Washington, D.C., February 6—Progressive Labor Party members have joined a number of rallies and struggles against racist immigration policies, including a recent rally in Washington, D.C. Our goal: show medical professionals that only a strategy with the end goal of communism and revolution can alter the vicious capitalist attacks on workers who are divided from each other by capitalist-formed borders. Our class has no borders, and revolution will abolish them!
Racism and cages divide families
Racist immigration policies are dividing families at the Texas-Mexico border. The U.S. bosses’ racist immigration policies create a devil’s choice for families migrating to the U.S. from Central America. The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) force families who come together into unsafe conditions in Mexico where children entering without parents are forced into U.S. detention centers. Children are in cages and some have died while the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) was supposed to be monitoring them and getting them treatment. Among many horrors, the CBP is not giving children flu vaccines. The CBP claimed that the children could get the vaccine after they reached their final destination since they would only be held a couple of days. But in fact, many are held longer and the crowded conditions predispose the spread of infection.
Medical workers organize
One organization in which we are involved in is Doctors4CampClosure (D4CC), which is protesting against inhumane and racist policies. This group has over 2,000 medical professionals and has demanded to meet with CBP medical staff about flu vaccinations and general medical care for children and families. In DMV (District of Maryland and Virginia) an active chapter led a protest at the Trump hotel in October and today a local contingent gathered to protest in D.C. at the CBP headquarters. In response to the mobilization, CBP Senior Medical Advisor David Tarantino said he would meet with the group after all.  This remains to be seen.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have participated with D4CC here and led the rally at the Philadelphia ICE office during the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in November. Today’s rally included plans to disrupt CBP work and risk arrest through civil disobedience tactics. This reflects the anger and seriousness of medical professionals who join the fight for immigrant rights and building solidarity among all workers. This rally built on the many resolutions passed in medical organizations to get the message out. This is similar to the way we led the rally at the APHA and turns words into action. While most of the D4CC members are physicians, their events have welcomed a wide range of medical workers as well. In Maryland we are demanding that no new ICE detention centers be built and that local government connections to ICE be stopped. These reforms would be welcome, but they only scratch the surface of capitalism’s systematic attack on workers around the world.
Concentration camps litter U.S.-Mexico border
The MPP went into effect on January 29, 2019 and has since detained 58,000 asylum applicants in Mexico until their asylum cases can be heard. Corralled into makeshift camps on the Mexican border, refugees sleep in the open without adequate access to water or proper sanitation. Human Rights First reported 660 reported cases of murder, rape, kidnapping and other attacks against migrants relegated to stay in Mexico by the U.S. under the MPP. These include 148 cases of children who were kidnapped or nearly kidnapped.
The MPP explicitly exempts those with medical and mental health issues; however, the Administration routinely denies humanitarian parole into the U.S. to vulnerable people. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has reported on 17 instances of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers sending women in the final trimester of pregnancy back to Mexico under the MPP. A woman with a known history of preeclampsia was sent back to Matamoros and went into labor in a tent, endangering both her life and that of her baby. In another case, CBP denied U.S. entry to a seven-year-old girl from Honduras with an enterocutaneous fistula, a condition in which excrement leaks through a hole from the intestines to the skin.
Communist revolution is workers only solution
International agreements and the U.S. bosses own laws claim to be against the mistreatment of refugees, but U.S. bosses ignore these agreements. The bosses break their own laws whenever it suits them—truly a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Building our party to move this struggle in a revolutionary direction is critical.