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FORCED MIGRATION AND DETENTION ARE THE REAL IMMIGRATION CRISIS  
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David Bacon
February 11, 2024
Jacobin
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_ While Republicans cry “invasion” and Democrats placate them
with hard-line border policy, immigrants languish in prisons or die in
dangerous passage. A rational approach to immigration must both
address the causes of displacement and protect those w _

A migrant looks over the fence between Mexico and the US in Tijuana,
Baja California Norte, 1996, trying to find a moment when the Border
Patrol may not be looking so that he can go through the hole under it
and cross. , (Courtesy of David Bacon)

 

Review of _Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and
Unjust System_ by Bill Ong Hing (Beacon Press, 2023)

A photograph
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Brandon Bell, distributed by CNN, shows fifteen beefy men in military
caps and fatigues, standing in front of a chain-link fence on a
concrete boat ramp. It is evening in Shelby Park, the city park of
Eagle Pass, Texas. The frigid water of the Rio Grande flows just
footsteps away. On the other side in the distance is a riverbank:
Mexico.

It was here in the dark, on January 14, that Victerma de la Sancha
Cerros, a thirty-three-year-old mother from Mexico City, stepped into
the water holding the hands of her two children, ten-year-old Yorlei
Ruby and eight-year-old Jonathan Agustín Briones de la Sancha. We
don’t know how they got into trouble in the strong current or if
they even knew how to swim. Grupo Beta, Mexico’s border rescue
service, saw them struggling and called the US Border Patrol. Agents
went to the park gate, a couple of miles from the boat ramp. The beefy
men in fatigues, soldiers of the Texas Military Department (TMD),
refused to let them through.

Mexican authorities tried to rescue the mom and her children but were
only able to save two others. The three drowned, and Grupo Beta could
only return to Mexico with their bodies. Later the TMD said its
soldiers, standing behind their chain-link barrier, had shone
high-powered lights on the water and used their night-vision goggles,
but somehow had seen nothing.

The White House called the event “tragic
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and used it as evidence to support its case before the US Supreme
Court, challenging Texas’s assertion that it is entitled to erect
razor-wire border barriers and use its own soldiers to stop migrants
from crossing the river. “The Texas governor’s policies are cruel,
dangerous, and inhumane,” said a spokesperson
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the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “Texas officials
. . . allowed two children to drown,” Congressman Joaquin
Castro added
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Yet within days, President Joe Biden told a campaign rally
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if Congress passed a bill to continue funding war in Ukraine and
genocide in Gaza, he would agree to anti-migrant provisions that are
part of the reason de la Sancha and her children drowned. “I will
shut down the border immediately,” he promised.

Biden didn’t mean that trucks carrying jeans and TV screens from
Mexican factories would be stopped from crossing or that he would halt
the flow of respectable people with visas. He meant stopping migrants
like de la Sancha, who are treated as though they are a threat and an
enemy. She might have been fleeing from drug violence in her
neighborhood or perhaps she couldn’t make enough money to keep food
on the table, or maybe she was trying to find a family member working
on the US side of the border. Regardless, she had no visa.

A memorial at the border fence for those who have died trying to cross
in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, 2001. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

Migrants found dead on the border between US and Mexico, in the area
of the Imperial Valley and Colorado River, are buried in a potter’s
field graveyard in Holtville, California. The identities of many are
not known and are buried as “John Doe” or “Jane Doe.”
Immigrant rights and religious activists have made crosses for many of
the graves, most of which say “No Olvidados” or “Not
Forgotten.” About 450 bodies are buried here. This image was taken
in 2010. (Courtesy David Bacon)

No money, running from something or someone, trying to keep a family
together and give it a future, or just needing a job at whatever wage
— these are the commonalities of the thousands who arrive at the US
border every year. In his 2023 book, _Humanizing Immigration: How to
Transform Our Racist and Unjust System_
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Bill Ong Hing rises to their defense. And migrants need defenders like
him, especially now. Texas governor Greg Abbott has pushed through a
law that makes being undocumented a state crime. Republicans in
Congress last year proposed
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build more border walls, create barriers to asylum, force the firing
of millions of undocumented workers, and permit children to be held in
detention prisons with their parents.

But Biden and centrist Democrats are very willing to agree to modified
proposals like these, even if he promised in his 2020 campaign to undo
similar measures put in place by Donald Trump. In return for war
appropriations, Biden agrees
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he’ll close the border to asylum applicants if their number rises
beyond five thousand per day, and make it much harder to navigate the
process for gaining legal status, for those even allowed to apply.

