Texas Border Horror
National Guard overlooking tens of migrants on the US-Mexico border.
Warsan Shire, British poet born to Somali parents in Kenya, starts her poem "Home" quite simply: "no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark." We should remember this sentiment when looking at what has and what is currently transpiring at the US border with Mexico, particularly along Texas in this current iteration. It's important to understand why people are risking life and limb to leave comfort and familiarity. The US-Mexico border is a reflection of the border surrounding Gaza—the capitalist elites’ blueprint for a future of walls.
As climate migration becomes more common due to effects of climate change and crises arising from the exploitation of the land by capitalism, the sowers of destruction will turn to the "battle-tested" tactics and technology deployed by the state of Israel against the Palestinians to maintain the facade of comfort at home. Everyone must recognize the parallels between the two and join the struggle against those who seek to impoverish humanity in order to fulfill capital’s need for constant growth.
In the not-so-distant past, then former Vice President Joe Biden stated during a debate, “We should not be locking people up. We should be making sure that we change the circumstance, as we did, why they would leave in the first place. And those who come seeking asylum, we should immediately have the capacity to absorb them, keep them safe until they can be heard.” As President, Biden has backpedaled on numerous campaign promises, so it should surprise no one that ending private detention was one. Over 2 million migrants were detained by US Customs and Border Protection in 2022, and 2023 saw over 142,000 immigrants deported.
In January of 2024, U.S. Representative Greg Landsman, one of Cincinnati’s own, crossed party lines to join Republicans in passing Resolution 957 which included intentionally damaging and derogatory language such as, “Whereas, during the Biden administration, more than 1.7 million known illegal alien 'gotaways' have successfully evaded U.S. Border Patrol along the southwest border.” He later stated, after a visit to the border, “They need us to change the asylum rules so that folks are less likely to come to the southern border.”
President Biden and the Democrats have continued pushing their stance further to the right and adjusting their messaging after a botched bipartisan attempt from Congress to allow the President the authority to shut down the border if approximately 5,000 migrants approach the border on any given day. Biden even invited former President Donald Trump to meet with him at the Texas-Mexico border to discuss cooperation between Democrats and Republicans over border restrictions. Biden stated, in the lead-up to votes on the measure, “If given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.” At the same time, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Texas Military Department are seizing public lands to grandstand and allow a mother and her two children to drown in the Rio Grande. Why did they let them drown? Because according to Abbott, “The only thing we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
President Biden ignores the reasons people flee their homes and is prioritizing a more militant border policy. From day one, his administration held on to Trump-era policies, some of which continue to cage children like animals. The Biden administration continues decades of US intervention in the region that has helped to install dictators and bad actors that privatized and held massive sell-offs of resources and then took on insurmountable debts from the IMF, leading to further destabilization. The US and the capitalist levers of power have a direct role in the economic infantilization of these countries because the capitalist system requires “developing countries” to be in a state of perpetual crisis so they can continue to rape lands of their resources and exploit a broken population to see an increase in profit margins. Capitalism’s need for perpetual growth has a damning effect on climate change which shows itself most immediately in the impoverished and exploited regions of the global south.
According to PBS, “Scientists predict migration will grow as the planet gets hotter. Over the next 30 years, 143 million people are likely to be uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures and other climate catastrophes.” When factoring internal migrations, this number is estimated to be over one billion. These levels of displacement will put pressure on current systems of government and likely lead to more regional migrations becoming international in an effort for many to secure a better future. Unless we address the core reasons for migrants leaving their homes, this level of movement will pose a threat of destabilization for any region’s infrastructure. We can’t rely on either of the two capitalist parties to address this because they will never work against their own interests. They would sooner watch hundreds seeking refuge drown than offer a lifeline.
The US-Mexico border wall is a reiteration of its prototype, the wall surrounding Gaza, which is an open-air concentration camp. According to Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World, “US military aid has financed the development of one of the world’s most advanced security apparatuses in Israel, which has used the Occupied Palestinian Territories as its ‘laboratory’ for technologies of surveillance and control.” For example, Elbit Systems provided an Integrated Fixed Towers system that United States Customs and Border Protection contracted for around $26 million in 2019. This system was placed on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation in Arizona and rounded out about a 200-mile span of surveillance.
Examples of Israeli technology and expertise on the border include Israel's NICE Systems, which provided CCTV surveillance technology to notorious Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was found guilty of racially profiling Latinos in 2013; the Golan Group, a huge Israeli conglomerate, who trained a select group of ICE agents in 2007; and a squad of Israeli Hermes drones, which were the first drones used to patrol the US-Mexico border skies in 2004. With over 600 exporters of security technologies and services, “defense” will continue to be one of Israel’s chief exports. This is why President Biden, for all his lapses in memory, continues to articulate, “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent one.” Weapons of war always have, and will continue, to find their way home to benefit police and terrorize both our borders and our streets.
As contradictions of the capitalist system continue to arise, we all must struggle against the impediments of a hyper-individualistic society and recognize that we are the sum of our parts. We have more in common with those desperately seeking refuge than with oligarchs selling us the means to paper over the cracks in the walls of our own prisons.