To fix border policies, we first must face history
A century ago, Fort Bliss detained Latin Americans seeking refuge. Today, it is again.
In January 1914, after a bloody battle of the Mexican Revolution in Ojinaga, south of what’s now Big Bend National Park, Mexican federal soldiers, along with civilian men, women and children, fled across the border into Texas seeking refuge.
U.S. soldiers intercepted the refugees near Presidio in West Texas, and forced them to walk 70 miles across unforgiving desert terrain to Marfa, where they were boarded onto trains and “shipped” west to Fort Bliss. There, the refugee prison camp, built in part by the prisoners themselves, was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence stacked 10 feet high and buried deep in the ground to prevent escape by digging — a fencing technique used to keep hogs in their pens.
As many as 5,000 prisoners lived in tents, with no running water or adequate medical care. The stress of war, exhaustion from their long journey and exposure to extreme desert temperatures took a toll. Dozens of death certificates indicate that prisoners died from pneumonia, dysentery and acute gastroenteritis. Young children and pregnant women were especially vulnerable. Records show that at least two mothers gave birth to stillborn babies in the prison. One, Pedra Mareno, gave birth to Anacleto Esquibel, but he died eight days later. His death certificate notes that he died “without medical attention.” Luz Rodriguez gave birth to a daughter whose life lasted just five days. The suffering of these prisoners was widely reported in the press at the time. Local residents from El Paso came to the prison to look at the caged refugees, others came with notes for people they knew in the camp. The U.S. soldiers standing guard prevented onlookers and friends from nearing the
fence line.
A century later, we should find it nearly impossible to fathom these mothers’ grief and loss, compounded by being imprisoned so soon after escaping a civil war. Sadly, it evokes much too familiar feelings. Fort Bliss is again a place where refugees and asylum-seekers are being detained in inhumane conditions. El Paso, where Fort Bliss has its headquarters, is again a place where mothers have cried out for their children.
In 2017, El Paso was selected to pilot the inhumane family separation policy that eventually removed nearly 5,500 children from their guardians. The children ranged in age from teenagers to newborns, some taken from their mothers while they were still nursing. Medical professionals described the policy as state-sanctioned child abuse and torture for parents. Thousands of Americans protested the practice and demanded accountability, but none came. It wasn’t until January 2021 that the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general released a report that concluded former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ policy of charging border-crossers with crimes (thus opening the way to the Trump administration’s family separation policy) prioritized prosecution at the expense of “consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations.”
The 2021 AG report only offered measly recommendations to improve coordination efforts across agencies to “ensure effective implementation.” Many historians and legal scholars described the policy as guided by white supremacy and being in violation of international laws and human rights laws committed by the U.S. government. Human rights organizations criticized family separation as a crisis “of the government’s own making.” Erika Guevara-Rosas of Amnesty International said, “Authorities have chosen to target the very families seeking safety in the USA, adding to the trauma and pain they have already experienced.”
A particularly inhumane part of the family separation policy is that the Trump administration created no structure to ensure parents and children would eventually be reunited, despite a series of court orders requiring reunification. An interim Biden task force report published in August showed that nearly 2,000 children still have not been reunited with their families — a fact that speaks to how horrific the effects of the family separation policy continues to be.
What’s needed is a truth and reconciliation commission into the policy, to create a clear record of responsibility and harm and to outline measures for remedy. People often believe that violence is followed by reconciliation and that time heals all wounds. History proves otherwise. When violence is not addressed, it continues to shape societies and institutions for generations.
This is true in the case of the child-separation crisis in 2017, and it has been true for more than a century along the Texas border with Mexico, with its long history of violence against Mexican migrants. The 1914 Fort Bliss refugee prison camp was just the start of a growing campaign to detain and quarantine Mexican migrants all along the southern border. It was also a campaign fueled by racist attitudes and dehumanizing rhetoric.
