“The spectacle of heavily armed border guards abusing vulnerable migrants reminds us that the U.S.-Mexico border is not a neutral entity,” Alicia Schmidt Camacho writes. Since it was established, “it has been an instrument of power and control.”
order that enlists the governments of Central America and Mexico in a program tantamount to mass expulsion. This has had devastating consequences for Black migrants and other vulnerable populations. In late August, video recordings of National Guard and immigration police in Tapachula, Chiapas, captured images of Mexican agents throwing Haitian, Cuban, Central American, and South American women and children to the ground and delivering beatings to break up a migrant caravan.
To charges of human-rights abuses and failure, the Biden Administration, like others before it, answered weakly that they must follow the rule of law. But no law requires that people fleeing political violence and natural disaster should be met by the militarized cordon sanitaire in South Texas.
The Del Rio photographs are shadowed by other violence that goes unseen and unrecorded by cameras. Immigration-law enforcement works by imposing privation and social isolation on those deemed alien and illegal: familial separation, physical and sexual abuse, and prolonged captivity.
against the federal government—but they most often confront these conditions alone and beyond any effective oversight. The Del Rio photographs should also make us look differently at the images wesee—the pictures of lawful violence that circulate in media coverage of the so-called migrant crisis. Scenes of migrants in chains, boarding buses on their way to deportation flights, have yet to cause the same anguish.
Black civil-rights leaders and migrant organizations responded to the Del Rio photos with a broad campaign for racial justice. The UndocuBlack Network