As Obama Sends More Troops to Mexican Border

Outrage Over Border Patrol Killings

On June 7, a U.S. Border Patrol guard in El Paso, Texas, killed Sergio Adrián Hernández with a bullet to the face, shot across the Río Bravo into Mexico. No sooner had Hernández’s blood dried in Ciudad Juárez than the Border Patrol and FBI launched a vile campaign to justify the coldblooded killing of this 15-year-old boy. First they claimed he had been throwing rocks at the border guards. Then they changed their story, saying that he had been “smuggling” immigrants.

The U.S. government’s justification for killing a Mexican—on Mexican soil—by claiming that throwing rocks and helping immigrants cross the border are “crimes” punishable by summary execution only underscores the American imperialist rulers’ racist arrogance and contempt for Mexican lives. After defending the Border Patrol killer in a June 8 press release and emphasizing that the only offense committed was a supposed “assault on federal officers,” the FBI vowed to carry out a “civil rights” investigation—i.e., a whitewash—with the killer kept on paid leave.

This killing was preceded by the gruesome homicide of Anastasio Hernández Rojas, a Mexican construction worker and father of five, by state forces. On May 28 in San Diego, California, a lynch mob of some 20 Customs and Border Protection agents clubbed and tased Hernández Rojas to death while he was being deported. Like the killing of Sergio Hernández, this incident was filmed on a cell phone and broadcast on television and the Internet. Millions of outraged viewers on both sides of the border have listened to the eyewitnesses’ screams of protest and the dying man’s cries of “No! No! Help Me! Stop, please!”

According to a report by the Mexican government, U.S. federal agents killed or wounded five people on the Mexican border in the final year of Bush’s administration, 12 people in the first year of Obama’s administration and 17 people in just the first five months of 2010! President Obama now plans to deploy 1,200 National Guardsmen to the border, add 1,000 Border Patrol agents to the 20,000 already there, increase the border security budget by $500 million and deploy two more unmanned aircraft, bringing the total to six drones.

Make no mistake: this is Obama’s deadly program for “immigration reform.” His chief deputy in this operation is Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, whom he thanked in an April 23 Rose Garden ceremony for naturalized military personnel “for leading our efforts to achieve comprehensive immigration reform so that America keeps faith with our heritage as both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.” It was Napolitano who boasted that Obama’s administration smashed Bush’s records by deporting 387,790 immigrants in fiscal year 2009. The Obama administration is true to the racist heritage of this “nation of laws,” a history that includes black enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, legal lynching under the death penalty, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese American internment camps during World War II.

The capitalist system is based on the brutal exploitation of all labor, with the ruling class inflaming racial and ethnic hostilities to keep the working class divided and thus ensure a greater extraction of profit. The bourgeoisie at different times has varying approaches to immigration. But at a time of economic crisis such as this, arrests and deportations of layers of immigrants deemed surplus are the order of the day, no matter which party is in power.

In his April 23 speech, Obama raised his criticism of the infamous Arizona anti-immigrant pass law SB1070 (see WV No. 958, 7 May). Obama complained that “the recent efforts in Arizona…threatened to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.” According to Obama’s Orwellian logic, undocumented immigrants need to “trust” the same police officers who, in many localities across the country, are arresting them and turning them over for deportation!

To top it all off, U.S. imperialism’s war-criminal-in-chief and overseer of the domestic plantation later vowed to investigate the “civil rights and other implications” of the Arizona law. Obama wants the federal government, not the states, to dictate the terms of persecuting immigrants, and he finds the Arizona law’s overt legal codification of racial profiling an international embarrassment.

In this same speech, Obama’s message was clear on one “path to citizenship” that he favors: enlist in the imperialist military, go slaughter people overseas and you too can “earn” your papers. “Like so many others,” he intoned, these military men and women “met their responsibilities. They played by the rules. They have earned their citizenship.”

While the reformist left seeks to pressure the Democrats in Washington, we know that they are simply representatives of the class enemy. For example, take Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez from Chicago, who got arrested protesting the Arizona law. A key component of his “immigration reform” bill last year (H.R. 4321) was more border security. That is, more Sergios, more Anastasios dead on the border. The Arizona boycott is really a cheap ploy by Democratic Party politicians to deflect attention away from the thousands of immigrant lives destroyed every day by the Obama administration and by Democratic Party-run state and local governments.

All workers must understand that their fate is vitally linked to that of undocumented immigrants. Attacks on immigrants will only weaken the labor movement further. At the same time, immigrants form a key component of the U.S. working class that has enormous potential social power. Moreover, immigrants are a living bridge to the proletariat in their home countries, many of which have traditions of militant class struggle.

Labor needs to vigorously protest the border killings, oppose the militarization of the border, demand an end to all deportations and organize immigrant workers. For full citizenship rights for all immigrants! This calls for a fight against the class-collaborationism of the chauvinist, pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which hogties labor’s power through its support to the Democratic Party. We of the Spartacist League fight to break workers and youth from the Democratic Party and to build a workers party that will be a tribune of the people and fight for socialist revolution. That is the only way to put an end to the capitalist system and all its murderous brutality once and for all.