Blood Red Lines

How Nativism Fuels the Right

Brendan O'Connor

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642593815
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Diskriminierung & Rassenbeziehungen

An engaging and reflective look at how austerity and the billionaire class paved the way for Trump's presidency, the rise of the "alt-right, " and the caging of migrants children and adults in detention centers across the country. For all of the energy that the far right has demonstrated-and for all of the support that they receive from institutional conservatives in the GOP and affiliated organizations-the United States is experiencing an upsurge in left-wing social movements unlike any other in the past half-century, with roots not in the Democratic Party but Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Drawing on his original reporting as well as archival research, O'Connor investigates how the capitalist class and the radical right mobilize racism to defend their interests, while focusing on one of the most pressing issues of our time: immigration.

Chapter One

THE FEAR IS ALWAYS THERE

It is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.

—Aimé Césaire

We hadn’t yet made it to our first waypoint when Dr. Sara Vazquez slowed the truck to a halt. Leaning forward into the dashboard, she peered up at the sky. “Vultures,” she said, without looking away. “Better check it out.” There were six of us crammed into the pickup, the bed of which was packed with gallon jugs of water, cans of beans, and bags of Fritos. I took a swig from my own bottle and opened the door. The heat hit first, and then the smell: rotting flesh.

Pulling apart the barbed wire of a cattle fence that lined the dirt road where we’d stopped, the crew spread out, heading in the direction of the circling vultures. The wind swirled and died, picking up the stench and carrying it away. Then, about fifty yards from the road, I saw a few of the birds huddled together around something, obscured by the saguaro cactus and cholla. Drenched in sweat, I took a few more steps until I had a clear line of sight. And then I could see—antlers. Not human. A deer carcass, partially decomposed. I called out to Dr. Vazquez and the others, volunteers from Tucson doing desert aid work with the humanitarian group No More Deaths, to let them know.

We got back into the truck, heading farther into the desert toward our first stop, where we’d park and then hike into the hills. We did this half a dozen times over the course of the day, carrying water and food to leave at points along known migrant trails. Sometimes, we’d find backpacks that had been emptied and left behind, along with slippers that people buy in Mexico border towns before making the crossing. Designed to fit over other shoes, the slippers hide one’s tracks. We left them, and the backpacks, where they were. Someone else might need them.

Since the early 1990s, thousands of people have died crossing the border into the United States from Mexico, though it is impossible to know exactly how many. In 2018, the US Border Patrol estimated that at least 7,209 migrants had died in the desert since the 1994 implementation of its “Prevention Through Deterrence” policy, which pushed border crossers from more densely populated areas into the hostile environment of the desert.¹ This number is understood to be a drastic undercount, however, as it did not include the number of bodies recovered by anyone other than the US Border Patrol, including local law enforcement—which have their own reporting difficulties—and aid groups.² Even if it were possible to reconcile all of these different counts and come up with a number of bodies recovered, this still would not offer a full accounting of the deaths on the border. This is because of what the desert does to dead bodies: it makes them disappear.

“If you have ever come across a carcass left out in the open that is in the early stages of rot, you know such bodies are miniature biological laboratories,” Jason De León, an anthropologist, writes in The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail, a study of the effects of “prevention through deterrence.”³ Between 2012 and 2013, De León conducted a series of experiments in which he killed several pigs, dressing them in the clothes that a border crosser would wear, and brought their bodies into the desert to observe their decomposition. There, he found, death does not bring rest or stillness: with maggots and vultures feasting on them, the carcasses began to vanish in a matter of days. Clothing fell away, and with it any identifying object, carried off by insects, animals, and the wind. “With enough time, a person left to rot on the ground can disappear completely.”⁴ By one estimate, there are two additional deaths for every body recovered from the desert.⁵

Such is one potential fate that awaits those who leave their homes and head for the US-Mexico border, whether one is a Oaxacan farmer bankrupted by DC-backed trade policies, a Salvadoran teenager fleeing gang violence exported from Los Angeles, or simply a child who wants to be reunited with their mother, who may have left years before, looking for work. Those who make it across the border, either through the desert or by other routes, join millions of other undocumented people living in the United States, part of a layer of the US working class—that is, migrant labor—whose political marginalization is as necessary as its economic exploitation. Even as they pick berries and milk cows, work construction and service jobs, and care for the children of the middle class and tend to golf courses, the country’s deportable workers exist in a state of rights-lessness unlike any other.

