Helen Zivar
Emails from a state trooper medic released to the Houston Chronicle detailed atrocities committed under order by Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers. The trooper sent the email to a sergeant on July 3 detailing some of the government brutalities he witnessed while on patrol in Eagle Pass where Greg Abbott, as part of his Lone Star Operation, has recently ordered to deploy chains of specially designed buoys down the middle of the Rio Grande River along with razor wiring installed on the riverbank to deter migrant crossings—violating international law.
The emails disclosed that the troopers were ordered to push migrants back into the Rio Grande and to deny them water, and describes scenes such as a woman having a miscarriage while entangled in the razor wire. So far this year alone over 100 migrants have died from heat along the southern border, and several have drowned in the Rio Grande, including two migrants whose bodies were found around the buoys in early August.
Meanwhile, 13 Republican governors have pledged to send 1,300 Guardsmen to Texas to support Abbott’s Operation, adding to the already 10,000 Guardsmen he has committed to patrol the borders. In response, the Biden administration has threatened Texas with legal actions; however, the mockery of his “opposition” is that just recently a federal judge struck down Biden’s latest asylum policy for being too strict and in violation of US immigration law.
The crisis at the border has become another show in the electoral circus, with Republicans and Democrats trading in the blood of migrants to see which state apparatus should be the one to oversee the brutal oppression—should we have Biden’s federal cages with tin foil blankets or Abbott’s state-sponsored barbed wire buoys?
For those unable to cross the border, a combination of both Democratic and Republican policies have caused thousands of migrants to get stuck in Mexican border towns, where they are preyed upon by drug cartels and lack access to food and adequate shelter. Earlier this year, The Worker reported on a fire in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which burned 38 asylum-seekers to death and injured many more at an immigrant detention facility just feet from the US border.
The US imperialists have created unlivable conditions throughout Latin America, leading to migration to the US from those countries where US corporations combined with the power of landlords and bureaucratic capitalists superexploit workers and peasants to death while poisoning their lands and committing genocide against its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Biden’s solution is to funnel more money into imperialist mega-projects such as the Interoceanic Corridor in southern Mexico, where in the name of job creation and environmentalism they decimate the people’s lands and drag larger portions of the population under the thumb of superexploitation.
Photo: Office of the Texas Governor
