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Trump Is Forging His Own Gaza on the Southern Border
Migrants from Central America argue with a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
(Gregory Bull / AP)
When a crowd is exposed to tear gas, an aerosol containing the chemical
agent 2-chlorobenzaldene malononitrile (CS), nasal passages begin to run,
eyes water uncontrollably and breathing grows short and painful. Those
directly exposed can experience vomiting or diarrhea. Effects take hold
within 30 seconds, and the symptoms can last up to 10 minutes, even after
the air has cleared or the afflicted have managed to scramble to safety.
For these reasons, nearly every nation in the world banned the compounds
use in warfare under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Yet despite
ratifying these agreements, the United States continues to utilize tear gas
for domestic riot control. Police shot dozens of canisters at protesters
over several days in Ferguson, Mo., and now U.S. Border Patrol agents have
fired upon Central American migrants and their toddlers in Tijuana, Mexico,
seeking asylum in the United Statesan act of aggression that almost
certainly violates international law.
When President Donald Trump announced that he would be deploying soldiers to
the southern border, in numbers that seemed to swell in direct proportion to
the fever of his campaign rallies, the media eagerly enabled his hysteria,
treating the arrival of a few hundred refugees as an impending alien
invasion. And while Nicholas Kristof has since acknowledged that The New
York Times allowed itself to be manipulated ahead of a midterm election, few
appear willing to confront the darker reality this assault has laid bare:
The Trump administration has sought to militarize the region from the start.
In January of 2017, mere days after Trump was sworn into office, Bloomberg
published a report detailing Magal Security Systems offer to construct the
presidents long-promised wall. (Shares in the company soared 50 percent
following the 2016 presidential election.) During a conference on border
security, the company presented its Fiber Patrol product to officials from
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, among others. Previously, Magal
Security Systems had constructed Israels border wall with Gaza, as well as
a fence separating the country from Egypt.
That August, amid a tense meeting with then Mexican President Enrique Peña
Nieto over who might fund such a construction, Trump made a confession of
sorts. You know, you look at Israel, a transcript of the conversation
reveals him saying. Israel has a wall and everyone said do not build a
wall, walls do not work99.9 percent of people trying to get across that
wall cannot get across anymore.
Bibi Netanyahu told me the wall works.
While a physical wall will likely go unfunded with Democrats now controlling
the House of Representatives, the president has nonetheless achieved its
central aim. By separating children from their migrant parents at the
border, the Trump administration has exerted its dominance over a vulnerable
population, and signaled to its supporters that it will not simply accept
white nationalism as a byproduct of American empire but embrace it as a
matter of public policy. As of October, administration officials had failed
to reunite hundreds of these children with their mothers and fathers, months
after a court-imposed deadline to do so.
In recent weeks, the U.S. military has laid down miles of concertina barbed
wire along the U.S. border with Mexico as part of Operation Faithful
Patriot. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has since dropped the name of the
mission on the grounds that it was too military sounding; when asked if the
troops planned to remove the wiring, he replied, Well let you know.
It seems increasingly unlikely. During a recent stop in Montana, Trump
gushed over the work of the U.S. military along the border, the new tracts
of fencing in particular. Mexico is trying, they are trying but were
different, we have our military on the border, he said. And I noticed all
that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire, used properly, can
be a beautiful sight.
If decades of U.S. foreign policy have shaped the migrant caravan, from
President Ronald Reagans violent maneuverings in Nicaragua and El Salvador
during the waning days of the Cold War to Secretary of State Hillary
Clintons assistance in the Honduran coup of 2009, the crisis currently
unfolding in Tijuana is almost entirely of the Trump administrations
making. Trumps border policy has squeezed asylum seekers at both ends,
observes Voxs Dara Lind. Officials stress that migrants ought to present
themselves legally at ports of entry, while asylum seekers at ports are
forced to wait days or weeks for entry to the US, and President Donald Trump
himself says they shouldnt be coming at all.
For the president and his enablers, that a refugees method of entering the
country has no bearing on his or her claims to asylum is ultimately
irrelevant. As is so often the case in this administration, the cruelty is
the point. Trump has since threatened to shut down the Mexican border
permanently, an act of dubious legality that, coupled with acts of violent
suppression, would only further Gaza-fy the southern border. This was the
idea all along.
Jacob Sugarman
Jacob Sugarman is the acting managing editor at Truthdig. He is a graduate
of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism whose writing has appeared
in Salon, AlterNet and Tablet, among other