In _Humanizing Immigration_, Hing describes the tenacious battles
fought by radical immigration lawyers and community defenders (himself
among them) to beat off these efforts to twist the legal process into
a maze few can navigate. At the time of writing, Biden has already
said he would cut short the time for screening asylum applicants to
ninety days. According to Hing, “rocket dockets” and “dedicated
dockets” already reduce the ability of migrants to find lawyers and
make a case for asylum. Cutting screening time would make winning
permission to stay much more difficult.

An onerous process already exists, Hing charges, in which an arcane
difference between a “well-founded fear” and a “clear
probability” of persecution govern life-and-death decisions by
immigration judges hearing asylum cases. He quotes one asylum officer
featured in the film _Well-Founded Fear_
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because the person fleeing can’t remember if he was kidnapped by two
men or three. “Let’s face it,” Hing says. “Most of the
problems with decision-making over asylum cases are tinged with
racism.”

To keep people imprisoned while their cases are in process, instead of
releasing them, Biden agreed to more detention centers
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a euphemism for immigrant prisons. There are already over two hundred,
according to the group Freedom for Immigrants
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law signed by President Barack Obama, Congress required that
thirty-four thousand detention beds
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filled every night. At the end of 2023 those beds held 36,263 people,
and another 194,427 were in “Alternatives to Detention
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wearing the hated ankle bracelets that bar travel more than a few
blocks. Over 90 percent of these jails are run for profit by private
companies like the Geo Group
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familiar to labor activists as the current incarnation of the old
Pinkerton detective agency of strikebreaking fame.

Even if de la Sancha and her kids had made it across the river, these
compromises would likely have meant their new home would be a cell.
Ending family separation was tenaciously fought for in the suits Hing
describes, and won in a reform that Biden did implement when he took
office. But like other protections, these are granular advances (or
the regaining of previous rights) that are never safe and must be
defended again and again. _Humanizing Immigration_ recounts the many
courtroom battles that won them, naming and profiling the courageous
migrants willing to stand up, and their equally courageous and
tireless lawyers.

A worker is deported back into Mexico at the border gate, from a bus
that has taken deportees from the detention center in El Centro in the
Imperial Valley, under the watchful gaze of a National Guard soldier,
Mexicali, Baja California Norte, 1996. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

Immigrants, workers, union members, people of faith, and community
activists called for a moratorium on deportations. Almost 400,000
people had been deported every year for the previous five years. Photo
taken in East Palo Alto, California, 2014. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

Criminalizing Existence

Of those profiled by Hing in _Humanizing Immigration_, one person
stands out: Reverend Deborah Lee, who coordinates the Interfaith
Movement for Human Integrity (IM4HR). She and a tiny staff constantly
mobilize a network of faith activists throughout California, marching
from one detention center to the next, speaking in working-class black
churches and morally outraged suburban congregations.

They are extremely effective. When California legislators voted to do
away with privately run migrant prisons, their action (not
surprisingly overturned
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a federal court) owed much to Lee and people like her, willing to go
into the streets for justice. A memo from US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the DHS, admitted that the California
ban on private detention centers would be “a devastating blow to the
ongoing ICE mission.” That mission was, and is, incarcerating
migrants.

Lee’s odyssey is worth a book in itself. I met her when we both
helped organize workers at the Pacific Steel foundry in Berkeley,
California, to resist another form of immigration punishment, the I-9
check. ICE had gone through the documents of hundreds of the
factory’s workers and accused over two hundred of not having papers
and demanded that the company fire them. Some had spent over two
decades working the foundry’s heavy, gritty jobs. For two years,
workers and their allies built a community support base that, in the
end, couldn’t save those jobs, but that helped them survive, not a
small accomplishment. Hing and I authored an article
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“The Rise and Fall of Employer Sanctions,” about the brutality of
this form of immigration enforcement.

One lesson underscored at Pacific Steel was that the vulnerability of
undocumented immigrants has economic consequences for other workers
too. Good union organizers know this — a union has to effectively
oppose immigration raids and firings if it wants to protect workers
and win their loyalty. At the same time, immigrants under attack must
find ways to unite with the community around them — an indispensable
lesson for this political moment. Overcoming today’s increasingly
reactionary and dangerous right-wing threat requires the unity of
immigrants and nonimmigrants: each must fight for the other. A Biden
strategy that throws immigrants under the bus will make that
impossible and could lose the election in 2024.

As the workers’ battle in Berkeley unfolded, Lee started another,
organizing monthly vigils at the ICE detention center just a few miles
from the plant (and even closer to many workers’ homes). It took
seven years of speaking before the social justice committees of Jews,
Catholics, Protestants, and Buddhists, and then bringing congregations
out to protest, before they could force the center to close. IM4HR
became a formidable force battling ICE and taking its closure
campaigns to communities around other jails and prisons.

