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Cameroonian 40 Hunger Strikes against ICE Continue

by A Scribe Called Quess?

Since March 3, some 40 African migrants, most Cameroonian, have been holding hunger strikes in an ICE concentration camp in Pine Prairie, LA. They’re protesting their extended detainment and inhumane treatment by ICE. The migrants paused their hunger strike when ICE agents said they would look into their cases. When this promise turned out to be a lie, the strike resumed. While some agents used deception to manipulate, others were more direct telling the men “for the 18 years I have worked for Department of Homeland Security, I’ve been trained to deport as many of you as possible,” threatening to deport them by October 7.

The migrants qualify for asylum under international law and have been incarcerated far longer than the law is supposed to allow. Still, Oakdale Immigration Court’s racist Judge Scott Laragy recently issued Final Orders of Removal to most of the men, resting his opinion on bogus “credibility” tactics, telling them that even if they appeal, he would still deny them asylum. Laragy has denied more than 85 percent of asylum cases that came before his court between 2014-2019, well above the national average of 63 percent. Since a large number of immigration judges are former ICE attorneys, it’s no wonder they uphold ICE’s mandates that support the ruling class. ICE uses racism to divide and conquer our working-class siblings nationally and internationally.

African migrants are twice as likely to receive deportations as their Latinx counterparts and are charged higher bonds due to their lack of family ties. But that lack of ties is a result of 400 years of racist U.S. foreign policy that barred immigration from Africa since the slave trade and even more so after the Haitian Revolution. This anti-Blackness permeates the practices of capitalist politicians of all races, so much so that the Mexican government is more likely to hand over African migrants to ICE than other immigrants. Meanwhile, African American politicians like Cedric Richmond, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, have failed to take adequate action by denouncing the modern-day slavery in Pine Prairie and demanding the release of all detainees immediately.

On August 14, the New Orleans Workers Group held a militant action in solidarity with the migrants and overwhelmed ICE officials with the power of the people. Only sustained direct action by the people to expose GEO Group, the $2.5 billion private company that runs the Pine Prairie ICE camp, will achieve the ultimate shut down of the camp and liberation of our working-class siblings. To support continued effort, email noworkersgroup@gmail.com and cameroon.american.council@gmail.com . We must fight until victory! Free Them All NOW!

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Stop Nazi-like Forced Sterilizations in ICE Concentration Camps and U.S. Prisons!

End Family Separation! Close the Camps! Free Them All!

The New Orleans Workers Group calls on all people of conscience to demand an end to the medical experimentation and forced sterilization of women and folks in U.S. ICE concentration camps. We cannot stand by as Republicans and Democrats attempt to minimize or conceal the atrocities occurring in so-called “detention” centers, jails, and prisons across the country.

We celebrate the brave stance of Dawn Wooten, a courageous Black woman who stepped forward to expose the horrific acts committed by a private for-profit concentration camp that cages migrants in Georgia. Similar human rights abuses have been documented in many other U.S. states.

Migrants are used as scapegoats so workers with papers will not recognize that the capitalist class is the real enemy. Migrants are workers just like us and we need to demand their release, family reunification, and full labor and political rights.

If any group of workers can be paid less, tortured, or discriminated against because of race, national origin, or gender, all workers will be hurt. To keep wages low and conditions poor for all of us workers, those who exploit us rely on reserve pools of labor, such as the unemployed, incarcerated, and migrant.

Lack of rights and fear of imprisonment and starvation have allowed bosses to pay migrant workers less money and the bosses are thrilled by that. The same process goes on in the prison system, making the U.S. the most incarcerated country in the world, with Louisiana and Arkansas as its most incarcerated states.

The right wing enforces the extreme exploitation of migrant workers by dehumanizing and caging. On any given day, more than 40,000 men, women, and children are in cages. Every migrant person caged in an ICE camp brings profits to the private owners of companies like Lasalle Corrections, GEO Group, and CoreCivic. These companies are addicted to this blood money and want more migrants incarcerated. For every person in ICE custody, these concentration camp companies receive about $65/day from the federal budget, totaling about $1 billion of our tax dollars every year.

Louisiana ranks second in ICE camps with at least 12 in the state. Some of these, such as River Correctional Center are unlisted facilities serving to disappear migrants. These camps are run in secret to hide torturous solitary confinement, lack of protection from COVID-19, inadequate food and healthcare, and everyday denial of legal rights.

