“ICE has a budget bigger than most militaries around the world. It has increased its spending on weapons by 700% since last year. Trump is building his own personal military to terrorize American cities, trample on civil rights, and intimidate his opponents.” —Robert Reich
Under the direction of President Donald Trump US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), often involving masked and brutal agents, has launched a veritable spree of immigration arrests, raids, detentions, and deportations. Asserting only those with serious criminal records would be subject to apprehension is yet another Trump lie.
Those swept up are mostly hardworking and taxpaying immigrants with no or extremely minor criminal records, many of whose documentation paperwork is in order, who are diligently following legal requirements, and may have permanent residency status in the US. In some cases, those who have been swept up include US citizens, and in one instance a US citizen, Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good, has been murdered.
Families have been subjected to wanton and cruel separations. Persons have been held indefinitely, some incommunicado, at locations far from their normal places of residence. Some have been transported to dismal conditions in foreign settings that are not their countries of origin.
Also patently obvious is that this is a politically-driven and racist policy. Urban areas that did not vote for Trump have specifically been targeted for raids and enforcement. Those stopped, subjected to questioning, and detained are typically brown or black. In a diverse, multiethnic and supposedly open society such as the US purports to be, such policy is simply unacceptable.
CCDS urges any and all who encounter calls or advertisements to work for ICE refuse such job offers. Join us in resisting the siren song of racist and anti-democratic employment. Organize and join efforts to restrain and stop ICE, to disrupt their brutal Gestapo-type tactics, challenge them everywhere, support legal action against them, bring the message to all demonstrations and protests to abolish ICE.
We demand humane treatment and well-being for everyone in the US and subject to its jurisdiction. As the labor movement has taught us — “an injury to one is an injury to all!”
Editors’ note: “If it happened yesterday, we’ve already forgotten.” – an anonymous Nation editor.
What we see and react to in the media conditions us to view the present as a series of immediate crises, and to ignore their roots in the past. For social justice movements, this can be deadly, cutting us off from an ability to weigh and learn from our own history, and to understand how that history shapes the ways we fight for justice today.
In this photo essay, David Bacon reaches into his photographic archive of 30 years, which are now part of the Special Collections of Stanford University’s Green Library. A Nation contributor and former union organizer, Bacon’s photographs and journalism have documented the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world.
____________________
In 1971, Pat Nixon, wife of Republican President Richard Nixon, inaugurated Border Field State Park, where the border meets the Pacific Ocean just south of San Diego. The day she visited, she asked the Border Patrol to cut the barbed wire so she could greet the Mexicans who’d come to see her. She told them, “I hope there won’t be a fence here too much longer.”
Instead, a real fence was built in the early 1990s, made of metal sheets taken from decommissioned aircraft carrier landing platforms. The sheets had holes, so anyone could peek through to the other side. But for the first time, people coming from each side could no longer physically mix together or hug each other. This is how the wall looked when I began photographing it, over 30 years ago.
That old wall still exists in a few places on the Mexican side in Tijuana and elsewhere. But Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton Administration border enforcement program, sought to push border crossers out of urban areas like San Ysidro, into remote desert regions where crossing was much more difficult and dangerous. To do that, the government had contractors build a series of walls that were harder to cross.
That’s partly how the US-Mexico border became more than mere geography-how it became instead a passage of fire, an ordeal that must be survived in order to send money from work in the US back to a hungry family, to find children and relatives from whom they have been separated by earlier journeys, or to flee an environment that has become too dangerous to bear.
Some do not survive, dying as they try to cross the desert or swim the Rio Bravo. To them the border region has become a land of death. Every year at least 3-400 people die trying to cross, and are buried, often without names, in places like the graveyard in Holtville, in the Imperial Valley.
But the photographs I’ve taken over 30 years also show that the US/Mexico border is a land of the living. Millions of people live and work on Mexico’s side of the border: There are the child laborers who pick the tomatoes and strawberries in Mexicali Valley that line the shelves of grocery stores in the US; there are the workers from across Mexico who staff the massive maquiladoras in Tijuana; And there are thousands who have been deported to Mexico, and who must now somehow survive this passage of fire as well.
Statement by the Peace and Solidarity Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism – December 2018
The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism condemns the November 27th vote in the U.S. Senate to impose economic sanctions on Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act (NICA) mandates that the U.S. vote against loans and aid to Nicaragua from international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. The NICA Act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2017, and after passage by unanimous consent in the Senate, it now awaits the signature of President Donald Trump. The NICA will impose significant cuts to infrastructure and social programs compounding the crisis caused by widespread destruction by U.S. funded oppositionists this spring and fall.
