U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY HAS LONG BEEN A PROBLEM
As people all over the United States celebrate Independence Day with families and friends barbecuing and enjoying fireworks shows, the militarization of border communities and the disdain policymakers express towards migrants is as American as the baseball they’ll play and apple pie they will consume.
A week ago today, dozens of migrants from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras were found asphyxiated in an abandoned tractor-trailer truck in San Antonio. Sixteen others with life-threatening injuries were taken to nearby hospitals, where seven succumbed to heatrelated wounds, increasing the death toll to 53. In total, there were nearly 100 people packed in the container without any water or air conditioning in oppressive heat, where the outside temperature reached as high as 103 degrees. Politicians will point their fingers at each other or blame unscrupulous profit-hungry smugglers, but both are facile conclusions that dismiss the decades of misguided policies that have created a human rights nightmare that exposes the falsehood of the so-called “American dream.”
This terrible incident occurs at a time when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has used the border as a wedge issue against President Joe Biden. In a tweet, he blamed the deaths on President Biden, saying “they are a result of his deadly open borders policies.” Ironically, Gov. Abbott has made immigration central to his reelection campaign, spending billions of taxpayer dollars on enforcement theatrics, like busing migrants to Washington, D.C., to spite President Biden. Now, Gov. Abbott plans on increasing interior checkpoints in Texas targeting large commercial trucks. But smugglers are known to evade checkpoints, and in some cases, checkpoints increase deadly vehicle pursuits that cost the lives of migrants.
Meanwhile, President Biden called the incident in San Antonio “horrifying and heartbreaking,” and he was quick to blame smugglers, stating “this tragedy was caused by smugglers or human traffickers who have no regard for the lives they endanger and exploit to make a profit.” This mimicked the Border Patrol’s predictable response each time it deflects responsibility away from border policies or its mistreatment of migrants that lead to tragedy and loss of life.
The backdrop to this, though, is that President Biden justified former President Donald Trump’s antiasylum policies. Biden callously continued using Title 42, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order that Trump adopted to allow Border Patrol agents to expel migrants without respecting their right to seek asylum. Biden also continues to deport Haitians and others to countries where the State Department has issued “do not travel” advisories “due to kidnapping, crime and civil unrest.”
The Title 42 order and the Return to Mexico policy, which forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for months as they wait for hearing dates and which the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that President Biden could terminate, are extensions of the prevention-through-deterrence strategy that the Border Patrol experimented with in the early 1990s to halt and control unregulated migration into the United States. Its tactics — saturating urban border communities with agents, building physical barriers and increasing interior checkpoints — ensured that migrants would be forced to seek out dangerous crossing methods, thereby increasing the likelihood of injury and death.
The deterrence strategy continues to be the foundation for border enforcement tools that policymakers promote, from Trump’s cruel zero tolerance policy that led to thousands of children being taken from their caregivers to President Biden’s attraction to surveillance technologies, also known to contribute to migrant deaths as they take dangerous routes in remote desert areas.
Until now, an incident in 2003 in Victoria, Texas, where 19 migrants perished in what was described as an “airless oven,” had been the worst recorded instance involving migrant deaths in a tractor trailer. Before then, in July 1987 in Sierra Blanca, Texas, near El Paso, 18 men suffocated in a boxcar in a similar fashion as they were Dallas-bound. Miguel Tostado Rodriguez, the sole survivor, described a scene straight out of a horror movie: the men “started fighting with each other because they were desperate to breathe and drink. They didn’t know what they were doing.”
Dozens of families in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras will be mourning and burying their loved ones who died in an excruciating circumstance. These deaths, and the thousands more that populate the United States Southwest borderlands — 3,219 missing and deceased migrants to date since 2014 — will not get any special hearings in Congress. There will be no freedom, triumph or victory for them or their grieving families.