The Violence of Trump’s Pandemic Politics

The Violence of Trump’s Pandemic Politics

By Rachel Kerstein

The ongoing protests over U.S. police violence and the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis, Minnesota represents a watershed moment in the current movement for racial justice in the United States. Despite militarized repression of their free speech rights, masses of people have been taking to the streets risking the pandemic, police brutality, arbitrary detention, and the possibility of deportation to build multiracial solidarity for systemic change.

Seeking justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Santiago Baten-Oxlag, and Carlos Escobar-Mejia and untold others killed by U.S. law enforcement agencies, activists’ calls to defund the police and abolish Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are receiving unprecedented attention by a nation bearing witness to the relentless violence of white supremacy carried out on behalf of the state by police, ICE, and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).

Deterred not by a global pandemic, the Trump administration is in fact using the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to carry out greater racialized violence and further its anti-immigrant agenda. Using COVID-19 as a pretext to circumvent U.S. laws, due process protections, and treaty obligations, the administration is using unsubstantiated public health concerns related to COVID-19 to shield itself from the illegality of its cruel detention measures, discriminatory border closures, and unlawful deportation procedures.

UN experts have provided clear guidance asserting States’ obligations to safeguard refugees and migrants from discriminatory treatment and refoulement during times of national crisis. UN mandate holders have additionally called upon States to respect the right to health for all persons, including those in detention settings, asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants.

Given that States are beholden to the principles of duty and equivalence of care, the U.S. is responsible for the healthcare of those whom it holds in custody and is obliged to provide detained individuals equivalent standards of healthcare as is available in the wider community, without discrimination on the ground of their legal status.

Granting this obligation, and recognizing that detained immigrant populations are highly vulnerable to infectious disease outbreaks due to the poor conditions in which many detained immigrants are forced to live, UN experts make clear that States’ pandemic response public health measures may not heighten the potential risk of exposure to ill-treatment for migrants deprived of their liberty. Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) state that immigration detention policies should seek to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by avoiding use of “cohorting”, or quarantining together people who have been in contact with someone infected with the virus, and utilizing community-based alternatives to detention to the fullest extent possible.

In defiance of public health guidelines, ICE refuses to release large numbers of people from detention and instead systematically relies on cohorting detainees. ICE policies force quarantined detainees to live in close proximity in unsanitary conditions while being denied access to even the most basic hygiene supplies including soap, masks, and gloves. Beyond being simply inadequate, such policies heighten the risk of COVID-19 transmission, increase the potential to produce a chain of infection, and subject detainees to high levels of stress, anxiety, and a well-founded fear of death from COVID-19 related complications.

The United States can reduce detained immigrants’ exposure to ill-treatment and decrease its immigration detention population by halting civil enforcement operations, ending coordination with police for criminal referrals, and expanding the use of alternatives to detention. ICE has the authority and capacity to release refugees and migrants from immigration detention without delay.

In choosing not to release detainees, the agency is demonstrating a cruel and callous disregard for the lives of migrants deprived of their liberty, and we have begun to see its fatal consequences. Last month’s deaths of Santiago Baten-Oxlag and Carlos Escobar-Mejia were the first COVID-19 related deaths of migrants detained in ICE custody. Their deaths were completely preventable and ICE’s refusal to administer safer solutions to detention demonstrates that the U.S. immigration detention system is incapable and or unwilling to safeguard those in its custody.

Compounding the mortal threat of U.S. immigration detention, on March 20, 2020 the Trump administration, through the CDC, issued a sweeping and unprecedented order suspending entry to the U.S. of migrants apprehended at its southern border. Based upon this order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has directed CBP agents to summarily return migrants seeking international protection to the Mexican side of the border or place them in expedited deportation to their home countries. While administration initially claimed this expulsion policy was a temporary, 30-day measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the administration intends to extend its use indefinitely.

Using public health considerations as pretext to justify the wholesale and indiscriminate expulsion of migrants from the U.S. southern border, DHS is illegally denying refugees the opportunity to seek asylum without providing safeguards to protect against refoulement. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, WHO, IOM, and UNHCR have jointly stated, it is possible to manage border restrictions through quarantine and health checks in a manner which respects international human rights and refugee protection standards, and there is no public health rationale to bar anyone entry to the U.S. based on their migration status.

With the highest number of COVID-19 cases globally, the U.S. government’s policy to continue to deport migrants during this pandemic is inhumane and puts the global community at risk. The U.S. government does not implement sufficient health screenings prior to deportation, resulting in U.S. deportees to numerous Latin American and Caribbean countries having tested positive for COVID-19. The Guatemalan government has asserted that infection among U.S. deportees accounts for more than 15% of the country’s cases.

Rather than providing for effective public health measures, U.S. detention and deportation policies terrorize migrant communities with extreme fear for their health, risk spreading the virus to countries with healthcare systems ill-equipped to manage an outbreak, return migrants to precarious conditions where they may be at risk of persecution, and create the conditions for another generation of a mass movement of people.

As people of conscious across the United States raise their voices to demand systemic change for racial justice, there must be a full accounting of the violence of white supremacist settler-colonialism and the machineries through which it racializes, criminalizes, capitalizes and otherwise harms Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. The U.S. government must stop all deportations, release immigrants in detention, and open its borders to persons seeking asylum.  

Rachel Kerstein is a writer, researcher, and activist based in the United States.