Racist Covid-19 crisis in U.S. concentration camps

The U.S. injustice system’s racist treatment of undocumented workers, intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic, is proof of the necessity of organizing society without borders and exploitation.
In its desperation to intimidate, criminalize and build racism against undocumented workers, 110,100 have been imprisoned by the U.S. Government since March 2020.  The dangerous conditions inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement concentration camps, made much more so by the pandemic, led to hunger strikes by 2,500 detainees nationwide from last March to July. Recently detainees at three northern NJ prisons, where NY detainees are also sent - Essex, Hudson, and Bergen County Jails – have struck to protest their continued endangerment.
According to a report published by The Detention Watch Network, as of August 2020, the rate of Covid-19 infections identified by ICE, is over 13 times that of the general population, despite sparse testing.
As of December 23, ICE admitted to 73 cases in two New Jersey jails on strike. At least two deaths have been recorded at the Essex County Detention Center. And even those numbers are low since anyone who leaves a facility to be released or deported or transferred is no longer counted.    
In a dorm of 48, no masks allowed
In an interview with an imprisoned worker at Essex County, he said prisoners live in crowded 48-person dormitories and are not allowed to wear masks. He never had a Covid-19 test. In some medical visits, his temperature was not even taken. He also developed a serious heart rhythm problem that requires hospital treatment, but he was only seen by the on-site MD, who gave him a medicine contraindicated by his asthma and never saw him again. The diagnosis subsequently disappeared from his record. For participating in the December strike, the administration transferred him to faraway Buffalo, NY detention.
It is estimated that ICE detention centers have been responsible for 245,000 Covid-19 cases throughout the country (CNN, 12/11/20), by virtue of the high infection rate among staff who come and go from the community as well as detainees who are released undiagnosed. Moreover, hundreds of deportees have tested positive for Covid-19, including over 330 in Guatemala (Arizona Republic, 10/28/20). The U.S. capitalist government has no concern for workers’ health anywhere.
Only crime? Being a super-exploited worker
The major crime for which undocumented workers are arrested is the crime of existing as an undocumented worker. Some are arrested during a routine traffic stop (ProPublica, 4/2/18). Immigrants, documented and undocumented, make up 17.4 percent of the workforce (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5/29/20). They toil in laborious jobs like agriculture, meat packing, home health, construction, and many low-wage service jobs.
While the bosses criminalize workers for conditions their profit-system created, they get away with the biggest crime of all—super-exploitation and racist state terror. The profiteers celebrate their mechanism to divide workers against one another—white versus Black, Latin, and Asian—citizen versus undocumented—a way to keep all workers down. What capitalist profiteers get is hundreds of millions of dollars paid to private prison owners who house 70 percent of detainees, like GEO and Corrections Corporation of America. Municipalities like Hudson County and Essex County, NJ rake in near $120 per day for each prisoner through contracts with ICE (Patch, 1/6).  
Biden, enemy of workers
Some hope that all will change with president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris.
Remember—it was under Democrats in 1996 that mandatory detentions and expedited removal of immigrants were written into law. It was under the Obama and Biden administration that over three million immigrants were deported, more than in all previous administrations combined, and family detentions escalated.  Furthermore, while the Obama administration deported 1.18 million people in his first three years, the number of deportations has been a little under 800,000 so far under Trump” (The Hill, 11/18/19). Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are friends of the working class.
Biden represents different interests than the Small Fascists. It is the economic and international peril of U.S. imperialism that dictates what we really can expect of any administration. As the U.S. position’s in the world declines and is flooded by a capitalist crisis, the Big Fascists’ main task is to ready their society for war and fascism (see glossary, page 6).
Progressive Labor Party is involved in mass actions to free immigrants, like many that have occurred outside the NJ jails. We are in organizations that oppose ICE and its health policies, like Physicians for Human Rights, Cosecha, and DSA Immigration Committee (see page 3). We fight to liberate all workers from the bosses’ criminal system and their racist borders.