“A crime against humanity” and “a disgrace to our great country”: that’s how 99-year-old Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nazis at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, characterized the Donald Trump administration’s coercive separation of thousands of immigrant children from parents seeking asylum.
During the Trump administration, the U.S. deported an average of 275,725 people per year, almost the same number of workers – 257,667 – brought by growers last year to labor in U.S. fields. Contract laborers on H2-A visas now make up is a tenth of the U.S.’s total agricultural workforce – an increase of more than 100,000 in just six years.
Femicide is a crime foretold, warns lawyer Karla Micheel Salas. Announced, frequently by the victim herself, in denunciations and desperate cries for help that are ignored by the authorities and society. Announced by the conditions of discrimination, threat and vulnerability in which so many women live. Announced, by the numbers of femicides that increase daily. Announced, because of the capitalist-patriarchal system in which we all live, a system that devalues the life of women, especially if they are poor brown migrants with disabilities.
The scene is tragic and horrifying. Two burnt out vehicles containing 19 bodies, one of them riddled by 113 bullets, along the hellish slice of borderland in Tamaulipas, near the Nuevo León and Texas.
Honduras is collapsing. The thousands of migrants who flee every day are direct testimony to a political, economic and social crisis that the world ignores and the U. S. government seems bent on perpetuating.
For the past year, Ciudad Juarez has been a flashpoint of the migrant and refugee humanitarian crisis gripping the U.S.-Mexico border. Now hundreds of other people-mainly women and children-are camped out at the international bridge, but this latest group of refugees is Mexican.
There’s nothing “uncontrollable” about people applying for asylum. All the U.S. has to do is meet its obligations under international law.
Trump’s tariffs-for-crackdown tradeoff punishes Americans and Mexicans and doesn’t fix the border. It’s hard to imagine a more misdirected plan.
In this Special Report, the Americas Program analyzed existing Safe Third Country Agreements to determine what such an agreement would mean for Mexico, for the United States and for the migrants from Central America who pass through Mexico to seek safety in the United States.
I have trouble responding to the Trump Wall Hoax. First because it’s almost incomprehensible that we’re even talking about a “border crisis” that has no relationship to reality (there is no “surge” or “invasion”, no increase in crime, no correlation between violence and migrants, no terrorists over the southern border, no threat to national security). Fact-checking these speeches has become a macabre shadow dance, actions that respond to illusions until the real and the projected become indistinguishable to viewers.
