‘This is how it starts’. Later that month hundreds of migrants demonstrated for four days in Chiapas in southern Mexico against the Mexican government’s collaboration with Trump and failure to provide transit visas.
Sustained divestment campaigning against banks, investment companies and pension funds (including those of trade unions) that put money in the private prison industry has driven down the detention profiteers’ stock values.
An injury to one is an injury to all!
No-one is illegal!
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 272, October/November 2019