Maru

“The fear is always there,” Maru Mora-Villalpando told me.⁶ A forty-eight-year-old undocumented woman from Mexico City who has been living in the United States since 1992, Mora-Villalpando is an organizer with La Resistencia, a Washington State–based group that provides support to people detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. She’s also been outspoken about her own immigration status—she overstayed a tourist visa—for years: “Some people don’t go public with their status because they think, ‘Oh, they’re going to come after me.’ But I wanted to be ready. I want it to be on my terms.” The fear of deportation changes the way that immigrants move through the world. It keeps students, whether themselves undocumented or the children of undocumented parents, out of school—especially in the wake of mass raids.⁷ It leads to undocumented women dropping domestic abuse cases, or declining to report incidents of sexual assault and rape at all.⁸ It keeps undocumented workers from organizing to fight for better wages and conditions.⁹

In December 2018, Mora-Villalpando received a letter from the federal government ordering her to appear before an immigration judge, making her just one of many undocumented activists who were targeted by ICE under President Donald Trump.¹⁰ “I saw my name, and I kind of laughed about it, because I had thought they would be here at my door. Instead, they send me a letter,” she recalled. But then she saw that her daughter, Josefina Alanis Mora, had tears in her eyes. “I really, really hate when anybody makes my daughter cry, so I got really angry. We just walked to the car. I told my daughter: ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine. You can cry as much as you need to, but I’m going to make these motherfuckers pay if they ever try to separate us.’”

Mora-Villalpando had started to prepare her daughter, who was born in the United States, for this possibility long before, when she was divorcing her husband. At the time, Josefina was about five years old. “I had to prepare her,” Mora-Villalpando said. “Nobody should have to have this conversation with their children. Obviously, when somebody goes through a divorce, or somebody dies in the family, those sorts of things, you have conversations. But having to say, ‘Hey, ICE might come and take me, and I might never see you ever again,’” she continued. “Nobody should have to say that.”

It was also for her daughter’s sake that Mora-Villalpando began organizing and thinking systematically about how people end up being detained by ICE at all—and how it could be otherwise. This was difficult enough before the Trump administration, but as many organizers and activists I have spoken to told me, the constant stream of crises—some national, but many more local— since January 2017 has left little time or energy to think about their nature and origin. “Personally, it took me years to understand how much damage the capitalist political system had created in our world,” Mora-Villalpando said. “Coming from Mexico, from a place that was invaded by Europeans and colonized, I grew up with a colonized mind, in a colonized context.”

“We are not only dealing with the monster of detention and deportation; we are also dealing with the monster of liberalism,” she continued. “We all need to eat, but we also should have the right to eat wherever we’re at. We should all be able to be able to cook ourselves food without having to kill ourselves in a job that is dangerous, without having to compete for wages—wages set by somebody else. All these rights that we should all have, we don’t have them because it’s so much easier to pit us against each other, to have us compete for the last things that are left for a few of us.”

Claudia

Claudia Rueda was six years old when she came to the United States. “I knew I was different, because I didn’t speak English,” she told me.¹¹ “I thought my difference was something great. I was proud to be Mexican.” She made good grades—good enough that, in high school, she qualified for a college prep program. Participation, however, required a social security number. “That’s when it hit me: ‘Like, wow, I can’t do this, just because of a number. I’ve been working my ass off, and it doesn’t really matter,’” she said. “I saw it in my sister also getting denied for a college program. I saw it in my parents not getting their wages, or my dad getting stopped by police for not having a driver’s license.”

Rueda’s mother, Teresa Vidal-Jaime, was detained in April 2017, during a joint operation conducted by the US Border Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department ostensibly targeting a Boyle Heights drug ring. Vidal-Jaime wasn’t arrested on drug charges but on suspicion of living in the United States without authorization.¹² “Even though she wasn’t involved, they still took her,” Rueda said. “They come into our communities, they use any excuse to take anyone who is around.” Vidal-Jaime was only released, over ICE’s objections, after several weeks of protests led by Rueda. Days later, the border patrol arrested Rueda.¹³ Again, the pretense was a drug raid. Again, Rueda was not charged with any drug-related offenses, only with violating US immigration law. “It was retaliatory,” Rueda told me. “They were mad that I was speaking up, that I was talking … on the news. They used that to punish me, to silence me.”

