The inhumanity of the US government’s border controls has once again been laid bare, by the separation of migrant families under the Trump administration’s so-called ‘zero tolerance’ policy that has left at least 666 children unable to reunite with their families, following their parents’ deportation.
The ‘zero tolerance’ policy was officially in practice between April – June 2018. Border agents enforced a mandatory separation of all undocumented families attempting to cross the US border. Over 3,000 children were removed from their families. Children were sent to ‘Offices of Refugee Resettlement’ around the country, where they were caged in overcrowded warehouses, in insanitary conditions, many for longer than the legal limit of 20 days, as reported in FRFI 271 (August 2019). Unable to wash or change their clothes, these children were denied basic amenities and prohibited from even hugging their siblings for comfort, while their parents were processed elsewhere.
Deliberate separation
Mass protests forced federal judges to pass an injunction ordering the government to cease the practice and reunite all separated families, but in October 2020 American Civil Liberties Union lawyers reported they were unable to track down the parents of 545 children. The parents had been deported to Central America without their children, and in such haste that no records were made of their locations. As of November 2020, the number had reached 666 children. The true figure is likely greater, as it has become apparent that the Trump administration maintained the separation policy covertly for months after being ordered to cease, separating a further 1,142 children from their parents after June 2018.
These children have been apart from their families for nearly three years. Hundreds of them were under the age of five when they were detained. The trauma they suffered was fully intentional. On 2 November 2020, a House Judicial Committee investigation confirmed that the Trump administration had ‘full knowledge’ these children would likely never be reunited with their parents. Evidence presented showed that the government viewed the sadistic treatment of infants as a deterrent to put off migrants, despite lying to the public that it had never been intended for families to be separated. Worse still, a 2017 report from a ‘zero tolerance’ pilot-programme concluded that families should not be split up due to the high risk of permanent separation – and was quietly hushed up until it was uncovered by NBC News.
Business as usual
The roles of US border control agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in oppressing migrants preceded the Trump administration and will not end under president-elect Biden. During his 2016 election campaign, Trump bragged that his administration would deport three million migrants from the US immediately following his election, and he hoped to remove up to 11 million people once his border wall was completed.
President Obama’s administration deported a record-breaking three million people over eight years, then Trump amplified violent rhetoric against migrants and massively increased the number of people detained in privately run immigration prisons. Under Trump, border agents have stepped up raids on workplaces, deporting hundreds of exploited migrant workers at a time, while bosses face no charges. Eduardo Segura, writing for Jacobin, astutely notes: ‘American capitalism doesn’t have a problem with exploited undocumented labour powering [the] country, so long as it remains docile.’ Since March 2020, the US government has expelled over 200,000 immigrants under the guise of preventing the ‘introduction of communicable diseases’. These deportations, speedily conducted, using an obscure clause in the 1944 Public Health Act, stand in stark contrast to the administration’s lackadaisical approach to the coronavirus pandemic.
Guardians of US imperialism
US border control agencies will become more violent as capitalist crises become more severe, and victims of US imperialism abroad seek escape from intolerable situations. The state will work to criminalise and isolate minority sections of the working class. Recent allegations of torture, violence and abuse have brought the barbaric practices of ICE and CBP to public attention: in late September, a whistleblower complaint alleged that detainees in a Georgia immigration detention centre were victims of abuse, including forced sterilisation, having received painful and invasive surgical procedures without their full knowledge or consent. Horrifying parallels have been drawn with the US’s shameful history of eugenics and forced sterilisation perpetrated against over 70,000 minority people in the 20th century. While investigations are ongoing, at least six of the women who spoke up about the abuse have been deported.
On 12 October, border agents and state troopers fired rubber bullets and tear gas at O’odham Native Americans holding traditional ceremonies at a border post built through unceded tribal land. O’odham are frequently targeted by border agents, as their ancestral lands cross the US-Mexico border. Their freedom to travel their own land is now under threat by increased militarisation.
The guardians of US imperialism threaten all workers. In July, heavily armed paramilitary ICE forces were turned on people in Portland, Oregon, where they attempted to smash anti-police demonstrations by detaining protestors in unmarked vans. It will take solidarity from the whole working class to oppose them, and the brutal imperialist state they defend.
Joe Tyler
