This Venezuelan family (top photo) and this Haitian family (bottom photo) were welcomed to the U.S. after applying for asylum, although their situations are still not secure. Thousands more are waiting at the border seeking asylum because the Biden administration’s policies are keeping them out. PHOTO/BOB LEE, PEOPLE’S TRIBUNE
“We go through so many things to get here, and they don’t let you cross,” Jose Ramon Aguilera, a migrant from Venezuela standing on the Mexican side of the border told Border Report in mid-December. “It is not fair. We want to enter; we want an opportunity…. I spent seven days in the jungle, drinking river water, starving, seeing people dying. I rode The Beast (a cargo train in Southern Mexico) and that was another trauma. My feet froze. I could not get off the train.” (borderreport.com)
Aguilera is one of thousands trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico, and one of millions around the world who have been forced to migrate. Journalist Chris Hedges reported in early January that, “There are some 84 million forcibly displaced people in the world, more than at any time since World War II. They are fleeing a combination of war, civil unrest, religious conflict, poverty, persecution, local violence and the climate crisis.” Hedges notes that governments in Europe and elsewhere have responded by denouncing immigrants and refugees and turning them back, “including at sea where whole boats of refugees are drowned. Pope Francis calls the Mediterranean ‘the largest cemetery in Europe.’” Persecuting and abusing migrants and refugees has become policy in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. Hedges points out that the U.S. “bears a direct responsibility for the more than 37 million people who have fled the [U.S.] wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan since 2001, not to mention the U.S.-backed wars in Central America” and the current U.S.-backed war in Ukraine. The increased hostility to refugees, Hedges writes, is the basis of “a new and heartless world order, one where the wealthy industrialized nations of the earth wall off the destitute to suffer and die.”
Although in the U.S. President Biden had promised a more fair and just immigration policy, his administration has dragged its feet in halting the use of Title 42, a health law, to arbitrarily keep asylum-seekers out of the U.S., a policy begun by Donald Trump. Indeed, in Biden’s recent speech about immigration he basically called for expanding the use of Title 42. And now the Supreme Court is delaying until June any action to stop the use of Title 42.
Meanwhile, some Republican governors are callously playing politics with the lives of migrants and refugees by sending busloads of them to places like Washington, DC. In Texas, Gov. Abbott has been sending National Guard troops to the border, who string razor wire to keep people out. Both Arizona and Texas have also begun using shipping containers to build their own exclusionary walls along the border. An estimated 3,000 asylum seekers are living in an encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, across the river from Brownsville, Texas, and they have only two portable toilets, according to a story in Border Report.
Just like the assault on the rights of Black Americans, indigenous people, women, etc., the shameless treatment of migrants and refugees at our southern border is part of the assault on democracy in America. It singles out a group of people and denies them their human rights, which is a threat to everyone’s rights. We have seen this pattern repeated throughout our history; it’s time we increase our efforts stop to it. We should welcome migrants and refugees as we would hope to be welcomed if we were in their shoes.
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
