We stand in grief and rage with our sisters, brothers, and familia in all border communities and communities of color facing the daily onslaught of trauma produced by militarism, capitalism, and white supremacy. We mourn with our comrades at the Border Agricultural Workers Project the loss of loved ones in their community as a result of the mass shooting in El Paso, TX by a white supremacist whose manifesto echoes Trump’s racist and violence inciting rhetoric.
We remain vigilant and ready to frustrate any attempt by those in power to use these acts of white supremacist terrorism to expand surveillance and policing of immigrant communities and communities of color. Trump has directly linked more stringent background checks to immigration reform, which under his watch can only mean more harm to our migrant familia. This year alone, 600,000 migrants have been taken by Border Patrol, and seven children have died in their custody. This, too, is a form of domestic white supremacist terrorism sanctioned and carried out by the state en masse. We recognize the same logic at work when police and vigilantes brutalize and murder Black women, men, and trans people with impunity.
In the face of this threat to our lives, our communities have continued to organize and to build alternative visions for a world where all of us can live in freedom, dignity, and a just relationship to each other and Mother Earth. We have continued to create and sustain hope. This hope is something we must not lose sight of.
Furthermore, both the criminalization of our movement such as the Black Lives Matter activists and environmental defenders right to resist goes hand in hand with the Trump administration emboldening and implicitly encouraging acts of racist vigilante terror. The dehumanization of Black, Brown and Indigenous Peoples by white supremacist ideology not only motivates individual acts of senseless violence, it rationalizes war tactics by domestic law and immigration enforcement and normalizes the hyper-exploitation of millions of our brothers and sisters.
The same week of these devastating white male terror attacks in El Paso and Dayton, this administration also carried out the largest single state ICE raid in history, where hundreds of ICE agents detained 680 Latinx and Caribbean workers in the poultry industry in Mississippi. As It Takes Roots member, Cooperation Jackson wrote, “Make no mistake about it, today’s assault was an assault on the working class. This assault was intended to terrorize a legally vulnerable and super-exploited sector of the class, largely drawn from Central América, México, and the Caribbean, and get them and those in precarious situations to disengage from politics (including but not in the least ways limited to electoral politics) and public life. We must stand in solidarity against these deliberate acts of terror.”
Trump’s visit to El Paso was another act of violence against the survivors and their families.
There is no question that the current President of the United States is a racist, using his platform to empower and incite violence to those with a similar agenda to make América white again. In the face of this threat to our lives, our communities have continued to organize and to build alternative visions for a world where all of us can live in freedom, dignity, and a just relationship to each other and Mother Earth. We have continued to create and sustain hope. This hope is something we must not lose sight of.
We do not accept any of these conditions as inevitable. Even as we mourn, we continue to struggle for the world we, and future generations, deserve. We demand the freedom of all migrants in detention. We demand the abolition of the prison industrial complex–this includes ICE, police, state surveillance, and all cages from jails to detention centers. We affirm the right of any people to move in search of refuge. We affirm the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples over their lands and livelihoods, including the rights of Indigenous Peoples of Central America and México. We organize to end the wars abroad and the wars at home, because as Assata Shakur put it, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.” Another world is possible.
It Takes Roots, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Climate Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network and Right to the City Alliance
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