When he first announced he was running in the Republican primaries for that party’s nomination for President, Trump signaled that central to his campaign would be anti-Mexican racism, racism in general against all non-whites, anti-immigrant xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Part of this was his oft-repeated pledge to “build a wall” between the U.S. and Mexico to keep out immigrants from Central America and Mexico, whom he characterized as rapists, murderers, thieves, drug dealers, sex traffickers and so on.
That a person with such open racism was even allowed to be a candidate for the most powerful post in Washington is testimony to how feeble bourgeois democracy has become in the U.S.
Now Trump, with the Republicans falling into line backing him, has partially shut down the federal government in a stalemate with the Democrats, demanding $5 billion to begin building “the wall.” Once again Trump is ramping up his racist rants and lies to back up his demand, as he did before the 2018 midterm elections last November.
As Justin Akers-Chacón writes in the U.S. Socialist Worker, Trump’s demand is “only the latest attempt to build and expand the wall. Wall construction began with Operation Gatekeeper and supplemental projects, which began under Democrat Bill Clinton and expanded over 100 miles to 654 miles of physical barriers under George W. Bush (with majority Democratic Party support). Trumpism is, in fact, the progeny of 30 years of U.S. immigration politics transmogrified into its most grotesque and violent form.”
The Democrats have positioned themselves as the supposed opponents of Trump by declaring they will not give in to his demand. But even their own words show that they have adopted the key rationale Trump makes for his wall: The two congressional leaders of the Democrats, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Charles Schumer in the Senate, emphasize that they agree with Trump that “border security” must be ramped up, but by other means than extending the already existing barriers along the southern border, which they say isn’t “effective.”
What they counter pose to the extension of the wall is the form of border enforcement that the Democrats have championed. “During the eight years of the Obama administration,” Akers-Chacón points out, “there was an intensification of border enforcement that emphasized increased militarization, surveillance and armed personnel as opposed to physical wall expansion. This included the use of military technology and equipment repurposed from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be deployed against migrant workers and refugees on the border.
“The Democrats’ position was reflected in the observation by Representative Henry Cuellar, who ridiculed Trump’s wall as a ‘14th-century solution to a 21st-century problem’ that must be solved with a more ‘high tech’ approach.
“The Democrats‘ ‘effective’ approach has included watchtowers, Predator drones, aerostats (blimps that hover as high as 5,000 feet), military helicopters, thousands of infrared motion and heat sensors, and other factors that contribute to a ‘virtual wall’.
“Furthermore, the Democratic Party’s trajectory during the Obama years focused on the increase in enforcement personnel and the spreading of immigrant policing throughout the interior of the country with the dramatic expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol.”
Trump rants about a “crisis” at the border in the form of an “invasion” of immigrant criminals. There is a current crisis, but not the one Trump talks about. It is the one the U.S. has created by its cruel and racist militarized attack on immigrants fleeing the poverty, drug violence, and other horrors in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala largely the result of U.S. imperialist exploitation for over a century and U.S.-backed wars and military coups and the phony “war on drugs” in more recent decades.
An example was the Obama administration’s orchestrated military coup in Honduras in 2009. The point person for the organization of the coup was then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She travelled to Honduras to meet with the country’s generals and a week later they carried out the coup against a mildly progressive elected president, Manuel Zeyala.
Not being quite sure what to do with Zeyala, they took him to their bosses at the U.S. military base in the country, who advised against killing him and instead had him deported to exile in Costa Rica. The Obama administration refused to call the coup a coup, because to do so would have meant the U.S. would have to stop aiding the Honduran military, under U.S. law.
Clinton then arranged to allow Zeyala to return to Honduras, but not as president. She oversaw new “elections” organized by the military to establish a fig leaf for the dictatorship that then severely repressed unions, peasant organizations and any resistance. The dictatorship turned Honduras into a narco-state rife with corruption and drug money, with the concomitant blossoming of violent gangs that transformed Honduras into what has become known as the murder capital of the world.
The caravan of men, women and children fleeing these conditions, that began in Honduras and worked its way through El Salvador and Guatemala then to the U.S. border was a direct result of what Clinton to this day brags about as one of her finest hours.
The past year has seen the horrors at the border, with the separation of children from their asylum-seeking parents, thousands locked up in appalling conditions, and everything else we have come to know.
Most recently, there were the deaths of two immigrant young children in December, who died because of the lack of medical attention of diseases resulting from the cold conditions, poor food, etc. that predominate in the immigrant detention centers.
Another recent series of atrocities has been the release by ICE of some immigrants from the detention centers at bus stations in the center of cities, dumped there with no money and no concept where they are or where they can go. Thankfully, there are reports that citizen volunteers are stepping in to aid them, a difficult task.
There is a real crisis at the border that is not part of the current discussion between the Democrats and Trump over his wall, and that gets more and more swept under the rug in the mass media.
In words the Democratic leadership is “resisting” Trump but not in practice.
Ackers-Chacón correctly concludes, “Even the new ‘progressive’ wave of Democrats that swept into the House as a result of the midterm elections, including self-identified socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib [members of the Democratic Socialists of America], fell in line. They voted along with every single House Democrat in favor of fully funding the Department of Homeland Security [which ICE is a part of] operations until February 8.
“This bill was part of a Democratic strategy to outflank Trump in a bid to get the federal government reopened – to provide ‘border security’ without funding Trump’s wall. This is a quick and shameful about-face from the “Abolish ICE” position these left Democrats campaigned on.
“If both the racist and xenophobic right, rallying behind Trump’s thuggish stand on the expansion of the border wall, and liberals and ‘progressives’ in the Democratic Party accepting the premise of militarized enforcement by different means, there is little chance for resistance to develop within Washington to the further slide to the right on immigration politics.
“To actually resist Trump’s wall, there will need to be a mobilization of opposition to the underlying anti-immigrant premise embedded in both political parties.”
He adds that the long-term solution is opposition to the “system of capitalism which profits off the subjugation and segmentation of the working class along racial and national lines.”
Barry Sheppard