Politicians and the media routinely lumped together people of Mexican ancestry living on either side of the border, regardless of their citizenship. They viewed “border Mexicans” as racially inferior to white Americans, part of a “mongrel race” — part Spanish and part Indian. They were described as bandits, revolutionaries or murderers who should not be trusted to own property, vote in elections or attend schools with white children.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of border residents were killed by law enforcement and vigilantes in that the decade during and after the Mexican Civil War alone.
That violence continued in new guises for generations. America has seemingly never stopped viewing the border as a violent place and Mexican and Latin American migrants and refugees as gang members, as potential terrorists and as threats to democracy.
The suffering at Fort Bliss continues, as well. The second anniversary of the El Paso massacre in August 2021 was bookended by three damning whistleblower reports of patterns of abuse and gross negligence in the Fort Bliss Emergency Intake Center, where children are being detained in tents.
These reports described conditions that put children at risk and the “physical, mental, and emotional harm affecting” children. Whistleblowers raised the alarm on hundreds of COVID-19 cases due to overcrowded, unsafe conditions; insufficient access to clean water, food, or sanitation. The conditions were so dire that children reportedly suffered from symptoms of severe depression, prompting staff to remove objects like pencils and nail clippers.
These reports were awful, but shouldn’t have been surprising. In 2018, the ACLU reported on the “unsanitary, unsafe, and overcrowded CBP detention facilities” for unaccompanied children. The report included charges of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents abusing, assaulting and threatening children with physical or sexual violence while in custody. Children reported being beaten, tased and worse.
It didn’t have to be this way. America already had a trial run at addressing the arrival of thousands of children at our border and learned it was sorely unprepared.
After all, in 2014 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees detailed concerns for thousands of children who had arrived in the United States. It found that 58 percent of the 404 children they interviewed were fleeing regional violence, gang extortion, abuse at home or recruitment and exploitation by the criminal industry of human smuggling.
The report recommended increased staffing and mandatory training “on the basic norms and principles of international human rights and refugee law, including the fundamental principles of nondiscriminatory treatment, best interests of the child, non-refoulement, family unity, due process of law and non-detention or other restriction of liberty.”
Rather than heed the calls of the UNHCR, then-Gov. Rick
Perry warned, “our citizens are under assault” and sent 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to militarize the border. The Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven McCraw spoke of a surge in cartel members, criminals and terrorists crossing into the United States.
But America does not appear to have learned anything from the 2014 humanitarian crisis.
And while the Trump administration’s horrific 2018 family separation policy was especially cruel, given that it actively broke apart families, the Biden administration’s handling of the current situation at the border is far from ideal. The ACLU has pleaded with the Biden administration “to ensure humane conditions for children at Fort Bliss.”
To understand how poorly treated Latin American migrants are consider the contrast between the horrific conditions for children at Fort Bliss and the Afghan refugees welcomed with open arms there as part of Operation Allies Welcome. While we can celebrate the aid provided to vulnerable Afghans, it serves to highlight that Latin American migrants are still treated as a criminal and security threat, rather than as people equally in need of aid. Many don’t even see these migrants as people, but as a threat to be neutralized through policing and mass incarceration.
On a more hopeful note, the contrast should also remind us that the United States is more than capable of meeting urgent humanitarian needs.
All the pain now being experienced along the border and in the camps at Fort Bliss, and the long history of animus toward people of Mexican ancestry, reminds me that we are living in a world that has been centuries in the making. Helping change that should be at the heart of the Biden administration’s approach to the border. But to succeed, President Joe Biden will have to fight against his own party’s recent history, too.
For decades, Democrats have ceded the immigration debate to an increasingly nativist agenda. Since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, too many chose to be “tough” on border security just as they chose to be “tough” on crime or the war on drugs. Few Democrats have been willing to confront the long history of racist animus that inspired our immigration policies.
How many more children will have to be imprisoned, what additional suffering will we have to see, for a Democratic administration to break the patterns of violence and abuse in our immigration policies?