From LA streets to Salvadorian prisons, the US escalates its war on migrants
~ Josie Ó Súileabháin ~
On the streets of Los Angeles, California earlier this summer, several masked and armed men attempted to kidnap a street vendor in broad daylight. Despite the gang showing no identification to authority, the community knew who they were.
Luis Hipolito arrived on 9th street and witnessed the attempted kidnapping. He pulled out his phone and hit record. The armed men ordered him to leave but Luis refused and continued to film. The community began to gather, as they do across the country to resist this fascist repression and support each other in standing up to violence and authority.
Andrea Guadalupe Velez arrived with her 17-year-old sister. Her mother Margarita was dropping them both off. Andrea got out the car and immediately saw a man running directly towards her. “He thinks I am illegal”, Andrea thought to herself bracing for impact, “because of the color of my skin”. Holding her hands up, the man collided into her.
Luis was then pepper sprayed by the masked men, later identified as agents from Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department for Homeland Security (DHS). Now blinded, Luis attempts to steady himself with his arms. Federal agents threw him down to the curb and assaulted Luis until his body goes into convulsions.
Both Andrea and Luis have been charged with assaulting a police officer, released on bonds between $5000 and $10,000. In the view of the Department Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin, the act of Luis filming the original abduction “kept ICE law enforcement from arresting the target illegal alien of their operation”.
In other words, he was blamed for his own illegitimate arrest – based on his right to record an arrest. Over the next two weeks, 1,618 people were deported from Los Angeles and the surrounding area at a rate of around 95 a day.
Suspicious behaviour
ICE raids have been observed to feature heavily armed and aggressive officers—masked and wearing tactical gear—arresting people at their place of work or on the streets. “A systematic pattern”, according to an ACLU lawsuit, where “individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified Federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from”.
At an immigration court in San Francisco, ten masked and armed Federal agents violently forced their way through a blockade of demonstrators to abduct a male detainee following his court hearing. One officer brandished a rifle and pointed it at both protesters and the press, as other agents from ICE used pepper spray and violently pushed people to the ground.
After resistance from the crowd, agents threw the man into the back of a black unmarked SUV. As ICE agents speed through the crowd of protesters, a woman was thrown off the hood of the car and onto the streets.
The community gathers at the immigration court on 100 Montgomery street every Tuesday to resist the multiple abductions by Federal agents to the nearby ICE field office. This tactic of waiting outside the courtroom and taking people had escalated from simply arresting those who had come to ICE voluntarily.
On 5 June, 15 people were arrested at the ICE field office on Sansome street including at least four children, one of them as young as three years old. As repression escalated, protesters took to the streets and courtrooms as a response to the abduction of thousands of members of their community, detained without charge and separated from their families.
Despite this systematic targeting of the migrant community however, few migrants rights organisations support the rights of sex workers and are suspiciously silent when it comes to their arrest, detention and deportation. “Police cars, plainclothes cars, we all hide when (we) see them”, a migrant massage worker told Red Canary Song, a NY-based collective of Asian and Migrant sex workers. “We’ll be arrested as soon as we go out”.
Respectability politics is to blame, organisers have pointed out, as groups attempt to sanitise their message and divide those who are deserving of solidarity and those whose rights are disposable. This is not something new and ironically by excluding sex workers from the struggle for migrant rights, we suppress a collective memory of resistance.
Between January and February there were nearly 1,000 arrests in Queens, New York that directly targeted immigrant sex workers. Police raids have focused on massage parlours, arresting women and creating a climate of fear across these under-represented workers. “I’m scared to go to work”, the migrant massage worker reported anonymously.
Authorities have justified a number of repressive police and immigration tactics in the past, using surveillance, racial profiling, raids, detentions and deportations as anti-trafficking measures. Law enforcement have claimed these measures are designed to protect women and children, yet in reality only expose migrants to more systematic violence.
DHS has now begun using artificial intelligence to profile those walking on the streets, using flawed patterns over evidence for “suspicious behaviour”. These patterns includes factors like “foreign accent” or “short skirt” as part of it’s evaluation of sex work through live-streaming public cameras.
Palantir currently has a $30 million contract to build a “master database” of all of those targeted by ICE, and various government agencies have received their pay for the building of this architecture of hate. As these technologies are applied to the general population, including facial recognition, we will see as with all surveillance, the only purpose is to build cases for prosecution and deportation.
