So they died, but they did not die for it. They died because they did not have a safe route to the United States. And why is that? It’s because of the border controls and the deadly, racist immigration policies that are being created and supported by our government, Democrats and Republicans alike. Many of these policies, such as Title 42, which effectively prohibits people from seeking asylum under Covid restrictions, are the same under Joe Biden as under Donald Trump. The same goes for the Immigration Protection Protocol, or “Stay in Mexico,” which allows U.S. border guards to return non-Mexican asylum seekers to dangerous locations in Mexico. Successive US governments have deliberately and relentlessly pushed against the human right to asylum. The results of the autopsy will show if the heat, dehydration or suffocation killed the people in this truck. But, basically, they have been killed by this nation’s immigration policies, our exclusion laws and our multi-billion dollar obsession with the southern borders and to keep Black and Brown people out. Border security is primarily a federal responsibility, and arguing that, the federal government must accept responsibility for the injury and death of migrants. The legislators of the state are also to blame. At 6pm on Monday, just as the truck was being discovered, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement about “Operation Lone Star,” a controversial $ 2 billion border security operation that began last year. The statement said the multi-agency effort “led to more than 265,500 arrests of migrants” and boasted that law enforcement had withdrawn 22,000 migrants from the border. This is what the people who died yesterday faced. The need to move and the few options to do so is what pushed them to get into this truck. People move. We always have, we will always do. We are just one of many species in which migration is a natural occurrence. What is not natural is the disproportionate death and suffering of people crossing the border – which is artificial, caused by inhumane immigration policy. The same heat radiating from the truck in San Antonio is forcing people around the world to move. The extreme temperatures caused by climate chaos and the growing number of wars and conflicts mean that more of us are moving today than at any other time since World War II. The US is not the only one targeting and victimizing black and brown immigrants. Due to Europe’s draconian anti-immigration policy, people are regularly evacuated from European shores, with thousands drowning in the Mediterranean last year alone. Treating people as a single use has negative effects and none is good. The Guardian report on the thousands of deaths of migrant workers in Qatar shows that since our lives are limited to the “immigrant” regime, it is in danger. How can we tolerate this? The people our governments exclude and target are rarely white. We can clearly see that Ukrainian refugees (the majority of whom are white) can fly to the United States to seek asylum. Meanwhile, crossing land, migrants (mostly black and brown) are prevented from doing the same. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mallorca said on Twitter that he was “a husband. Daddy. Immigrant. “He puts these IDs before his government role on his resume. And it was on Twitter that his husband, dad, immigrant, Mallorca made a brief statement about the deaths last night. He said he was heartbroken, he described it In this way, Mayorkas and the U.S. government, past and present, evade responsibility while actively endangering people on the move. a disease they cause.Among yesterday’s dead were spouses, dads and immigrants, too.Now they are ghosts and will haunt us until we fix it.
