Andrew Jackson led armed forces into what is now Alabama
on a homicidal mission against Creek Indians. Refusing to discriminate between
the armed and helpless; men and women; adults and children, his agents of
genocide murdered eight hundred Indigenous people. It was such a “successful”
attack that Jackson feared his military superiors would not trust the veracity
of his account. Given the mores and incentives of prevailing US culture ,they
would assume that he was exaggerating to receive promotion, accolades, and
other professional benefits.
To gather evidence, he had his men slice off the noses of
each fatality, and place them in handmade wicker baskets that, in an act of
grave robbery, they stole from the villages of the murdered Natives. Jackson
would later receive the award of becoming president. The US celebrates and
honors his legacy with the placement of his face on the twenty-dollar bill;
currency functioning, without intention, as a nifty metaphor for the dark side
of American “progress” and affluence.
A portrait of Jackson’s face also adorns a wall in the
Oval Office, where Donald Trump, while claiming to advance the legacy of his
“populist” predecessor, decides what cities to strike with his secret police
force, what immigrants to accost, abuse, and assign to overseas torture
chambers, and what excuses to offer, no matter how flimsy, for the cold-blooded
execution of American citizens in the middle of residential streets.
Jackson’s war crimes amount to a straw of hay in a
haystack. Through a series of official massacres, the awarding of lucrative
bounties for private killers responsible for the deaths of Indigenous people,
and forced removal programs, most infamously the “Trail of Tears” on
which 16,000 Natives died due to starvation, freezing conditions, and
preventable diseases, the US, a nation no small amount of patriotic politicians
and academics tell us was founded on the ideals of freedom and equality,
eliminated 96 percent of the Native population, while confiscating 98 percent
of their ancestral lands.
These lands included most of the minerals and resources,
from fertile ground for agriculture to timber, and eventually, natural gas and
oil, that allowed the US to become the wealthiest nation since the fall of the
Roman Empire. Of crucial significance is the Indigenous land that settlers
would transform into cotton plantations, making viable the entire system of
chattel slavery for Africans.
Like a pack of wolves tearing into the flesh of mutilated
deer, the US appetite for expansion was ravenous, its thirst for the spoils of
bloody conquest unquenchable. From 1846 to 1848, the US fought a war with
Mexico, declaring that it had a God-given right to their land. Not bothering to
obtain notarization from the office of real estate in Heaven, American forces
invaded Mexico, treating the people who had already lived there as brush to
clear on a ranch.
The result of the “Manifest Destiny” policy of invasion was
Mexico’s cessation of what the world now calls Texas, Nevada, Utah, Arizona,
New Mexico, and the southern part of California. Novelist Carlos Fuentes
referred to the borderline between Mexico and the US as a “scar.” Immigration
activists have often said, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.”
There is a word that applies to the US slaughter of
the indigenous population, the expropriation of natural resources, and the
violent theft of land from its neighbor to the south: colonialism. This is also
the word missing from the immigration “debate” in current US discourse. Its
absence renders said debate as absurd, degrading it from an opportunity for
clarity, edification, and leadership into insipid chatter for officials and
pundits who take for granted that the white figures of authority who inherited
the benefits and advantages of the colonial system have the right to impose
their will on any given situation, no matter the human costs or social
consequences.
The willful failure to acknowledge the legacy and
influence of colonialism creates a culture that functions according to the
colonial mindset. One of the main features of this mentality is suspicion, if
not outright contempt, for the population caught in the crosshairs. They are
the problem, not the men or the system aiming the weapon.
And so, we arrive at the hideous point of escalation
when an agency founded as recently as 2003 under the name, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, has murdered an American citizen in broad daylight. Renee
Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, attempted to steer her vehicle away
from an ICE checkpoint, not unlike the stations of armed interrogation in
occupied cities of war, when a masked ICE officer fired three bullets directly
into her vehicle.
If the Trump administration did not order ICE to
patrol, raid, and terrorize Minneapolis, the city where the shooting occurred,
Renee Good would be alive. Blaming individuals, no matter how psychopathic,
misses the point, but in case anyone was prepared to resort to the “bad apple”
theory, the vice president of the United States, JD Vance put that notion to
rest. Standing at a podium in the White House, like a vampire whose eyeliner
protects him from the sun, he said, “The precedent here is very simple. You
have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement
action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity.”
