Crackdown on migrants

In mid-March, Reuters reported that Mexico would “restrict movement on its southern border with Guatemala to help contain the spread of COVID-19.” The same article noted that the Joe Biden administration in the United States would be simultaneously sorting the details of a plan to loan Mexico coronavirus vaccines.

According to White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, the simultaneity had nothing to do with a quid pro quo to stanch so-called ‘illegal immigration’ and was instead the result of ‘multiple layers’ of conversations between the US and Mexico.

But there is no time like a pandemic to intensify the crackdown on poor, US-bound migrants. I have been in Mexico since the onset of the health crisis last year, and no effort has been made to ‘restrict movement’ of incoming tourists and other humans of superior value who have arrived by plane – many of them from coronavirus hotspots such as the US itself.

Quid pro quo or not, Mexico's southern border reinforcement apparently did not provide the gringos with sufficient immunity from the migrant threat.

On April 12, the Associated Press remarked that the month of March had seen a “record number of unaccompanied children” endeavouring to cross into the US, as well as the highest number of Border Patrol ‘encounters’ with migrants on the US-Mexico border since March of 2001.

In a press briefing on the same day, Psaki revealed additional measures the US had pushed to ‘increase border security’ in the region. Mexico would be maintaining 10,000 troops along its border with Guatemala, while Guatemala had ‘surged 1,500 police and military personnel’ to its own border with Honduras, which had in turn “surged 7,000 police and military to disperse a large contingent of migrants.”

To be sure, the military jargon is no accident. After all, what we have here is a war on migrants – one that Biden has dutifully continued to wage despite his ostensibly more humanitarian approach to human suffering than that of his enthusiastically sadistic predecessor, Donald Trump.

And as with arguments on behalf of other forms of imperial war – like when we were led to believe, in 2003, that the effective annihilation of Iraq was somehow in the Iraqis’ own interest – US officials have conducted a surge in criminal illogic.

For example, Tyler Moran, a special assistant to the president on immigration policy, assured MSNBC that the troop deployment agreements with Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras would not only “prevent the traffickers, and the smugglers, and cartels that take advantage of the kids on their way here”, but also “protect those children”.

Of course, it is anyone’s guess as to how “protection” might factor into the arrangement, given the established track record of anti-migrant violence by the security forces of all three countries.

Excerpted: ‘The Case Against Biden's Plan to Further Militarize Borders’

Commondreams.org