Lee and her coworkers developed an understanding about the
relationship between class and immigration, between race and the
migrant carceral system, and about the roots of migration itself. She
took delegations to Honduras and Guatemala, in support of activists
there. On their return, faith activists alerted congregations and
communities to the fights in those countries for political and social
change — for an alternative to forced migration for survival.

I described those fights as they took place in Mexico, from factories
on the border to cornfields in Oaxaca, in my
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NAFTA: Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border_ and _Illegal People: How
Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants_. These
books documented the impact of US policy, displacing millions of
people in Mexico, and then criminalizing them as they became border
crossers and immigrant workers. Another book
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wrote, _The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican
Migration__, _gave a voice to migrant activists demanding a double
set of rights — the right to migrate, with social and political
equality, _and_ the right to not migrate, i.e., for political change
in communities of origin so that migration is not forced by the need
to survive.

This understanding was the basis of Hing’s earlier book
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Borders: NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration_. “Instead of
addressing the contemporary causes of undocumented Mexican migration
that are linked to NAFTA and globalization,” he wrote, “the United
States has addressed the symptoms of the challenge by adopting an
enforcement only approach.”

People of faith and immigrants in front of the West County Detention
Center, where immigrants have incarcerated before being deported.
Victor Aguilar and Hugo Aguilar were recently released detainees and
embraced each other in front of the detention during the last vigil
before the center was closed, showing the friendship that had
developed between them during months inside. Rev. Deborah Lee looked
on. Photo taken in Richmond, California, 2018. (Courtesy of David
Bacon)

The Mixteca region of Oaxaca is one of the poorest areas in Mexico.
Indigenous Mixtec, Triqui, and other groups from this region now make
up a large percentage of the migrants who have left to work in the
United States. Photo taken in Santiago de Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, 2008.
(Courtesy of David Bacon)

Ignoring the Root Causes

Hing puts forward a basic truth: winning public understanding of
immigration is the only way to decisively defeat anti-immigrant
hysteria. Yet centrist Democrats, caving in to the onslaught of
Republicans and MAGA acolytes, won’t acknowledge the causes of
immigration. This failure long predates Biden.

When large numbers of unaccompanied children started coming from
Central America during the Obama administration, as it faced midterm
elections in 2014, the president told mothers
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to send their children north, admonishing them as though they were bad
parents. “Do not send your children to the borders,” he said.
“If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they
may not make it.”

President Obama made some acknowledgement of the poverty and violence
that impelled them to come despite his warning, but drew the line at
recognizing this migration’s historical roots, much less any
culpability on the part of our government. President Biden sent Vice
President Kamala Harris
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Central America in his first year in office with a similar message —
don’t come.

Today this unwillingness to look at US responsibility for producing
displacement and migration is starkest in relation to Haitians and
Venezuelans, who have made up a large percentage of the migrants
arriving at the Rio Grande in the last two years.

After Haitians finally rid themselves of the US-supported François
Duvalier regime and elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president, the
United States put him on an outbound plane in 2004, as it did with
Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. A string of US-backed corrupt but
business-friendly governments followed, which pocketed millions while
Haitians went hungry and became homeless by the tens of thousands
after earthquakes and other disasters. “The treatment of Haitian
migrants,” Hing charges, “demonstrates how immigration laws and
policies are . . . a concrete manifestation of systemic and
institutionalized racism.”

Survival in Venezuela became impossible for many as its economy
suffered body blows from US political intervention and economic
sanctions. President Biden allowed Chevron, Repsol, and Eni to sell
Venezuelan oil once Russian oil was embargoed during the Ukraine war,
but the basic sanctions making survival precarious remain in place.
Meanwhile, the ongoing effort to unseat its government continues.
National security spokesman John Kirby demanded
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political changes in late January, and threatened, “They’ve got
till the spring.”

These interventions produce migrants and then criminalize them. In
2023, the Border Patrol took 334,914 Venezuelans and 163,701
Haitians into custody
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promoting military intervention in Haiti and regime change in
Venezuela, the Biden administration put people on deportation flights
back home, in the hope that this would discourage others from starting
the journey north.

The US media endlessly interprets this as a “border crisis,” but
the disconnect is obvious to anyone born south of the Mexican border.
For Sergio Sosa, who grew up during the Guatemalan civil war and now
heads the Heartland Workers Center in Omaha, migration is a form of
resistance to empire. “People from Europe and the US crossed borders
to come to us, and took over our land and economy,” he points out.
“Now it’s our turn to cross borders. Migration is a form of
fighting back. We’re in our situation, not because we decided to be,
but because we’re in the US’s backyard. People have to resist to
keep their communities and identities alive. We are demonstrating that
we are human beings too.”