This summer, the U.S. deported 8,800 unaccompanied minor children. A policy of supervised care for deported children to prevent trafficking has just been stopped by the U.S. government. Amidst COVID-19, these ongoing deportations have been a murderous act of biological warfare, spreading COVID-19 to over 11 countries and deporting over 159,000 people since March.

Forced sterilization, medical experimentation, and separation of children from families is part of the history of the U.S. These heinous acts have been overwhelmingly perpetrated against women of color, the disabled, and the extremely poor. Forced sterilization or forced childbearing and rape was common under slavery. It has been practiced in all U.S. colonies, especially Puerto Rico, and was a tactic of the genocide against Indigenous people.

The U.S. legacy of genocidal racism and torture of women continues. Studies show that Black women in Louisiana are four times more likely to die giving birth than white women. Every day, women are shackled during childbirth and denied pre- and post-natal healthcare in ICE concentration camps and U.S. prisons.

WORKING CLASS WOMEN UNITE AGAINST OUR TERRIBLE CONDITIONS

The current economic depression has hit women, folks, and families harder and driven us deeper into poverty and insecurity. This will eventually bring an explosion from working class and oppressed women. Women are 50% of the workforce, are more likely to join a union, a protest, oppose racism and poverty and become revolutionaries. Our ability to shut down production terrifies the ruling class. Impoverishment, violence, rape, incarceration, and attacks on reproductive and workers’ rights are being enacted to control us.

By fighting back, we can end the torturous cruelty inflicted on migrant women in the name of capitalist profits, just as we can end the police terror that took the lives of Breonna Taylor, Namali Henry, and Sandra Bland. We are clear that it is only through struggle that we can win, not by relying on the on the Supreme Court or any politician in office. We can and we must close all concentration camps including U.S. prisons and jails. None of us are free until all of us are free! End the capitalist war on women! End our impoverishment! Working women of all backgrounds unite! Free Them All!

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Free the Cameroonian 40 Now!

Aug. 14: People in ICE detention at Pine Prairie, LA hold signs reading “HELP” and “WE ARE INNOCENTS”

by A Scribe Called Quess?

“We are like a slave under a master with no place to go. The master[…] is ICE.” So said some of the 43 Cameroonian men detained in an ICE concentration camp in Pine Prairie, LA in a video published on Juneteenth this year. The men have been locked up by ICE for as much as 19 months with no end in sight. Racist Judge Scott Laragy has dismissed or “lost” evidence presented by the men while abusively telling them to shut up and trying to intimidate them into signing voluntary deportation during trials, adding to the 20% rate of African migrants facing deportation versus other immigrant groups with larger populations in the US. In response, they waged a 10-day hunger strike that landed them in solitary confinement where they were forced to drink toilet water. All this in a concentration camp where one out of five detainees have tested positive for COVID. The treatment of the men is illegal, as they qualify to seek asylum in the U.S., a right guaranteed by the Constitution for non-citizens fleeing political persecution in their homelands.

In their native Cameroon, a civil war has been waged by the dominant French-speaking government against the Southern, English-speaking region of Cameroon since 2016. This genocidal war is rooted in 55-year-old tensions between the two regions that have existed since British Cameroon established independence in 1961 and joined French Cameroon. Colonization left a deep divide that has festered over time as the French-speaking majority has tried to dominate the English-speaking minority to control their oil supply. This type of capitalistic oppression born of European colonization is all too common in the motherland. And its effects lead to refugee crises and migrants seeking safety in the U.S., the very country that helps perpetuate the oppression that led to the migrants’ crisis in the first place.

Aug. 14: New Orleans Worker’s Group leads protest of the illegal and brutal detention of migrants at GEO Group’s for-profit ICE detention center in Pine Prairie, LA.

As U.S. citizens, we can use our privilege to raise up the voices of our oppressed workers overseas. When interviewed by WV, Divine of the Cameroonian 40 encouraged folks on the outside to help the world hear their cry by contacting them for interviews, sharing their story on social media, and waging demonstrations on their behalf as New Orleans Worker’s Group comrades did on August 14th when they drove a motorcade to Pine Prairie and raised their voices in solidarity with the men. To learn more ways to support, email neworleansworkersgroup@gmail.com.

