Migrants cross the Rio Grande into the U.S. from Mexico behind Concertina wire, Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024, in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Friday’s tragedy on the US-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Texas is a demonstration of the brutality of the capitalist ruling elite in its treatment of desperate migrants fleeing poverty and oppression, mainly in Latin America, conditions for which American imperialism itself bears responsibility.
A woman migrant and her two children died in the Rio Grande Friday after Texas state troopers and national guardsmen refused to allow US Border Patrol officers to reach the river and carry out a rescue operation. The federal agents were responding to a report of six migrants in distress in the water. The three bodies were retrieved on the Mexican side of the river.
The exact circumstances of the drownings remain under investigation. Officials of the Texas Military Department (TMD), the agency that controls the deployment of state troopers and national guardsmen on the border, claim there was no contact between the migrants and state forces before the drowning. They deny that state officers barred the migrants entry or forced them back into the river to their deaths.
What is undisputed is that when the Border Patrol contacted the TMD Friday night, they were told that the state would not allow federal agents into the area of Shelby Park, which had been occupied by the TMD on Wednesday. National guardsmen erected barbed wire barricades to keep out both local residents and federal agents.
The Biden administration went to court, seeking an order requiring Republican Governor Greg Abbott to withdraw the state forces from the border. Abbott declared that he was merely enforcing the law. “Texas has the legal authority to control ingress and egress into any geographic location in the state,” he told reporters Friday. That power was necessary “to maintain operational control.”
A Texas Department of Public Safety official told the Washington Post that it did not receive any communication about the drownings on Friday. Migrant drownings are “nothing new,” Lt. Chris Olivarez, a DPS spokesman, told the Post. This callousness sums up the outlook of both state and federal governments, and both capitalist parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans.
While several Democratic Party officials shed crocodile tears over Abbott’s actions on the border—the federal Department of Homeland Security, for example, called Abbott’s actions cruel, dangerous and inhumane—there is infinite hypocrisy on display. The Biden administration has endorsed and enabled the Israeli slaughter of thousands of Palestinian children, with the enthusiastic backing of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.