Women Workers Strike at Detention Center

DILLEY, TEXAS, May 21 — On May 8, a federal judge in Texas refused to protect hunger-striking immigrant mothers from retaliation by jail guards at Karnes County Residential Center. Strike leaders had been placed in isolation, fired from jail jobs and accused of insurrection.
The 78 women on hunger strike are leading the fight for freedom by thousands of immigrant women and children who have crossed into the U.S. since last summer. Obama’s sexist and racist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers claim that the women pose a significant “threat to U.S. national security” by their mass migration. Therefore all were held initially without bail.
 In support of the women’s release, 1,000 marched on the new jail here. PLP led the strikers with anti-racist and anti-capitalist chants, but the strikers were sometimes misled by others chanting to improve U.S. democracy. Nevertheless, dozens protested yesterday at the ICE office to deliver petitions demanding freedom for all jailed women and youth. Liberal church groups call the mass incarceration of women and kids an immoral act by the U.S. government.  Civil rights lawyers in the federal court action argued without success that the women’s hunger strike was an exercise of free speech.
PL members and friends attended the court hearings and worked to support the strikers.  But no reform group leaders are willing to identify the real cause of the problem — U.S. imperialism’s fight to maintain the profits of the ruling class worldwide. Racist and sexist prison guards are only one symptom of U.S. imperialism.
Mass Incarceration for Profit
The mass incarceration of Latin women and youth in Texas is part of the mass refugee crisis affecting 50 million people around the world.  U.S. drone attacks force millions to flee their homes in Syria, Yemen, and other countries. City police from Ferguson to Baltimore incarcerate millions. In almost every case, the underlying cause of the displacement, incarceration or murder of millions of working class people is the fight to defend or expand markets and resources by the United States.  The U.S. bosses will stop at nothing to maintain dominance.
Legalistic fights for “asylum” and inmate “free speech” for women fleeing U.S.-funded oppression in their original countries are well-meaning dead ends.  The U.S. government doesn’t readily grant asylum to people fleeing U.S.-backed fascist regimes. Nor will it allow hunger strikers to shut down prisons under court-ordered First Amendment free speech doctrines.
Striking women must expand their fight. We should not physically weakening our forces through a hunger strike, which runs on the incorrect assumption that our oppressors will be pressured or moved to act by witnessing our suffering. As the 2,000 rebelling immigrant prisoners in the Willisey, TX prison demonstrated earlier this year, physical destruction of prison facilities and attacks on guards by inmates are an even more serious threat to the U.S. fascist immigration system. When prisoners strike at once, with strikes in solidarity by industrial workers who can shut off profits to the ruling class, the system will be more seriously threatened.
But in this period of capitalist crisis caused by long-term decline, bosses have little ability to reform the system, even temporarily. When the working class in Baltimore rebelled last month with violent attacks on the cops, Obama panicked, calling the Black youth of Baltimore “thugs.” Obama, Baltimore’s Black mayor, and the new U.S Attorney General then followed the ruling-class script by mobilizing cops, troops, and sell-out community programs. The rulers brought a few charges against Baltimore cops and declared the crisis over. In fact, the rulers can recover quickly from any crisis short of working-class revolution to destroy the capitalist system once and for all.  
Liberal Pols: Capitalist Flunkies
No demands for reform can fix the problems created by capitalism. A few racist cops do not cause the mass incarceration of Black and Latin workers.  Likewise, the mass deportation of families is not the byproduct of a “broken” immigration system. These are the products of U.S. imperialism in a period of decline.  This system, actually controlled by bank owners and corporations through their money and their military, depends on racist super-exploitation to survive. To foster the illusion that reform is possible, the capitalists use the media to spread the illusion that elected politicians control the system.  Thus, liberals proclaim that voting is key to reform.  But Democrat and Republican flunkies all take their orders from the capitalist class.
In this period of impending imperialist war, the electoral circus will serve only to revive faith in reform and get people ready to fight on the side of their country. History has shown that reforms are always taken away and that world war is inevitable.  Don’t be suckered. The only solution is to fight for communist revolution based on multi-racial unity of the working-class of the entire world!