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Trump’s Storm Troopers Target Immigrants

In cities across the U.S. people have democratically decided to show solidarity to migrants and immigrants. These sanctuary cities have directed the police not to check immigration status, to racially profile undocumented workers, or to call in ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) to imprison our brothers and sisters in detention camps. New Orleans is one of several so-called sanctuary cities.

The ultra-racist Trump, just like the Louisiana legislature, refuses to accept any local decisions to raise wages, get sick pay, or deny corporate tax exemptions and more. Both rule solely to provide millionaires and billionaires with profits at the expense of the entire working class.

These anti-working class, racist politicians want to bring U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Units into sanctuary cities, armed to the teeth to arrest immigrants. These units are like the storm troopers of the Nazis. If they are allowed into our city, they will not stop with immigrants: the militarization and super weaponry will be used against the entire working class.

Anti-immigrant Attorney General Landry Has Got to Go!

Like Trump, Louisiana Attorney General Landry has been one of the loudest and ugliest voices in Louisiana against undocumented immigrants and migrants. This vicious racist and anti-immigrant millionaire opposed raising the minimum wage and initiated a lawsuit to stop Medicaid expansion and to destroy beneficial features of the Affordable Care Act. His lawsuit, which threatens the lives of 700,000 adults and children, was never decided by the workers of Louisiana.

Landry wants to divide workers by pitting citizens against immigrants. In 2017 he led a group of Attorneys General who threatened to sue Trump if he did not cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, which protects 800,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation. Yet when it comes to making profits, Landry is only too happy to exploit migrant workers as part of a “guest” worker contract that his business rigged in order to get skilled and unskilled labor for cheaper than he could get it locally.

Guest workers work under conditions of semi-slavery. This program requires workers to sign contracts stating they will not complain or organize, or they will be deported immediately. Many “guest” workers are forced to live in horrid conditions, and their pay is deducted for food and housing. There is no path to citizenship. The racist-in-chief Trump has overseen an expansion in guest worker programs. There are more short-term migrant farm-workers being exploited as “guest” workers than ever before.

This goes to the very core of why the capitalists, and their media, are beating the message that we should blame immigrants rather than the super-rich. The purpose of the anti-worker, anti-immigrant and migrant hatred is to divide us while they laugh all the way to the bank. They want to lower the wages and benefits of all workers.

We need to tear down the prisons which make Louisiana the world’s prison capital for citizens and immigrants alike. Private prisons for profit, eight of them, are now operating to cage immigrants and take their children away.
All workers should reject the storm troopers and view an attack on immigrants as an attack on all workers. ICE and storm troopers out of New Orleans or anywhere! An injury to one is an injury to all!

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Freedom Now! ICE Concentration Camps Are a Menace to All Workers

By Joseph Rosen

Thanks to President Trump and Governor Edwards’ racist persecution of migrants, a few rich shareholders at private prison companies GEO Group, LaSalle Corrections, and CoreCivic have raked in millions of dollars in profits from an expanding network of more than 15 lockups across the state.

Meanwhile, working people in Louisiana have seen their families torn apart and their wages kept criminally low.

On any given day, around 9,000 men, women, and children are held captive in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) concentration camps across Louisiana for no reason except to terrorize and super-exploit non-citizen workers. With taxpayer money, ICE contracts private prison companies and parish jails to carry out this abominable ‘business.’

Every year the capitalist U.S. government deducts millions in taxes from the paychecks of workers—citizen and non-citizen alike—in order to hand that money over to multi-millionaire prison owners. Last year, more than $600,000,000 in taxpayer money went to GEO Group; CEO George C. Zoley skimmed $6,963,460 for himself alone.

Capitalists reserve some of their profits for bribing politicians: in 2016, the GEO Group Political Action Committee spent more than $1 million this way. Similarly, the owners of LaSalle Corrections have donated thousands of dollars to Louisiana politicians including Governor Edwards. For this price, GEO Group and LaSalle secure more business and influence over the policies that affect their means of profit-making. This is just one way they work to keep wages down for all workers, citizen and non-citizen alike.

Dec. 3: Human rights demonstrators shut down private-prison firm GEO Group’s corporate headquarters in Boca Raton, FL.

