Border abuse

Nearly four years ago, the devastating photos of a Syrian toddler named Alan Kurdi, whose little body had washed ashore in Turkey, shocked the world.

Kurdi’s story was tragically typical – his family had fled the Syrian war and attempted to cross the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Greece. All of Kurdi’s siblings and his mother died while crossing. Only his father survived.

Today, the photo of the bodies of Oscar Alberto Martínez and his two-year-old daughter, Angie Valeria, who drowned on the U.S.-Mexico border while crossing the Rio Grande, offers a heartbreaking analogy to Kurdi’s story. The two Salvadorans were forced to wait in Mexico, as per President Donald Trump’s demand, after they escaped their home country to try to seek asylum in the US.

Just as artists, activists and politicians the world over memorialized Kurdi’s death as a reminder of the injustice of the Syrian war and the barriers facing refugees, the deaths of Martinez and Valeria ought to serve as a reminder of the humanitarian catastrophes unfolding in Central America and driving large numbers of refugees northward.

Immigrants, including children, are suffering abuse and death on all sides of this battle for migration, and at nearly every step their harsh treatment is attributable to US policies. The violence in their countries that is spurring northward migration stems from US intervention in Central America. Coups such as the 1954 ousting of democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, as well as the removal only ten years ago of President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, are a signature part of Washington’s policies. Writing in the Guardian, reporter Julian Borger concluded, “The families in the migrant caravans trudging towards the US border are trying to escape a hell that the US has helped to create.”

Central American refugees are also facing abuse in Mexico, where the Trump administration has insisted that they be detained. An Associated Press report about Mexico’s largest detention center just north of its border with Guatemala found the facility to be “sorely overcrowded and filthy,” with “alleged repeated abusive treatment by agents tasked with running it.” Trump has threatened Mexico with harsh tariffs over the border crossings of Central Americans into the US through Mexico.

Farther north, at the US-Mexico border, deaths like those of Martinez and Valeria are a tragically routine occurrence. On the same day that the father and daughter perished, three young children and a 20-year-old woman were also found lifeless from what appeared to be dehydration and excessive heat. The Texas Civil Rights Project placed the blame for the border deaths squarely at the feet of the Trump administration, saying, “When the government creates policies that make it harder to cross the border safely, people die. Children die.”

And here in the US, conditions facing immigrant detainees, particularly children, have made headlines in recent days with disturbing reports from Border Patrol facilities in Clint, Texas, which told of “dangerous overcrowding” and a total lack of access to basic hygiene for children as young as one year old.

Children remained locked in cages, suffered from the flu with no treatment, and older children were tasked with caring for younger ones in what can only be described as a “concentration camp” environment. Although the children were moved out of the facility after the outcry, about 100 were relocated back to the same facility just days later. Another detention center, in Calexico, Calif., was found to be operating in a similarly dangerous fashion.

In May, reports emerged of migrants needing medical attention being shackled while receiving treatment. So far, at least seven children have died in US custody.

Excerpted from: ‘As Immigrant Deaths Pile Up, We Need to Find Our Moral Compass’.

Courtesy: CFommondreams.org