Systemic racism

Many pro-migration activists have pointed out that for all his talk of human rights and pro-migration policies, President Joe Biden has proven no different from his predecessors in his cruel racist policies.

In just one week in September, the US has deported more than 2,000 asylum seekers to Haiti, using a Trump-era policy to bypass their right to apply for protection. The previous administration used Title 42 of the 1944 Public Health Services Law, which allows the US government to carry out expulsions of persons who have recently been in a country where a communicable disease was present.

On the surface, the policy appears neutral but, in practice, it is applied to the most marginalised people on the move, evidenced by the increased deportation of undocumented Haitians. In fact, according to a report by Haitian Bridge Alliance and the Quixote Center, just days after Biden walked into the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramped up expulsions to Haiti. By March, it had deported more Haitians than under the Trump administration in Fiscal Year 2020.

While there was a short-lived moratorium on deportations, it did not cover Title 42 expulsions, and thus Haitians continued to be targeted. As of September 2021, more than 14,000 Haitian asylum seekers who crossed the border into the US at Del Rio in Texas are at risk of being forcibly removed from the country.

But the US government’s racist policies alone do not explain the complexity of anti-Blackness behind the violence against Haitian asylum seekers at the US-Mexican border. The harrowing images of border police brutality might seem like an exceptional event for some, but they are squarely in line with the racial ideology of the US.

The mistreatment of Black asylum seekers draws on pervasive anti-Blackness in US society, which kills, maims and incarcerates Black people in great numbers. It also reflects the historical ‘discomfort’ of American political elites -- whose prosperity derived from the enslavement and exploitation of Black people -- with a Black-led revolution overthrowing colonial rule and slavery and establishing a republic so close to American shores.

Against this backdrop of systemic anti-Blackness in the US past and present, it is hardly surprising that Black asylum seekers, and Haitians, in particular, have the lowest asylum acceptance rate (4.6 percent) among all racial/national groups. They are also more likely to be deported based on their criminal record compared with other undocumented individuals.

Unfortunately, Haitians elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere have not fared that much better. For many asylum-seekers, the violence at the US-Mexico border was just one episode of the suffering they have long had to endure in various Latin American countries.

Excerpted: ‘The border violence against Haitians reflects US racial ideology’

Aljazeera.com