4/13/21

By Josh Rubin

Abandon hope.

This is our immigration policy for Mexico and Central America. It does not matter how bad things are. How hungry, frightened, homeless, poor. Stay right where you are. And here is what we will do to convince you.

We will enter into agreements with your governments. Those agreements will encourage an unprecedented buildup of troops dedicated to breaking up, beating back, and imprisoning people who set out to migrate. It needs to be especially severe, because it will need to make migrating seem worse than the threat of starvation, chronic poverty, and death by violence.

We will close the borders to the US, using the discredited excuse that migrants are a contagion threat, even though we don’t believe it. It doesn’t matter that we don’t believe it. It will frighten people in the US into supporting one of the most racist policies imaginable, inflaming anti-immigrant sentiment. We will chain people up, load them on planes, march them back across bridges.

We will allow children to come in, but not their families, and in this way tear families apart. I bet you thought family separation was a thing of the past. Well, it is not. But it isn’t only recent, and it is very much alive in the present. Adult family sent away, children accepted. Locked facilities opening up all over the country. And the military is in the picture, too. Mysterious camps on military bases like Fort Bliss, with thousands of children, staffed by people who report that nights are filled with the sounds of children crying. Children, waiting to be released, who knows when, to family here.

A humanitarian crisis. A military solution. And our message, carried at the end of a gun, a militarized border, and confinement with locked doors and guards.

Abandon hope.