LA FRONTERA, United States / Mexico – As Texas escalates the war against immigrants and racist, anti-immigrant attacks spread throughout the country, with increasingly servile cooperation from the Mexican government of the so-called 4T; acts of resistance by hundreds of desperate people also increase who only seek their survival and that of their families. This is about the confrontation of two opposing sides. On the one hand, a well-equipped army with a war strategy of containment and repression, and on the other hand the mass of dispossessed capital who resist being discarded as human beings. The fight for classes is becoming more and more intensive.
With the passage of HB4, which makes it a state crime to enter the United States without immigration documents, Texas leads the legalization of the criminalization of immigration. Other states are following very closely in their footsteps—mainly far-right state governments of racist beliefs who are anti-immigrant. The most recent, Iowa, has passed a similar law (Senate File 2340) that starting in July will allow state and local police forces to arrest anyone who can not prove their legal stay in the United States. In the absence of actions of the federal government to find a humanitarian solution to immigration, states and anti-immigrant forces currently have the upper hand when it comes to the application of systematic violence and policies of criminalizing immigrants for the sake of being immigrants. Meanwhile, the Biden administration and Democrats remain entangled in ambiguity and opposition to separating themselves from the extremist politics of the Republicans.
On the border, the deployment of National Guard troops, equipped and armed for war on the Rio Grande as part of the violent Operation Lone Star promoted by the state government and that HB4 seeks to justify and legalize. The Rio Grande is the setting for militarized troops, tactical vehicles, and serpentine roll barriers.
But the anti-immigrant war strategy does not only occur on the American side, the violent containment actions are accentuated on the Mexican side where immigrants not only face the terror of organized crime with kidnappings, disappearances, executions, and extortions that reach their families and friends found in the United States but also the Mexican National Guard, the National Migration Institute (INM) and local authorities close the clamp on violence that today has thousands of immigrants trapped at the border.
On the anniversary of the arson on March 27, 2023, in the Detention Center of the INM in Ciudad Juárez, where 67 immigrants had been detained in cells locked with padlocks, an investigation was released which revealed that the facility had a torture room where prisoners were punished, mainly transgender immigrants. The investigation report of the tragedy where 40 immigrants lost their lives and 27 were seriously injured, when immigration personnel refused to open the cells was carried out by five human rights organizations (Foundation for Justice, the Institute for Women in Migration, Comprehensive Human Rights in Action, Asylum Access Mexico and the Legal Clinic for Refugees “Alaíde Foppa”) and has revealed the atrocities committed by the INM: “The stories are heartbreaking because they tell us that women heard electric shocks from a migrant who entered these cells.”
“I heard a man scream so much and then only a loud bang and absolute silence…”
Overwhelmed and cornered, immigrants have had no choice but to respond with mass actions. These are spontaneous acts of resistance.
On March 21, what the media described as a “confrontation” occurred between a group of desperate immigrants who tried to cross the wall formation of the National Guard to enter the American side in search of asylum. That day, the troops attacked the mass of migrants, threw tear gas at them, and beat them indiscriminately when they tried to force entry through the fence of serpentine with steel blades. More than 200 immigrants were detained, and seven of them are being charged with serious crimes, such as rioting, illegal entry, destruction of public property, and physical attacks against members of the Guard
National.
Along with sporadic acts of resistance by immigrants, there has also been an increase in organized fight against SB4 and Operation Lone Star involving a large group of community and human rights organizations in the area, headed by the Border Network for Human Rights. In the middle of the intensifying battle against immigrants and the poor, the resistance of the border community also increases. On Saturday, April 6 there was a great day of resistance in the main cities of Texas to demand the repeal of SB4 and the end of Operation Lone Star. Following state mobilization, the actions of struggle particularly in the border communities have grown.
Given this current panorama of struggle and resistance, it is time to close ranks and promote solidarity among the working class. But it has to be solidarity genuine and active under the old motto of the eighties:
“the workers’ struggle is not stopped by border”
Today, the most urgent task for the North American working class is to support the acts of resistance of immigrants and the border people, since they are acts of resistance against capital that has declared war on us on all fronts to preserve this system of oppression, exploitation and have disregard our human lives.
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