Migrants travel in groups through Mexico for safety reasons. But Mexico is still one of the world’s most dangerous countries. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

But group travel couldn’t save everyone.

Earlier this month, two trucks from the caravan disappeared in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. One person who escaped told officials that about “65 children and seven women were sold” by the driver to a group of armed men.

Mexican authorities are searching for the migrants, but history shows that people missing for more than 24 hours are rarely found in Mexico – alive or at all.
 

Mexico’s ambiguous welcome

An average of 12 people disappear each day in Mexico. Most are victims of a raging three-way war among the Mexican armed forces, organized crime and drug cartels.

The military crackdown on criminal activity has actually escalated violence in Mexico since operations began in 2006, my research and other security studies show.

Nearly 22,000 people were murdered in Mexico in the first eight months of this year, a dismal record in one of the world’s deadliest places.

Central Americans fleeing similarly rampant violence back home confront those risks and others on their journey to the United States. Doctors Without Borders found that over two-thirds of migrants surveyed in Mexico in 2014 experienced violence en route. One-third of women had been sexually abused.

Mexico’s security crisis may explain why so few caravan members want to stay there.

In response to President Donald Trump’s demands that Mexico “stop this onslaught,” Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced that migrants who applied for asylum at Mexico’s southern border would be given shelter, medical attention, schooling and jobs.

About 1,700 of the estimated 5,000 caravan members took him up on the offer.

Meanwhile, everyday Mexicans are greeting the migrants as they pass through their towns, donating food, clothing, lodging and transport.

A recent poll shows that 51 percent of Mexicans support the caravan. Thirty-three percent of respondents, many of them affluent members of Mexico’s urban middle class, want the migrants to go back to Central America.

Two trucks carrying an estimated 80 migrants went missing in Mexico in early November. AP Photo/Marco Ugarte
 

Asylum overload

Mexican law, which allows eligible asylum seekers to both request and be granted asylum, exceeds international standards on the rights of migrants.

But reality in Mexico often falls short of the law.

The Mexican Refugee Assistance Commission is supposed to process asylum applications in 45 days. But its offices in Mexico City were damaged by last year’s earthquake, forcing the already overstretched and underfunded agency to suspend processing of open asylum claims for months.

Meanwhile, new applications for asylum in Mexico continued to pour in – a record 14,596 were filed last year. The processing backlog is now two years.

During that period of legal limbo, asylum seekers cannot work, attend school or fully access Mexico’s public health system. President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office on Dec. 1, says he will offer Central American migrants temporary working visas while their claims are processed.

Anti-caravan posts on social media accuse migrants of taking Mexican jobs and violating Mexico’s sovereignty, using nativist language similar to that seen in the United States.

Mexico City, which in 2017 declared itself to be a sanctuary city, nonetheless put thousands of caravan members up in a stadium staffed by medical teams and humanitarian groups.
 

Militarizing the US-Mexico border

The first Central Americans from the caravan are now arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they face a far less warm reception.

Calling the caravan an “invasion,” President Trump has ordered the deployment of over 5,000 troops to the border.

U.S. law prohibits the use of the armed forces to enforce domestic laws without specific congressional authorization. That means the troops can only support border agents in deterring migrants.

But Trump’s decision still has symbolic power. This is the first time in over a century that military troops have been summoned to defend the U.S.-Mexico border.

The last deployment occurred during the Mexican Revolution.

On March 9, 1916, a small band of revolutionaries led by Francisco “Pancho” Villa invaded Columbus, New Mexico.

After Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to the border – and into Mexican territory. United States Air Force

Officially, the group assaulted the border city in retaliation for then-President Woodrow Wilson’s support of Venustiano Carranza, Villa’s political rival. Villa also had a personal vendetta against Sam Ravel, a local man who had swindled money from him.

President Wilson responded by summoning General John J. Pershing, who assembled a force of 6,000 U.S. troops to chase Villa deep inside Mexico’s northern territory. Pershing’s “punitive expedition” returned in early 1917 after failing to capture the revolutionary leader.
 

