Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Immigrant Woman Shot Dead by Border Patrol in Texas

LOS ANGELES—On May 23, Border Patrol, emboldened by the official racism and anti-immigrant vitriol emanating from the Trump White House, killed Claudia Patricia Gómez González, a 19-year-old indigenous Guatemalan from the Maya-Mam group. Claudia, who had graduated with an accounting degree, had just crossed over near Laredo, Texas, when she was brutally shot in the head by an agent. She had come to the U.S. to find work in order to continue her education. Her distraught mother told a TV network in Guatemala: “We’re poor and there are no jobs here, that’s why she travelled to the U.S.—but they killed her.”

Resorting to the same excuse of “fearing for my life” that the racist cops routinely use after killing black men, a Border Patrol statement claimed that an agent “came under attack” from a group of immigrants and described Gómez González as “one of the assailants”—before changing their story. Reportedly, three undocumented immigrants were detained by Border Patrol, and Marta Martinez, a Spanish-speaking local resident, was threatened with arrest as she live-streamed the aftermath of the grisly shooting. Grotesquely, the Texas Rangers, which have the blood of thousands of Latinos and other minorities on their hands, have been assigned to “investigate” Gómez González’s coldblooded killing. Free the arrested immigrants! Hands off Marta Martinez!

According to the Guardian, over the last 15 years at least 97 people, including 28 U.S. citizens, have been killed by Border Patrol. Border agents, both at land crossings and in roving patrols, have used deadly force up to 160 miles away from the border and shot dead three Mexican teens on Mexican soil between 2010 and 2015.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration recently announced that it will ramp up the cruel practice of separating the children of undocumented immigrants from their parents at the border. This announcement came amid reports that U.S. officials have literally lost track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children who were seized as they crossed the border. Additionally, according to the ACLU, more than 100 children held in temporary detention centers have been subjected to physical, sexual and verbal abuse by Border Patrol agents, as well as deprivation of food, water and medical care. Now, Attorney General and notorious racist Jeff Sessions is threatening to prosecute undocumented parents for “smuggling,” for bringing their own children along to claim asylum! Stop all deportations! Full citizenship rights for all those who have made it here!

Gómez González’s killing comes less than two months after the Democratic and Republican governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas answered Trump’s call to send 1,600 National Guard troops to the border. That deployment came as a caravan of desperate refugees was moving north to ask for asylum in the U.S., seeking to escape the hell of poverty and violence that U.S. imperialism has turned their countries into. At the same time, the administration has revoked Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants—mainly from Haiti and Central America—with provisional visas to live and work in the U.S., threatening to destroy their lives, including by separating them from their U.S.-born children.

The U.S. government has declared open season on immigrants, spreading terror across whole communities. Border residents report that agents are more aggressive and feel they can interrogate and deport anyone they want. In the face of such racist hysteria, speaking Spanish in public or even having a Spanish last name is enough to make you a suspect. The viral video of a racist New York lawyer abusing restaurant workers for speaking Spanish is just the tip of the iceberg. On May 16 Ana Suda, a U.S. citizen in Montana, was interrogated by a Border Patrol agent for the “crime” of speaking Spanish in a gas station. In January, Washington State filed a lawsuit against the Motel 6 chain for reporting the information of nearly 10,000 guests with Latino-sounding names to immigration authorities between 2015 and 2017. According to news reports, Motel 6 carried out a similar practice in Arizona, resulting in the arrest of 20 immigrants.

While openly racist rhetoric dehumanizing and criminalizing immigrants has mushroomed under Trump, who has obscenely described groups of immigrants as “animals,” anti-immigrant attacks are bipartisan. Trump did not create today’s vast deportation machine; he inherited it from his predecessors. The Democrats have played a key role in going after immigrants. Bill Clinton’s “Operation Gatekeeper” militarized the border starting in 1994. Barack Obama massively expanded the detention system and deported record numbers of people. The Obama administration also implemented the callous practice of separating children from their parents, splitting up Mexican fathers from their spouses and children.

Atrocities like the killing of Gómez González will continue under the U.S. rulers’ endless war on immigrants. But undocumented immigrants are not just victims; they form an important part of the working class in the U.S. Immigrants are a living bridge to the proletariat in their home countries, many of which have traditions of militant class struggle. The bosses use anti-immigrant chauvinism and anti-black racism to divide and rule their wage slaves. To fight for the unity and integrity of the working class, the integrated unions must be in the forefront of the defense of immigrant rights. But the labor movement is crippled by a union misleadership committed to the defense of American capitalism, most clearly expressed by its support to the Democratic Party.

As part of the struggle to forge a fighting leadership of the unions, we seek to break working people and the oppressed from the Democrats and win them to the fight to build a multiracial workers party. Such a party is the indispensable instrument in the struggle for socialist revolution to sweep away the barbaric U.S. capitalist order.