Activists on Both Sides of US-Mexico
Border Converge Against US State Violence
Charlotte
Uprising on September 24, 2016. (Photo: Steve Pavey)
After holding an annual vigil for 25
years at the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, the human rights group SOA
Watch is moving its convergence to the US-Mexico border in
Nogales, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico. Activists throughout the US and Mexico
have gathered on both sides of the US-Mexico border for an October 7-10 Border
Convergence to highlight and protest US state policies linked
to the root causes of migration, as well as to multiple levels of violence
against migrants and more broadly, against Black and Latinx people.
People from Latin America continue to
be forced to flee from US-trained repressive security forces, only to be
confronted with a militarized border, racist immigration laws and the
xenophobic rhetoric we see escalating during this election cycle. Black and
Brown bodies in the US continue to be targeted, criminalized and systematically
imprisoned and killed in the same way. We can no longer separate these issues
and this weekend we have gathered to say "enough!" We cannot look at
immigration reform without looking at its root causes. We cannot discuss police
brutality or the prison industrial complex in the US without discussing its
root purpose. State violence is used to exert control and oppress Black
and Latinx communities
in order to maintain an exploitative racist system that benefits the few. SOA
Watch founder Father Roy Bourgeois has
said:
We need to build broad-based grassroots power across borders, and
push back against neoliberal politics of privatization of the commons, the
militarization of our communities, and the upholding of profit interests over
life, that permeate today's political discourse. We will stand on the side of
mutual aid and solidarity, and build power for a culture shift.
Traveling for that last two weeks
through local communities in North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas on my
way to the Border Convergence, I have been listening and learning from the
voices of those directly affected by this US state violence based on racism,
greed and fear of the "other." The main goal of my storytelling
journey of acompañamiento (accompaniment) was to bear witness
to US state violence beyond an abstraction, to its lived experience in real
bodies and communities. State violence, like all other forms of violence, is a
visceral experience embodied most potently as death, but also as racial
profiling, incarceration, deportation, labor exploitation, sickness,
depression, fear and much more.
I began in Charlotte, North Carolina,
just days after Keith Lamont Scott was unjustly killed by the police. A diverse
coalition of local community members called#CharlotteUprising continues
with their demands for justice for the family of
Keith Lamont Scott, more transparency and accountability from the police, and a
dismantling of the police state targeting poor and Black communities among
other demands. Asian Pacific Islander organizers from
the Southeast Asian Coalition, as well as local organizers identified as Latinx
for #BlackLivesMatter, have joined in solidarity with the mobilizing efforts in
part because they understand that the state violence that kills Black men is
deeply connected to the state violence that targets all people profiled and
feared as the "other."
Stopping in Atlanta with Georgia
Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) and in New Orleans
with the Congress of Day Laborers,
I joined their weekly community meetings where migrants come together to
struggle against the dehumanizing pain enacted daily through detention and
deportation. These communities know that President Obama's administration is
lying when it says it is prioritizing the deportation of
violent criminals.
In Atlanta, where local police
cooperate with ICE through a problematic program called PEP [Priority
Enforcement Program], migrant communities are fighting against the pending
deportations of three of their members -- Cindy's son Wilhen,Juan and Irvin -- none of whom should be
considered priorities for deportation. In New Orleans, they tell me they are
seeing a rise in the manufacturing of criminals through unconstitutional
policing and unjust prosecution priorities led by US Attorney Kenneth Polite,
who is expanding felony convictions for the nonviolent "crime" of
illegal reentry of migrants who are fleeing violence or seeking to reunite with
their families, as is the case with William Diaz-Castro, whose wife and
US-born children want him home from jail.
Irvin,
Cindy and Juan of GLAHR, Atlanta, Georgia, September 26, 2016. (Photo: Steve
Pavey)
Yonto, wife of William Diaz-Castro, with
her daughters in New Orleans, Louisiana, September 28, 2016. (Photo: Steve
Pavey)
I visited the graves of a growing
number of unknown bodies found en route to cross around checkpoints that exist
70-100 miles beyond the Texas-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley. The South Texas Human Rights Center nearby
receives phone calls every day inquiring about disappeared family members lost
in the brush at night.
Unknown Male, Texas Human Rights Center,
Rio Grande Valley, Texas, October 2, 2016. (Photo: Steve
Pavey)
Eduardo Caneles, the
director of the South Texas Human Rights Center, calls this US policy of
deterrence, "death by policy." The US intentionally chooses to police
safer routes, leaving a funnel open through the most dangerous landscapes;
in this way, it uses the landscape itself to kill migrants. The Texas
Department of Public Safety (DPS) is now asking for $1 billion,
after already receiving $800 million, to work alongside the US Department of
Homeland Security (DHS ) to secure the border. What I saw while in the Rio
Grande Valley could aptly be described as "low-intensity warfare,"
not that dissimilar to what I observed on a trip to Palestine. The fierce women
organizers making up the growing Fuerza del Valle Workers Center are
fighting against the wide practice of wage theft while supporting each other in
the face of depression, fear of deportation and violence from employers.
During a brief stop in Austin, Texas,
I was able to meet Hilda Ramirez at St. Andrews
Presbyterian church, where she and her son Ivan have found sanctuary after she
was denied asylum from the violence she is fleeing in Guatemala. Since
presenting herself at the border to seek asylum in the summer of 2014, she was
incarcerated at Karnes Detention Center with her son for 11 months, housed at
Posada Esperance while humiliated with an ankle bracelet for another seven
months, and for the last nine months, restricted to the confines of the church
where she has sought sanctuary. "Me da coraje," she tells me:
"It gives me courage and anger."
Fuerza
del Valle Workers Center, Rio Grande Valley, Texas, October 2, 2016.
(Photo: Steve Pavey)
Hilda Ramirez, in sanctuary at St. Andrews
Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas, October 4, 2016. (Photo: Steve
Pavey)
She tells me she will continue to
struggle not only for her own freedom, but also for the end of all family
detention centers. Seventy-three percent of the nearly 37,000 migrants
incarcerated on average daily are locked in privately owned prisons contracted
by ICE. A recent policy paper by the ACLU sheds
light on the abuses, calling for an end to incarcerating families, children and
people seeking asylum. Migrants represent a growing number within the
profit-making prison industrial complex. On September 28, 2016, former migrant
prison detainees accompanied by#Not1More Campaign, Color
of Change and Black Alliance for Just Immigrationconfronted
Jeh Johnson, secretary of the DHS, outside a public speaking event todemand that he address the crisis inside
immigrant detention and cut the department's contracts with private prisons.
"What gives you hope," I was
asked on this journey to the Border Convergence. My hope is grounded in the
work and struggle of all these amazing grassroots leaders organizing against US
state violence. They are not waiting on politicians for hope. They have each
other in the struggle for human dignity and freedom. And this is why we are
gathering together this weekend at the Border Convergence, to say we have each
other and together, we will not stop our struggle until US state violence
against our communities has ended and we are all free.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Steve Pavey, Ph.D., a photographer and applied
anthropologist works at Hope In Focus, which
bears witness to the world as it is and as it could be through activist
photography committed to walking alongside the world's oppressed and
marginalized, finding hope together in the collective struggle for human
dignity and justice.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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