No relief at the border

Central Americans who reach the militarized United States border can still apply for asylum there, despite President Trump’s recent executive order limiting where they may do so. But they face stiff odds.

The Central American caravan includes many women asylum seekers hoping to give their children a safer life in the United States. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

After an evaluation process that can take months or years, the majority of Central American asylum claims filed in the United States – 75 percent – are denied. Caravan members rejected will be sent back to the same perilous place they fled last month.

With 60 percent of its population living in poverty, Honduras is the poorest country in Latin America. It also has the world’s second-highest homicide rate – 43.6 murders per 100,000 people – trailing only El Salvador.

The U.S. contributed to the instability that created these hardships.

Honduras has been in turmoil since 2009, when the military overthrew leftist President Manuel Zelaya. Rather than join the United Nations and European Union in demanding Zelaya’s reinstatement, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for new elections, effectively endorsing a coup.

The country entered a prolonged political crisis. Honduras’s November 2017 presidential election was contested, with the U.S.-backed President Juan Orlando Hernández accused of rigging the vote. Seventeen opposition protesters were killed in the unrest that followed.
The Central American caravan that started in Honduras seeks in the U.S. a life free of such violence. Its steady progress toward the border shows that even kidnappings, Trump’s threats and soldiers cannot deter them.

Luis Gómez Romero, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory, University of Wollongong
 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Donald Trump has now declared the caravan of refugees from Honduras and other Central American countries making their way on foot to the U.S. border an “invasion of our country” that has created a “national emergency.” “We have no choice,” he bellowed from the White House on November 1. “We will defend our borders. We will defend our country.” And on November 3, at a rally in Montana, he said of the people on the caravan, “These people are vicious,” calling them “very tough, young people” and claiming they were “criminals in some cases. In many cases.”

On the basis of this pack of lies, Trump has called out the army, and the Department of Defense immediately responded with the deployment of 5,200 active duty military troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump has now upped that to 15,000 troops. Military officials have made clear that some of these soldiers will be armed. Still not enough for Trump, he told the soldiers they can open fire if a refugee throws a rock, then backed off when the military refused to do it.

These troops are in addition to the 2,100 National Guard troops already there as “backup” to the nearly 20,000 Border Patrol agents with all of their high-tech border security already in operation. The deployment of active-duty military forces is unprecedented, although both Obama and Bush mobilized thousands of National Guard troops to the border when they were in office.

Not satisfied with mobilizing “troops on the ground,” Trump is expanding the list of “emergency measures” he’s considering to further threaten and intimidate these refugees who have every right—including the clear legal right under U.S. law—to come to the border and request asylum:

• Shutting down the border completely.
• Prohibiting all immigrants from the countries represented from entering the U.S.—including refugees requesting asylum—similar to his successful banning of Muslims from selected predominantly Muslim countries.
• Threatening to imprison refugees indefinitely while awaiting their asylum hearing—potentially for years—outdoors in tent city detention centers in the sweltering heat. These are refugees who’ve already shown a “credible fear” of facing repression if forced to return. Until recently, most refugees were released eventually while awaiting their asylum hearing in immigration court.
• Now Trump has proposed eliminating birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants—and claims he can bypass Congress, and violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment—by simply issuing an executive order. This proposal has triggered controversy and opposition within the ruling class, even among Republicans.

Trump’s unrelenting anti-immigrant tirade is being portrayed by the mainstream media as just an election maneuver—putting the blame at the feet of the Democrats for their supposed “open borders” policy. But what the Trump/Pence regime is accomplishing is far more. They’re further mobilizing fascist forces behind the intensifying attacks on immigrants and their call for ethnic cleansing, as part of consolidating their whole fascist program.

In America, “I’m a nationalist!” = “I’m a white supremacist!”

The Trump/Pence regime has brought forward a fascist program in the face of the serious crises U.S. imperialism is facing internationally and within this country. They have set out to consolidate this country around the open restoration of white supremacy, male supremacy, and anti-immigrant xenophobia, along with USA #1 chauvinism, with the rallying cry: “Make America White Again!”