Gina, a Haitian refugee, washes clothes in Mexico City in 2023.
Several hundred Haitian refugees lived in tents in Giordano Bruno
Park. They’d come from Haiti through Central America headed to the
US border, but knew they’d probably be prevented from crossing.
(Courtesy of David Bacon)

Michelle Medina, a Venezuelan migrant, nurses her baby Salome Comenal
in a camp of Venezuelan and Haitian refugees in Mexico City, 2023.
(Courtesy of David Bacon)

Displacement Is the Crisis

Biden calls the border “broken” and “in crisis.” That is the
biggest concession to the media-driven storm that repeats these words
endlessly. From them flows the hysteria that justifies repression.

Department of Homeland Security statistics
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however, that over the decades the numbers of people crossing the
border and subject to deportation rise and fall, while displacement
and forced migration remain constant. In 2022 about 1.1 million people
were expelled after trying to cross, and another 350,000 deported. In
1992 about 1.2 million were stopped at the border, and 1.1 million
deported. Over a million people were deported in 1954 during the
infamous “Operation Wetback.” Arrests at the border totaled over a
million in twenty-nine of the last forty-six years.

Last year the number arrested at the border was higher: about 2.5
million. But the real point is that the migration flow has not stopped
and will not stop anytime soon. What, then, is the “crisis”? _New
York Times_ reporter Miriam Jordan says
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“In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern
border, a record number.” They all believe, she says, that “once
they make it into the United States they will be able to stay.
Forever. And by and large, they are not wrong.”

In fact, the number of refugee admissions in 2022 was 60,000. In 1992
it was 132,000. According to Jordan, applicants are simply released to
live normal lives until their date before an immigration judge. That
will certainly be news to families facing separation and the constant
threat of deportation. But this is what Republicans and anti-immigrant
Democrats call an “invasion,” and against it Biden threatens to
“shut the border.” So enforcement and deterrence are the means to
stop people from coming in the first place.

Should Trump win the election in November, he promises to reinstitute
the notorious family separation policy. Children who survive the
crossing, unlike Yorlei and Jonathan, might not see their moms again
for months and easily be lost, as so many were, in the huge detention
system. Oklahoma senator James Lankford wants to reintroduce
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“Remain in Mexico” policy, under which people wanting asylum were
not allowed to enter the United States to file their applications, and
the Mexican government was forced to set up detention centers just
south of the border to house them while they waited. Trump and other
Republicans would imprison all migrants who face a court proceeding,
applying to stay or stopping a deportation. Pending cases now number
in the millions, because the immigration court system is starved for
the resources needed to process them.

Immigrants and their supporters, organized by the Tucson immigrant
rights coalition Derechos Humanos, call for a moratorium on
deportations. That call was made by many organizations in the US when
the number of deportations reached 400,000 per year. Photo taken in
Tucson, Arizona, 2008. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

That system, Hing says, must go. But the whole idea that the people
arriving at the border must be met with deterrence and enforcement
does more than justify the tortuous immigration court system and the
detention centers.

“The need to abolish ICE,” an oft-repeated demand among immigrant
rights activists, “is a no-brainer for me,” Hing says. “In fact,
I count myself among those who call for the abolition of the
immigration system altogether. Migrants should have the right to free
movement across borders and the right to live free of harassment over
immigration status. Our system must be transformed into one that
prioritizes our humanity first.”

To accomplish that, Hing advocates a set of tactics to make it hard
for the system to function, including public oversight, marches like
those that opposed the Sensenbrenner Bill in 2006, and antideportation
campaigns like those of the Dreamers. He profiles as positive
disrupters two lawyers: Jacqueline Brown, who fought the imprisonment
of unaccompanied children, and Julie Su, who defended enslaved Thai
garment workers in Los Angeles and is now the acting US secretary of
labor. Until institutions like ICE and the detention centers are
abolished, he says, “we should do everything we can to disrupt the
system.”

To win an alternative to the present system, we have to uproot the
causes of the displacement that makes migration involuntary, while
recognizing the ongoing reality of migration and making it easy for
people to come and to stay. No matter how many walls and migrant
prisons the government builds, people will come anyway. But we can
easily see the consequences of this system — one that first produces
migration and then tries its best to bar migrants and send them away
— in the death of Victerma de la Sancha Cerros and her two children
in the cold water of the Rio Grande.

_David Bacon [[link removed]] is a California writer and
documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents
labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for
human rights._

* migration
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* immigrant detention
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* US borders
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