Acting and retired prosecutors, as well as legal
scholars, have rejected Vance’s “absolute immunity claim.” Legalities aside,
Vance’s heartless assertion is politically useful, as it concedes governmental
responsibility for Good’s death. Her murder wasn’t merely the act of a rogue
agent, but the predictable consequence and logical endpoint of official US
policy. Vance requested prayers for the killer, but not the victim’s family.
The victim, like the millions of Indigenous people before
her, the Mexican fatalities of the Mexican-American war, and immigrants who ICE
separates from their families, assaults, and intimidates, are not human beings.
They are colonial subjects, whose removal, as in the Indian Removal Act
that led to the “Trail of Tears,” and exclusion, as in the Chinese Exclusion Act
of 1882, which codified oppressive measures against Chinese immigrants, is
essential to the maintenance of colonial society.
Renee Good was white, but her shared identity with the
dominant culture did not provide her with any protection. Like the white allies
who police beat nearly to death at Selma, she had crossed over to the other
side, becoming a traitor to her race and class. After receiving training as an
ICE observer through her aptly named church, St. Joan of Arc, she pledged
solidarity with immigrants, vowing to use the agency of her citizenship to
monitor, and to the extent that it was possible, mitigate the destructive
immigration policies of US power. One protestor in Minneapolis asked on
television, “If they killed a white woman in front of witnesses, how are they
treating Black and brown people behind closed doors?”
She could find the answer to her question in
Louisiana, where thousands of former detainees of ICE detention centers have
spoken to journalists, the ACLU, and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center
about widespread physical abuse, sexual harassment and assault, medical
neglect, and arbitrary and retaliatory solitary confinement. Inhumane
conditions include cockroach-infested food, filthy drinking water, lack of
feminine hygiene products, and the use of painful shackles.
ICE sadists target women for the worst forms of violence
and humiliation, advancing the colonial tradition of reserving particularly
intense hatred for those who bear and most often nurture children, and
therefore, protect and promote the future of their people.
Beginning in the
1920s and extending through the 1970s (not exactly ancient history), federal
and state programs across the US sterilized Black, Latina, and Indigenous
women, either through force or without their consent during other surgical procedures.
As many as 150,000 women, according to documentation
obtained through a federal lawsuit, were victims of genocidal eugenics. Outside
the continental United States, American officials enhanced its imperial
relationship with Puerto Rico by sterilizing nearly one third of Puerto Rican
women between the ages of 20 and 49. The program persisted into the 1960s.
Depriving despised women of the ability to conceive children became so common
that Fannie Lou Hamer, herself a victim of involuntary sterilization, referred
to it as “the Mississippi appendectomy.”
The first words that the ICE agent who killed Renee
Nicole Good spoke after observing her vehicle crash into a telephone pole were,
“fucking bitch.” The derogation is an echo from the killing fields of
Indigenous land, the Trail of Tears, and the operating rooms where thousands of
women, under anesthesia and unable to speak, suffered the theft of their
potential for motherhood.
The mainstream media’s indifference to the Louisiana
story, along with the general public’s relative silence in the face of daily
ICE actions against Latino immigrants, provokes the painful, but necessary
inquiry into the morality and priorities of the American people. Vance’s
admission of federal responsibility for Renee Good’s murder reflects onto the
citizenry. Despite the Trump regime’s best efforts, the US is still a
democracy. As a result, the people, or “demos,” are culpable in Good’s murder,
ICE’s systemic abuse of detainees, and the ongoing violation of human rights
from border to border.
Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, a law professor and member of the
leadership team at Witness at the Border, an immigrant advocacy and
ICE-tracking organization, has dedicated his life to the cultivation of
solidarity, anti-racist organization, and the elevation of consciousness within
a dormant democracy. When I spoke to Pérez-Bustillo, he said, “Colonialism and
imperialism provide a useful framework for connecting what is happening in
Minneapolis, other cities, Venezuela, and at the border. It is not only theoretical
or rhetorical. It is also concrete and material.”
“The poison of rhetoric from the White House,” as
Pérez-Bustillo calls it, is intended to “not only dehumanize Renee Nicole Good,
but also demonize and criminalize what she represents.” Through his work and
connections with Witness at the Border, Pérez-Bustillo was able to confirm that
Good received training as a “legal ICE observer.” To disparage such civil and
lawful activism as “domestic terrorism,” as Vance has done repeatedly, is to
spotlight that Good enrolled into the resistance against, to use Pérez-Bustillo’s
words, “the colonial occupation of American cities.”