Monster or terrorist?
Agustín was sixteen-years-old when a group of armed men came to take him away but this was not the first time he had faced organised violence. When he was younger, local gangs had attempted to recruit Agustín. When he refused they threatened to kill his mother. Together, they fled to San José Guayabal to start a new life.
For the second time, there was a knock on the door. Agustín was taken from his home by the El Salvadorian army and driven to a deserted road. He was ordered out of the truck and the soldiers simulated Agustín’s execution, making him believe he would die on his knees facing the barrel of a gun. This mock execution of the teenager was followed by his detention in an overcrowded cell with 70 other children.
Agustín was kicked virtually every day by the other detainees in front of the guards who did nothing but watch. Detainees would count up to thirteen while assaulting him, in reference to MS-13. There are now 3,000 children within the sprawling Centro De Confinamento Del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison system, as reported by Human Rights Watch in 2022
El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele has been in power since 2019 and for the last six years has radically eroded rights and freedoms through a repressive “war on gangs” that seeks to enrich the security sector at the expense of local communities. 40,000 people are now held within this prison system and an estimated 375 detainees have died in custody – all justified through a state of emergency or Bukele’s “state of exception”.
In exchange for 261 men deported from the United States, El Salvador received $6 million to humiliate and warehouse them in this public theatre of dystopia. The men were escorted off three planes and taken through lines of heavily armoured and armed police officers. New inmates have their heads shaven upon arrival. Eighty men share a single cell.
Most of those detained have no criminal record, inside or outside the United States. Yet they were convicted on the basis of administrative violence through intentional error and faulty symbolic criteria that categorised detainees as “monster”, “terrorist” or “gang member”. A point system that determines if tattoos, graffiti, hand signs or social media posts are ‘evidence’ of association to gangs.
Most of those detained by ICE and DHS are taken to facilities within the United States. In Florida’s Everglades, a prison camp with the projected capacity for 5,000 people has been set up at the cost of $450 million. Testimonies reveal the typical state of the U.S. prison industrial complex.
“They only brought a meal once a day and it had maggots”, Leamsy La Figura, a detainee at the prison said. “They never turned off the lights for 24 hours… we’re like rats in an experiment… I don’t know their motive for doing this, if it’s a form of torture. A lot of us have our residency documents and we don’t understand why we’re here”.
Memory of resistance
“In terms of ICE detention”, Panagioti Tsolkas says in conversation with Max Granger, “we know the goal isn’t to remove every undocumented person; it’s to create a climate of fear and terror, to make people controllable, more scared to speak up or act in their own interests”.
Tsolkas recommends looking into our collective memory and the political activism against ICE during Obama’s administration. In a documentary called The Infiltrators, young undocumented activists “intentionally got themselves arrested with the goal of organizing in prison centers”. By getting inside the prisons, the activists were able to document who was inside, taking down their names for their families to organise solidarity on the outside.
“No-one dies but those who are forgotten”, Peter Gelderloos recalls an assertion from an armed group in the Chilean state who had taken over a street outside of a prison to show their solidarity. “In other words”, Gelderloos writes, “we all exist through our relations”. We resist through a collective memory of resistance.
“When I was a boy”, the late anarchist Willem Van Spronsen once wrote, “in post-war Holland, later France, my head was filled with stories of the rise of fascism in the ’30s, I promised myself that I would not be one of those who stands by as neighbours are torn from their homes and imprisoned for somehow being perceived as lesser”.
Willem was killed by police while taking direct action to sabotage a fleet of buses that served Northwest immigrant detention centre in Washington on July 13, 2019. His action in attempting to burn the buses coincided with the one year anniversary of a hunger strike from those detained inside, as well as over a decade of resistance from the community and La Resistencia, a grassroots organisation for undocumented migrants.
“Anyone who is determined to carry out his or her deed is not a courageous person”, wrote Alfredo Bonanno. “They are simply a person who has clarified their ideas, who has realised that it is pointless to make such an effort to play the part assigned to them by capital in the performance… in doing so they realize themselves as human beings… the reign of death disappears before their eyes”.
“You don’t have to burn the motherfucker down”, Willem wrote before his death, “but are you going to just stand by”?