Biden to Migrants from Mexico and Central America: DON’T COME!

(reprinted/translated from the August 2021 issue of Transición, published monthly in Mexico)

In early June 2021, the Biden administration sent Vice President Kamala Harris on an official visit to Mexico. With a supposedly “more humane” face and the pledge of “good intentions,” the purpose of the visit was to ensure imperialist control over Mexico’s border policy and to tighten strategic control over the Central American region.

In the Memorandum of Understanding adopted June 8 at the conclusion of the meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico is called upon to increase its repressive forces along a Northern border “Containment Wall” with the United States and a Southern border “Containment Wall” with Guatemala. Apparently, Biden did not consider that the deployment last April of 10,000 Mexican troops on the Southern border with Guatemala, itself an outrage, was sufficient.

The Memo of Understanding also calls on Mexico to provide financial resources to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras as part of a “strategic economic development partnership” aimed at addressing the “root causes” of the immigration in the region.

Let’s be clear: This agreement is not about eradicating the root causes of the immigration crisis; rather, it’s about continuing with the imposition of the “free trade” agreements – CAFTA with Central America and the USMCA (aka NAFTA 2.0) with Mexico – that have devastated Mexico and Central America, plundering our natural resources and further overexploiting Mexican and Central American labor. It is these “free trade” pacts that have forced millions of workers, peasants and youth, in particular, to risk untold hardships in the quest for a better life for themselves and their families.

That is why working people and all the oppressed must redouble our efforts and unite on both sides of the borders to demand with greater force the repeal of CAFTA and NAFTA 2.0, a stop to the militarization of the borders, and free transit for migrants fleeing from conditions imposed by U.S. imperialist domination.

• Down with CAFTA and NAFTA 2.0!

• No to U.S. intervention in Mexico, Central America and Latin America!

• No to the militarization of the northern and southern borders of Mexico!

• Unity of the working class across Mexico, the United States and Central America in defense of the sovereignty of the peoples!

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“Border Remains as Closed to Migrants as During the Trump Administration”

(reprinted/translated from the August 16 issue of La Jornada, Mexico)

With the advent of the Biden presidency, the border remains as closed or more closed to migrants as during the four-year Trump administration, known worldwide for its blatant xenophobia.   

An example of the Democratic administration’s conduct in this matter is that it maintains a Trumpian provision that allows the United States to expel migrants who enter its territory without documents, under the pretext of combating the spread of Covid-19.

Vice President Kamala Harris meets with Mexican President Lopez Obrador.

In an even more regrettable action, at the beginning of this month it came to light that Washington is deporting Central American citizens by plane to different points in Mexico instead of to their countries of origin, a practice that had never been registered before, and about which the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has already expressed its concern. 

It is estimated that in July, U.S. federal authorities picked up more than 19,000 unaccompanied children, which marks a new all-time high; in addition to 80,000 people traveling as families, representing a 30 percent increase compared to the previous month.

Central American families, children and adolescents, women – even pregnant women – and men migrants and asylum seekers, who have been expelled from the United States and sent to Mexican territory by air, are crossing into Guatemala on foot, forced by agents of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM). They are crossing from Chiapas and Tabasco at night, without food, transportation or resources, according to immigrant rights’ organizations working in these states.

The massive expulsions, under U.S. public health order Title 42, are unprecedented, as is Mexico’s collaboration in abandoning them at the border once they are in the United States, without any administrative procedure. In a letter addressed to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, more than 50 human rights organizations stated that Mexico is being complicit in human rights violations by supporting U.S. actions.

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