CCDS stands with organizations, faith leaders, solidarity groups and individuals who have denounced the U.S. government’s economic warfare. As with Venezuela and Cuba, the intent is to create a humanitarian crisis to undermine, destabilize and overthrow the democratically elected, socialist governments of Latin America in pursuit of an imperialist agenda – the so-called policy of “regime change.”Once again we see the U.S. government pursuing policies throughout the hemisphere and in the U.S. of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described 50 years ago – the “three pillars of evil” – white supremacy, militarism, and exploitation.
Troika of Tyranny
Trump administration National Security Advisor John Bolton boldly announced U.S. aims in a speech in Miami November 1st:
“This Troika of Tyranny, this triangle of terror stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua, is the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere. The United States looks forward to watching each corner of the triangle fall…the Troika will crumble.” (11/1/18)
What is driving this “regime change” policy? The countries targeted have pursued policies aimed at the betterment of their citizens – free education and health care, eliminating extreme poverty, creating an inclusive society where women, minority and indigenous populations are equal, protecting the environment, and combatting the violent drug trade that has engulfed other countries of the region.
The people-oriented policies of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are a direct challenge to the “neo-liberal” world order of free markets for capital, deregulation, austerity budgets, and elimination of worker and environmental protections in the pursuit of maximum profit and plunder of natural resources. Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela stand as examples to the world that there is an alternative to policies dictated by Wall Street and free market capitalism.
In Nicaragua, the violence that began in April 2018 was sparked by IMF demands to gut social security pensions in repayment of loans. When the FSLN government countered with a plan to make employers shoulder the burden, the business council refused and walked out of negotiations.
Oppositionist groups funded by the U.S. “aid” organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy seized on the moment of confusion and waged a social media-driven disinformation campaign that accused the government of making workers, not businesses, pay. The ensuing violence resulted in nearly 200 deaths, including several police, kidnappings, torture and destruction of public and private property.
In Venezuela, sanctions have been used against working people and the very poor who are most supportive of the Maduro government. Using the excuse that Venezuelans who have left the country pose a humanitarian crisis, the U.S. openly talks about plans for military intervention. Right wing governments of Colombia and Brazil are being urged to cooperate with the U.S.
The U.S. announced more sanctions on Cuba following an overwhelming UN vote of 189-2 on November 2nd to end the longest running economic embargo of any country in history. Only Israel sided with the U.S. Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called the embargo “a flagrant, massive and systematic violation of the human rights of Cuban men and women.” Estimates are over $1 trillion in lost economic activity since 1962.
The Larger Framework: Aims of U.S. Empire in the Western Hemisphere
With the collapse of Socialist Bloc countries and the dramatic shift from manufacturing to finance at the apex of the capitalist world, we have seen the coming of age of neo-liberal globalization. U.S. global hegemony has been increasingly challenged by China, India, and various formations of the Global South such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). In Latin America there has been a shift from U.S. domination of the region in trade, investments, and economic assistance to greater competition with China, Russia, and European countries.
The new government of Mexico headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) aims to divest itself of the neo-liberal economic model in favor of building its domestic economy, raising wages and living conditions that will end the forced migration of its citizens. In an inaugural address to the nation on December 1st, the new president announced that “starting from now, we will carry out a peaceful, steady political transformation.” Promising a “change of our political system, he fiercely attacked free market, pro-trade policies have been “a disaster” for Mexico, resulting in low growth, rising income inequality and the migration of citizens out of the country.
Neo-liberal policies are coming under increasing pressure elsewhere in Latin America. Huge mass movements and labor-led strikes have protested IMF-imposed austerity measures in Argentina and Costa Rica. With rising challenges to its regional hegemony, the U.S. has countered its weakening economic position with an expansion of its military presence through dozens of military bases in Colombia and Argentina, and funding rightwing sectors of the capitalist class in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The people of Puerto Rico are challenging the Wall Street imposed regime of austerity and privatization following a debt crisis that led to bankruptcy.
Cuba is still celebrated as a model for progressive economic and political change, and, while suffering setbacks, the spirit of the 21st Century Bolivarian Revolution persists throughout the Western Hemisphere. President Barack Obama recognized the futility of regime change in Cuba and moved toward normalization of relations. Today, President Trump is returning to the use of military threats, supporting violent protests such as in Nicaragua, and imposing crippling economic sanctions to stimulate instability. In the case of Cuba, Trump seeks to reverse the economic and people-to-people ties that have been expanded in recent years. All of these policies constitute desperate efforts to reverse history to overcome the contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism and challenging China’s growing influence in the region. In sum, the Trump Administration is trying to overcome the United States’ loss of regional hegemony.
CCDS stands with people the world over in condemning U.S. government policies of aggression in pursuit of economic and political domination of the hemisphere. We reject interference in the internal affairs of other countries and work to redirect our tax dollars from militarism to living wage jobs for all, a Green New Deal, health care and education.