In the middle of his xenophobic horror show, Trump declared “I’m a nationalist!” In a country founded on slavery and genocide—with white supremacy sewn into its fabric from the very start—this means “I’m a white supremacist.” The ethnic cleansing of dark-skinned, poor immigrants from “shithole countries” has become a crucial part of galvanizing their core white supremacist supporters and consolidating their fascist program as a whole. And that includes slamming, and threatening to criminalize, opposition from Democrats representing other sections of the ruling class, as they’ve done in going after “sanctuary cities,” threatening to arrest the mayor of Oakland and bring charges against the governor of California.

The Trump/Pence regime is exaggerating and playing on the fears in this country of the massive numbers of immigrants coming to the border.

What is the larger context? The U.S.’s open backing of right-wing death squads and reactionary regimes in these countries (see accompanying article “Hell in Honduras—American Made”) is coupled with continued economic domination and devastation of countries south of the U.S. border—a border that is itself a result of wars of conquest by the U.S. The workings of this capitalist-imperialist system have led to a great lopsidedness between the imperialist countries of the world, the “First World,” and the vast number of oppressed nations, the “Third World.” This generates massive flows of migrants from the Third World, looking for refuge and livelihood, now further exacerbated around the world by devastating wars and global warming. They—the rulers and enforcers of this system—have NO ANSWER. Faced with this, the rulers rely on more and more militarization of borders and deportation of immigrants in response to what they perceive as “the problem.”

What Is the Response of the Democrats?

This is why, even before the Trump/Pence regime escalated the assault on immigrants to new, fascist levels of brutality, the same program was carried out by Obama, Bush, Clinton, and by previous presidents.

It was the Democrat Obama who earned the title “deporter-in-chief” by the pro-immigrant community for setting the record with more than two million deportations while he was president. And his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, responded to the arrival of large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children in 2014 this way: “We have to send a clear message: just because your child gets across the border doesn’t mean your child gets to stay.” Note she didn’t distinguish asylum seekers who would be, and at times were, killed because she saw to it the child didn’t “get to stay.”

Where have the Democratic Party leaders been while Trump has been issuing a call to arms to “real” Americans to take action against immigrants? In large part they’ve stood aside and told people to stay focused on health care, and let this attack go unchallenged. They’ve agonized at the sight of poor and exhausted refugees coming to seek asylum—because it helps rally anti-immigrant Republicans in the elections! The reality is that the Democrats have no other program to bring forward, because it is the very workings of the system of capitalism-imperialism that they, too, represent that created this immigration crisis.

This, even as the fascist sections of the ruling class of this system, such as Trump, Pence, and Jeff Sessions, further promote extreme forms of demonization of immigrants, relying on and reinforcing the white supremacy which pervades this society, as most of the immigrants are Central and South Americans.

The demonization, criminalization, and deportation of immigrants is rooted deeply in and flows from the system—the system of capitalism-imperialism. The Democratic Party, as demonstrated by Obama, is not the answer, because they represent and enforce the very same system—and relying on them is worse than useless: it contributes to shoring up this whole oppressive setup. To actually move fundamentally beyond this intolerable situation—and get to a far better society and world—this system must be OVERTHROWN by an actual revolution—to be replaced by a radically different society and system, aiming to end all of the social divisions worldwide, the oppression and exploitation of this system, that give rise to this problem in the first place. And from this perspective, it is even more crucial that we wage fierce resistance against these escalated attacks on immigrants, uniting with the tens of millions whose consciences are shocked by the scope and nature of these acts of the Trump/Pence regime.

We urge readers to watch the new talk by Bob Avakian (available at revcom.us)—Why We Need An Actual Revolution And How We Can Really Make Revolution—where the source and solution to the immigration crisis is addressed. And in particular, watch the Q&A: “Bob Avakian’s Answer to People Who Complain About Immigrants Crossing Borders.”
STOP: The Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants and the Militarization of the Border!

This article was first published on countercurrents.org
 

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