More than 50 men and women died on Monday (the current count is 51, but may increase). They died trapped on a tractor-trailer platform and abandoned on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, with a heat of 100F (38C). More than a dozen are in the hospital, including children. The dead were migrants from Mexico and Central America. Local fire chief Charles Hood said the people in the truck were “hot to the touch” and had no water or air conditioning inside the truck.
That’s how they died, but that’s not why they died. They died because they did not have a safe route to the United States. And why is that? It is because of border controls and racist and deadly migration policies created and defended by our government, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Many of these policies, such as Title 42, which effectively prohibits people from seeking asylum under the auspices of Covid restrictions, are the same under Joe Biden as under Donald Trump. The same goes for Migrant Protection Protocols, or “Stay in Mexico,” which allow U.S. border agents to return non-Mexican asylum seekers to dangerous places in Mexico. Successive U.S. governments have deliberately and relentlessly pushed against the human right to asylum. Autopsy results will show if heat, dehydration or suffocation killed people in that truck. But fundamentally, they were killed by this nation’s migration policies, our exclusion laws, and our multimillion-dollar obsession with the southern border and keeping black and brown people out.
Border security is primarily a federal responsibility, and in asserting this, the federal government must accept responsibility for the injuries and deaths of migrants. State lawmakers are also to blame. On Monday at 6 p.m., at the same time the truck was discovered, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott released a statement on “Operation Lone Star,” a controversial $ 2 billion border security operation. which he launched last year. The statement said the effort by several agencies “has resulted in more than 265,500 arrests of migrants” and boasted that law enforcement had repulsed 22,000 migrants from the border. This was faced by the people who died yesterday; the need to move and few options to do so is what drove them to get on that truck.
People move. We always have it, we always will. We are just a kind of many in which migration is a natural event. What is not natural is the disproportionate death and suffering of people who cross borders, this is artificial, caused by dehumanizing migration policy. The same heat radiating through the truck in San Antonio is forcing people around the world to move. Extreme temperatures caused by climate chaos and the growing number of wars and conflicts make us more on the move today than at any other time since World War II. The United States is not the only one to attack and victimize black and brown migrants. Due to draconian policies against migrants from Europe, people are regularly expelled from European shores, and last year alone thousands of people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Treating people as disposable has side effects, and none is good. The Guardian report on the thousands of deaths of migrant workers in Qatar shows that once our lives are reduced to “migrant” status, it is in danger.
How can we tolerate this? The people our governments exclude and address are rarely white; We see it clearly how Ukrainian refugees (most of whom are white) can fly to the US to seek asylum. Meanwhile, crossing the land, migrants at the border (mostly black and brown) cannot do the same.
The Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, states on Twitter that he is a “Husband. It seems. Immigrant. ”He puts these identifiers before his government role in his biography. And it was on Twitter where her husband, father, immigrant Mayorkas made a brief statement about the deaths last night. He said he had a broken heart, called it a tragedy and put it to smugglers, so Majorkas and the U.S. government, past and present, shirk responsibility while actively endangering people on the move. to the symptoms of a disease, but it is a disease they cause.Among the dead yesterday were also husbands, parents and immigrants.Now they are ghosts and they will chase us until we do well.