Contact: Jemima Pierre 323-675-6890 on September 18, 2021
photo: Bill Hackwell
When a white Fox News reporter used a drone to film the thousands of Haitian and other Black asylum seekers camped beneath a bridge spanning the Rio Grande and linking Del Rio, Texas to Ciudad Acuña, in the Coahuila state of Mexico, he immediately (and deliberately) brought a stereotypical image of Black migration: that of the teaming, African hordes, ready to burst the borders and invade the United States. Such images are as cheap as they are racist. And, typically, they erase the larger question: why are so many Haitians at the US border?
But before that question could be addressed, the Biden administration struck with a decisiveness not seen throughout its nine-month tenure in office in ordering that Haitian refugees, many of them with legitimate asylum claims to be summarily deported to Haiti.
This rogue state action is both morally indefensible and illegal under international law. The United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention “recognizes the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries” and stipulates that states have an obligation to provide reasonable measures to allow for individuals to seek asylum. “Seeking asylum by individuals who may be facing prosecution, imprisonment and even death because of political affiliation or membership in racial, national, sexual or religious groups is a recognized requirement under international law,” states Ajamu Baraka National Organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace. “The fact that the Biden administration has ordered Federal authorities to mass deport thousands of Haitians that will probably have the effect of driving many of them who will resist deportation back into Mexico and Central and South America, is both unprecedented in its scope and fundamentally racist.
What makes the Biden policy even more outrageous is that it has been U.S. policies that created the economic and political conditions in Haiti that have compelled tens of thousands to flee.
Janvieve Williams of AfroResistance, a BAP-member organization, points out, “racist US policies in Haiti, supported by the Core Group, the UN, and other international organizations, have created the situation in Haiti — and at the border.”
If successive U.S. administrations had not undermined Haitian democracy and national self-determination, there would be no humanitarian crisis in Haiti or on the U.S. border. George W. Bush greenlit the 2004 coup against elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. The UN sanctioned the coup with a full-scale military occupation. The Obama administration installed Michel Martelly and the Duvalierist PHTK party. And the Biden administration upended democracy in Haiti by supporting Jovenel Moïse despite the end of his term. All of these imperialist interventions have ensured that thousands would have to seek safety and refuge outside of Haiti. The US policy response? Imprisonment and Deportation. The US has created an endless loop of dispossession, depravity, and despair.
The Black Alliance for Peace calls on the Congressional Black Caucus and all human rights and humanitarian groups to demand that the Biden administration live up to its responsibility under international law and give Haitians a fair chance to seek asylum. We also call on the Biden administration and the Core Group to stop their interventions into Haitian politics and allow Haitian people to form a government of national reconciliation to restore Haiti’s sovereignty.
Source: Black Alliance for Peace