The Biden Administration has shown its true colors in this week’s violent oppression of more than 10,000 Haitian refugees gathered at the Del Rio, Texas border with Mexico. Over the last few days, the Biden administration unleashed escalated violence by U.S. Border Patrol agents on children and families. The horrific images of CBP officers using horses and whips as weapons against black migrants plainly exposed the continuing racist and fascist violence of US border enforcement, now under this administration.
Tens of thousands of Haitian refugees are seeking asylum in the U.S. after decades of the devastation of their homeland by US Imperialism. The Haiti Action Committee recounted the U.S.- orchestrated coup against democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and the recent series of U.S. backed dictatorships that have attacked and terrorized the Haitian people. Under neoliberal policies and programs imposed by the US and local puppet regimes, the people have suffered from UN occupation, a shattered economy and a massive cholera epidemic, forcing Haitians to leave their homeland by the thousands every day. Two massive earthquakes and a hurricane in the last decade further exposed the man-made humanitarian crisis for millions of Haitians, with hundreds of thousands dying, and displaced and homeless due to lack of infrastructure, healthcare, and basic social services. The U.S. and local dictators have failed the people and exploited their labor, with many forced abroad as contract workers in places like Brazil and Chile - migrant workers whose temporary contracts leave them with nowhere to go, especially because of the ravages of US imperialism on the island of Haiti itself.
After the difficult journey north to the US border, more than 10,000 Haitian refugees are now encamped in squalid conditions under a bridge near the Del Rio, Texas/Mexico border. They are rightfully on the doorstep of the country that profited the most from the exploitation and devastation of Haiti and its people. But Biden has continued Trump’s policy of limiting asylum applications and effectively closed that door, without any regard for their basic human right to find refuge from the humanitarian crisis in Haiti. While the U.S. has the resources to welcome and tend to every single applicant and family, this administration refuses to do so or even begin to process their applications, violently forcing them to “Remain in Mexico” and then loading them onto planes back to Haiti daily now for the next few weeks.
IMA-USA launched our Border Solidarity Campaign: “Serve the People! Organize Solidarity from the Border to Our Homelands” in response to a similar Migrant Exodus from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in 2018. Tens of thousands of migrants moved together north and faced violent repression including tear gas and truncheons, along with the exploitation and abuse of coyotes/traffickers and the brutality of Mexican government forces throughout their travel across Mexico. Since that time Trump has effectively closed several legal pathways into the U.S., refused to allow migrants in while applying for asylum, and further militarized the border, attempting but failing to build his xenophobic physical border wall. Now Biden is deploying border patrol thugs and the DHS to terrorize and deport another mass mobilization of people demanding a better life than the misery they fled from in their homelands.
The Haiti Action Committee pinpoints the Haitian Refugee Crisis as “Made in the USA,” and Nana Gyamfi, Executive Director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), rightly denounced the Biden Administration’s response as “outrageous, immoral, inhumane, unlawful, and violent” and supports “our people's effort to exercise their human right to asylum in the country of their choice.”
From within the U.S. and around the world, IMA will mobilize all forms of solidarity with the Haitian people. From our undocumented and detained migrant community campaigns, to migrant workers struggling against the disproportionate impacts of COVID, we will not stand idly by as both Biden and VP Harris gloss over the imperialist root causes of forced migration and proclaim, “Don’t come over!” to millions of migrants who simply have no other choice. We will continue our solidarity missions to the U.S./Mexico border, our campaigns against the neglect, exploitation, and repression of migrants in the interior, and our international solidarity with the hundreds of millions of migrants, refugees, and displaced people fighting against imperialism and for national liberation.
We call on all IMA-USA members to join the calls of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and the Haiti Action Committee to organize and take collective action in the streets and to also contact the White House Comment line (202-456-1111) and Congressional representatives (Switchboard: 202-224-3121) to demand:
Stop the Racist Deportations of Haitian Asylum-Seekers!
Justice for Haitian Refugees!
Stop US Support for Dictatorship and Terror in Haiti!
And Join IMA-USA in our campaigns and calls to:
Organize Solidarity From the Border to Our Homelands!
End Forced Migration!
@ima.us