It’s a well-known scene throughout the world: migrant families marching in the streets to demand their rights and seek a better life are brutally repressed by state forces. Police wield billy clubs to attack men, women and children and enforce the message migrants and refugees have heard everywhere: “You are not welcome here”.
The biggest rock in the way of the White House’s plans to stop the influx of people across the Southern border is regional corruption and graft.
Reuniting the more than five thousand children forcibly separated from their parents by the Donald Trump administration has been a slow and agonizing process.
“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.
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.
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.
