Despite the rhetoric during his presidential campaign, stating ‘Offering hope and safe haven to refugees is part of who we are as a country’, Biden continued Donald Trump’s use of Title 42 of the Public Health Services Law to fast-track the deportation of migrants from Central America whilst Covid-19 restrictions were in place. President Biden even extended the restrictions to migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti. With pressure from the capitalist class to remove all Covid-19 mitigation measures, not for any health reasons, but due to it being an impediment to maximising profits, Title 42 also had to go. Before the deadline of 11 May the US state wasted no time and added further restrictions to Title 8 (the section of the US code of laws that deals with Immigration and Nationality), to make it more difficult for people from Latin America and the Caribbean to get into the US. US Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas (a Cuban exile, whose family left shortly after the revolution) stated ‘Let me be clear, our border is not open and will not be open after May 11’. He backed this up by boosting the US-Mexico border with 24,000 armed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) guards, 1,500 US troops, and augmenting the border with new layers of razor wire. Piling on, the reactionary Texas governor Greg Abbott added 2,500 Texas National Guard troops.
Title 8 effectively puts severe limits on migrants applying for asylum in the US and is intended to allow fast processing and deportation for people who arrive in the US without prior approval. Those who have passed through a ‘safe’ country before entering the US will be ineligible. Migrants must use a mobile app (which so far is full of bugs with error messages appearing in English) to get an appointment at a US port of entry, a US embassy, or regional processing centres to be established in several countries including Guatemala and Colombia. Anyone who crosses the US border unauthorised or fails in their asylum application faces swift deportation with a five-year ban on re-entry to the US. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has stated that the number of deportation flights will double or triple for some countries. Seeking to restrict refugee status by how people apply or enter the country is in contradiction to the US Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as The Geneva Convention and the 1951 Refugee Convention.
The infrastructure for the new rules, including the app and immigration officers with ‘specialised asylum training for a “credible fear” interview(s)’, is not adequate to deal with the tens of thousands stranded on the Mexican side of the border. This leaves the majority of migrants homeless, unable to work and at the mercy of criminal gangs, as well as Immigration officials and the Police (at least 40 people died during a fire at an over-crowded Mexican detention facility in Ciudad Juarez in March). The US has trained and invested in border patrols in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to stop migrants before they get anywhere near the US border. This has recently been extended to Panama, with the US co-ordinating a 60-day ‘surge campaign’ in the Darien Gap area. The Darien Gap is a dangerous forested area without roads that many from South America, particularly Colombia and Venezuela, have to pass through to reach the US. This forces migrants to use even more risky routes and methods. Those that make it over the border can be detained for months in overcrowded facilities awaiting interviews and immigration judge reviews. Detention facilities with a capacity to hold 10,000 migrants were already holding 28,000 when the new regulations came into effect. Within a couple of days of 11 May, an unaccompanied Honduran child and an 8 year old child (who arrived with her family) died in custody. As a temporary measure to ease the overcrowding, which is expected to get worse, the DHS announced a plan to release some people prior to a court date; this was immediately blocked by a federal judge.
Advocacy groups, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the new regulations, stating they are substantially similar to Donald Trump’s immigration policies that were blocked. With the ruling class narrative all about a ‘Border Crisis’ and ‘Invasion’, the main aim is to look tough on immigration with eyes on the next presidential election. This, however, facilitates increasing racism inside the US with all state forces given the green light to treat all non-white people with suspicion. The Texas governor is supporting a bill that allows citizens to arrest, detain and deter people crossing the border illegally, including the use of ‘non-deadly’ force. The Florida governor is banning local government offices from issuing identification cards to people who cannot prove citizenship, requiring hospitals which accept Medicaid to have questions about citizenship on intake forms, and increasing penalties on human-trafficking related offences. This atmosphere of state racism will lead to more racist attacks and shootings by Neo-Nazis/white supremacists; just four days before the immigration changes, a man ploughed his vehicle into a group of Venezuelan immigrants in the border town of Brownsville in Texas.
A small group of Democrat House of Representatives members (led by representatives from states bordering Mexico along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib) signed a letter asking President Biden to ease some sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela (specifically the Trump-era additional sanctions) to lessen the surge of migrants arriving from those countries. This was swiftly dismissed by the influential chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Robert Menendez, whom President Biden has been unwilling to antagonise. Biden has kept in place his policy to allow 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti to live and work in the US for two years if they meet highly prohibitive criteria and can fly to the US (see FRFI 292). This meagre pleading shows the insignificance of this section of the Democratic Party and that they cannot be relied on for any progressive fightback against the US imperialist state.
David Hetfield
