November 27, 2018
By now we have all seen the gut wrenching photographs of women in Disney t-shirts and children in diapers crying and choking as they run to escape the tear gas that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers fired at refugees. The migrants were protesting the slow pace of processing of refugees, after the U.S. closed the San Ysidro border crossing, the busiest port of entry in the United States (Source: “U.S. closes major crossing as caravan migrants mass at border in Mexico,” by Sarah Kinosian and Joshua Partlow, The Washington Post, 11/26/18).
Think for a moment about what has happened here. The U.S. CBP responded to a scuffle with about two dozen protestors, out of a caravan of several thousand, by firing tear gas at the entire group of protestors, across the border into another country! Tear gas is a chemical weapon that has been banned in international conflict since 1997 (Source: “Tear gas was banned for warfare in 1993 but police still use it, viral meme says,” by Louis Jacobson, Politifact.com, 8/6/14, (correcting the effective date of the ban)). This is a war crime, although we are not at war.
We must renounce any effort to justify this violent, lawless escalation. We know the truth— that Trump, aided by the media’s amplification, manufactured a ‘crisis,’ appealing to naked racism to demonize women and children fleeing violent conditions in their own countries that have their roots in more than a century of American foreign policy. The crisis in the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua began in the late 19th Century, when we first began privileging U.S. business interests over human rights or democracy (Source: “Big Fruit,” Book review by Daniel Kurtz Phelan, The New York Times, 3/2/08). From the plunder and exploitation of Honduras and Guatemala beginning in the 1870’s by the likes of the United Fruit Company (now Chicquita) and the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole), to the C.I.A. backed coup d’etats of democratically elected governments in the 1950’s, the repressive Central American regimes propped up by the U.S. government led directly to the proliferation of violent gangs and corrupt police officials that make life untenable there today (Source: “How U.S. foreign policy in Central America created the child border crisis,” by Kay Hubbard, The Seattle Times, 8/12/14).
The Trump administration is violating international law by gassing women and children AND violating U.S. law in its effort to prevent the refugees from seeking asylum. Just last week, federal judge, Jon S. Tigar, blocked Trump’s ham handed attempt at an asylum ban, ruling “Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden,” (Source: “Order granting temporary restraining order against Trump administration asylum policy” in East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Donald J. Trump, (U.S. Dist. Ct, N.D. Cal), 11/19/18).
Every single day, Trump ratchets up the racist rhetoric and cruelty, betting that America’s boundless capacity for nativist paranoia outweighs our so-called love of democracy or even our sense of common decency. There is no question as to exactly who Trump is. The question is, Who are we?