“To understand the deployment of ICE as an occupational
force in our communities is the same way that the Black Panthers understood
white police in Black neighborhoods,” Pérez-Bustillo said. He then referred to
the civil rights movement more broadly, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King’s
Riverside Church address against the Vietnam War: “The bombs that fall in
Vietnam explode at home.”
In a rhythmic reprise of the late 1960s, the Trump
regime’s imperial incursion into Venezuela, murder of 40 Venezuelans in their
capture of Nicolás Maduro and promise to expropriate the country’s oil forms
of a figure eight knot with the domestic war against immigrants of color. The
white nationalist obsession with countering an increasingly multicultural
American demography, in which whites have become a minority in many cities and
several states, harmonizes with the Trump administration aim to establish hemispheric
dominance through the installation of right-wing governments in South America.
The “Donroe Doctrine,” as Trump calls it to remind
everyone that the malevolence of modern fascism is on par with its stupidity,
is a more aggressive and brazen iteration of Ronald Reagan’s murderous
interventions in Latin America, Bush the elder’s capture of Noriega in
Nicaragua, and W. Bush’s attempted coup in Venezuela.
If Donald Trump is fentanyl to the body politic, there
were plenty of gateway drugs. Perhaps there is no issue on which the inducement
of psychosis that functions as US politics is more destructive than
immigration.
Through a series of military aggressions, typically producing high
death counts, ruination of local economic orders, and termination of homegrown
political movements, the US created the very conditions that birthed the
so-called “migrant crisis” of mass immigration across the southern border.
To maintain economic domination and political influence
in the region, the US toppled governments in Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, and
Ecuador. With subterfuge and subversion, often using tactics of violence, the
US has also “intervened” in the affairs of El Salvador, Panama, and the
Dominican Republic, while the CIA, with Operation CHAOS, undermined several
political independence movements in Puerto Rico.
Add exploitative “trade deals,” and it becomes clear that
many of the Latino immigrants to the US are merely following their wealth in
search of the freedom that colonial forces on the ground in their own countries
had obliterated. When they arrive, they can find employment with a
multinational corporation, performing backbreaking and unsanitary labor for
miserly wages, then contend with a political movement that targets them for
hate crimes and harassment.
To underline the racist intent of the Trump regime,
and to trace a clear connection between the colonial founding of the US and
present-day policy, ICE recently detained five Native Americans in Minneapolis.
Agents also tried to gain entry to Little Earth, an urban Native housing
project. This is the equivalent of a cat burglar calling the police to arrest
the residents of the house he plans to rob.
Camilo Pérez-Bustillo makes it clear that it is only an
escape from the “colonial framework” that will emancipate the US from its cycle
of violence and generate a genuine transformation in political policy and
morality. The inability to break free of the ideological restrains of the
colonial mentality explains why, according to Pérez-Bustillo, nearly everyone
across the mainstream political spectrum “concedes that undocumented
immigrants, or at least many of them, constitute a threat to the United States,
and concedes the necessity of militarization of the border.”
“A decolonial framework can liberate us from the limits
of our discourse,” Pérez-Bustillo said. As ICE spreads terror in American
cities, with tactics that now include homicide, it is helpful to remember that
“Abolish ICE” was once a popular slogan and movement on the left. All
Republicans and most Democrats treated the position as it was a manifesto for
the demolition of indoor plumbing…
As millions of people struggle for freedom and
self-determination, they await an extinction event for colonialism. The murder
of Renee Nicole Good, like the deaths of immigrants whose names the powerful
never even utter, becomes yet another tragic means of marking the time until
there is transformation of our political ecology. It is a transformation that
depends upon the propulsion of mourning; the alchemy of pain into action.
For the entire essay: The
Absurdity and Barbarity of the “Immigration Debate”: Breaking Free of the
“Colonial Framework” - CounterPunch.org
This essay also ran on the author’s Substack, Absurdia Now.
-David Masciotra is the author of six books, including
Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy and I Am Somebody: Why
Jesse Jackson Matters. He has written for the Progressive, New Republic,
Liberties, and many other publications about politics, literature, and
music. His Substack is Absurdia
Now.