The twenty-two-year-old was already in a state of shock when Customs and Border Protection agents showed up outside her aunt’s house, also in Boyle Heights. “I couldn’t believe it was happening,” she said. “I was already traumatized that they took my mom. I thought my whole life was falling apart.” They took her to a detention center downtown. “In that place, they try to keep everyone in a constant state of fear,” she said. “To eat, you have to go through metal detectors, random searches—there are so many rules. If you don’t make your bed, you can get a strike, and if you get three strikes you get sent to isolation, which people call ‘the hole.’ You’re not treated like a human being.”

“The first time I received some money [in detention], being able to buy some conditioner reminded me of my humanity. Everything is dry and deprived. You feel like no one,” Rueda told me. “That place causes a lot of mental anguish and depression,” she said. “There’s a psychologist, but it’s just for the look of it. They just say, ‘Drink more water.’”

Still, Rueda kept organizing, even in detention. “I did my best trying to help people,” she said. “I made friends, I helped with their asylum applications. A lot of people are coming from distant countries, and they make them do asylum applications in English and they don’t know English. So I was helping with translation.” After her release, Rueda applied for protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and was denied.¹⁴ Legal filings described her as the “paradigmatic” DREAMer—that is, the kind of young immigrant who would be covered by the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act—a model student who grew up in the United States and is civically engaged. But Rueda herself was ambivalent about this particular strategy. “We can’t choose who we fight for in our community,” she said. “Our humanity shouldn’t be defined by whether we have a diploma or broke a law. Our humanity should always be put first, under all circumstances. Humanity shouldn’t only be for DREAMers, it should be for every immigrant.”

Even after she was released from detention, as she waited for a lawsuit over her DACA application to be litigated, Rueda’s life was still shaped by her experience inside. “Before, I was more able to do more—to sit down and strategize, to be part of a space or a group,” she said. After her release, her depression and anxiety became debilitating. “It was really hard to integrate back into society. I was really sad. I would isolate myself. It was so traumatizing—it affected me a lot mentally,” she said. “I wasn’t able to concentrate on daily tasks, even school or organizing. I actually did a campaign for one of my detention roomies, and raised bond for them to get out, but I noticed that I wasn’t able to do much, because it was mentally too much, so I took a step back. It was too traumatizing, I would have anxiety and nightmares, I kept stuttering, would lose my train of thought, forget things a lot.”

This was the intended effect, Rueda believed. “Even though I was free, mentally, I didn’t feel free,” she told me. “I think it’s part of the agenda: keeping people in a state of fear. Trying to silence me and what I have to say about what I’ve been through. They want complacent people—they don’t want people who are out there exposing what’s going on, how they’re dehumanizing people, how state violence creates this trauma in our communities to keep us under control.”

Security Culture

Donald Trump is not the first modern president to fetishize “border security.” Between them, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations conducted twenty-seven million deportations.¹⁵ Democrats and Republicans alike have allowed a “culture of cruelty” to flourish within the immigration enforcement agencies.¹⁶ Both parties are complicit in the transformation of the Sonoran Desert into a death trap surveilled not only by the heavily militarized border patrol but by right-wing vigilantes and militias.¹⁷ The massive expansion of the carceral state and its subsequent privatization was a bipartisan project, preceded by a set of shared ideological assumptions about immigration, the border, and national sovereignty that were the necessary preconditions for Trump’s election: among them, that immigration, absent regulation and control, posed a threat to national sovereignty; that it was appropriate for the border to be militarized; that it was acceptable for there to be a criminalized underclass of people in this country subject to deportation. Under the Trump administration, the federal government’s efforts to deport as many people as possible—part of a wider effort to rid the country of vast swathes of immigrants, whether or not their presence is authorized—escalated, radicalizing into something categorically different than what preceded it. ...