ICE Pepper Sprays Refugees Protesting Internment

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I see the US House of Representatives just passed a law putting targeted sanctions on Chinese officials for "arbitrary detention, torture, and harassment" of the Uighur Muslims in China. How uncivilized.

Meanwhile here in the USA, US Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers (ICE) pepper sprayed economic refugees being held in a jail in rural Louisiana who were protesting their imprisonment, or what the US media calls, “prolonged detention”. A spokesperson for the company that owns these centers reassures us though that only, “a brief, calculated use of pepper spray was employed” affecting only 50 refugees, and they,“subsequently became compliant”. Don’t you just love the terminology representatives of the state security forces use? The protestors were refusing to go back to their cells, sleeping outside of them and some folks had written “libertad” on “bedsheets and towels” according to reports. The imprisoned are seeking asylum and being forced to spend months in holding cells with no effort to process them.

The jail is operated by a private company that owns several similar centers and jails throughout Louisiana and the number of imprisoned economic refugees in the state has grown over the past period and as many as 8000 were held earlier this year.

Do people not realize the hypocrisy of the US Congress, the most prolific purveyor of state violence on the planet, censoring any individual or administration for detention or torture?  Are we to think that this hypocrisy goes unnoticed by most people in the world? The US has two million people incarcerated, more than 50% people of color. We execute children, the mentally ill and have locked up the children of economic refugees in cages. We supply the arms and money for the Zionist regime’s theft of Palestinian land and murder of their children. The US embraces the murderer of Kashogi the Saudi dissident and US citizen. And what was/is Guantanamo but a torture chamber. Have you ever wondered how the US got a base in Cuba? And to top it off, we tolerate a rapist and racist in the White House. The US ruling class is thoroughly degenerate.

I do not raise this comparison out of any love for the Stalinist regime in Beijing, simply to point out the inconsistencies here.

I refer to the influx of people from our southern border as “economic refugees”, because that’s what they are. If we familiarize ourselves with the history of US imperialism in the region; its savage plunder of the resources as well as its indirect and at times violent direct meddling in the politics there, the correctness of that definition becomes clear. The US predator in chief and his right wing fascist supporters are fond of pointing to Latino gangs that originate in the region like MS 13, Barrio 18 or numerous US based gangs as one of the reasons for his ant-immigrant stand and the need for his stupid wall. I am not sure at this point but I think he cannot yet take the title of Deporter in Chief that his predecessor Barack Obama held.

The main point we have to grasp though is that the many Latino gangs in the US and particularly Los Angeles are a direct result of US policy in Central America. Some one million people fled north to escape US armed and financed death squads in Central America in the 1980’s, many of these people were urban or rural poor and many settled in Los Angeles with little opportunity or real assistance at integration. This history has to be understood if we are to talk at all about immigration.

In 1953 the US orchestrated the coup that overthrew the Guatemalan government that was introducing polices that would have laid the foundation for a healthier and more stable environment for the majority of the people there. Instead the new US backed regime slaughtered thousands of indigenous Guatemalans and many came to the US to survive. People don’t flee their homeland because they don’t like where they live generally. The US overthrew the Guatemalan government on behalf of the United Fruit Company. I wrote previously about this here. And I suggest reading The Brothers about the Dulles brothers and their role in the Guatemalan Coup. There is a review of that book here.  The US also orchestrated the coup that overthrew the democratically elected secular regime of Mossadegh in Iran the same year. The gift the US gave to Iran for that venture was the murderous Shah. This history was suppressed but became more widely known after Stephen Kinzers book,  All the Shah’s Men was published.

Street gangs, Latino or otherwise can’t match the biggest gang of all when it comes to violence and mayhem and that is the US ruling class and its organizations.  That the present gang occupying the US Congress can get away with the laws it passes, including the recent censure of China for human rights violations that would be perfectly legitimate if the source had any credibility on the world stage, is because the US working class has no concept of the murderous role it’s government plays on the world stage or turns a blind eye to it. 

That this will change I have no doubt.