The owners of private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic also reap huge profits from the forced labor and slave wages of the men and women in their custody. Over 60,000 people held captive in a GEO Group work-camp in Aurora, Colorado are seeking damages for being forced to work for $1 or less a day, many under the threat of solitary confinement. Just as in other prisons across the country, this type of slavery is widespread: GEO Group alone operates 130 facilities across the country.

Capitalists get the most profit out of production by putting workers in competition with one another for wages. The less they pay one worker, the lower the wage rate another worker will have to settle for. Citizen workers are worse off when the bosses cheat their non-citizen brothers and sisters who are worse off when the bosses cheat their imprisoned brothers and sisters. Workers are strongest when we come together to fight against our common enemy: the millionaires who would enslave us all if only they owned enough prisons to keep us captive. Workers must unite to put an end to the camps and gather our forces for war on these slavemaster CEOs.

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Resistance to ICE is Growing. Stop the War on Migrants!

Protesters block ICE headquarters in Philadelphia, PA.

By Ashlee Pintos and Adam Pedescleaux

In an act of resistance against the racist, capitalist state, a Nashville community came together to protect an immigrant father when two plainclothes ICE agents in an unmarked vehicle came to arrest him. The neighborhood of Black and white workers formed a human chain surrounding the car and ensured the father and son had food and water during the whole ordeal. After four hours, the agents finally left having terrorized the immigrant father and child. Without community support, the father and son would have been separated and thrown into one of the government’s concentration camps.

Protests against anti-migrant terrorism have been taking place all over the country. Over 1,000 activists in Washington, DC, blocked the entrances and exits to the national ICE offices. Led by Jewish activists, this action blocked traffic and ended only when 11 protesters were arrested. At an earlier protest in DC, the activists staged a sit-in at the same offices. In Phoenix, AZ, 16 people were arrested in a similar protest. In Colorado, protesters replaced the U.S. flag at the ICE offices with one of Mexico in act of symbolic solidarity.

They also destroyed a racist Blue Lives Matter flag. And in Rhode Island, a protest outside a concentration camp was attacked by an ICE employee when he drove his truck into the crowd, injuring several people.

In acts of solidarity across California, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, hospital staff are being trained how to use their bodies to stop ICE agents from entering hospitals.

In recent months, there have been multiple incidents where sea captains were arrested for saving migrants’ lives in the Mediterranean Sea. Pia Klemp, a German sea captain with an organization called Sea Watch International, faces 20 years in prison for rescuing people fleeing from Libya, a country which was destroyed by U.S. bombings and a right-wing coup a decade ago. While she and her crew are being investigated by Italian authorities, the French city of Paris offered her a medal for her bravery. She declined, denouncing the hypocrisy of the Parisian city government who order their police to oppress migrant workers daily. In June, the German ship captain Carola Rackete brought migrants she had rescued into port in defiance of the Italian police. She now faces charges similar to Klemp’s.

Every act of resistance against ICE and other anti-migrant forces in capitalist countries is a victory for the working class. We must all stand together against the Gestapo-like tactics of these agencies. As attacks on workers worldwide are increasingly violent, it is easy to feel defeated. However, all throughout the world, there are countless acts of resistance that are demonstrating workers’ power.

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Workers’ Rally Says Mass Action Needed to Fight White Supremacy

Photo credit: Fernando Lopez
By Jennifer Lin

On Sunday, August 11, Take ‘Em Down Nola hosted a “Rally to Unite and Fight Back Against White Supremacy” in response to recent white supremacist attacks waged by ICE and the El Paso, TX shooter. Several hundred people gathered in front of Jackson Square to hear community members speak, including representatives from the New Orleans People’s Assembly, New Orleans Workers Group, the Hospitality Workers Alliance, Congreso de Jornaleros/Congress of Day Laborers, New Orleans Renters Union, and the American Federation of Government Employees.

The ICE raids in Mississippi and the massacre in El Paso are violent expressions of the white supremacist ideology that the U.S. was founded upon. From the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans to the for-profit imprisonment of immigrants and people of color, racial hatred continues to be a tool used by the rich, mostly white ruling class to keep workers and oppressed people divided. When the people are divided, they cannot effectively challenge the institutions that oppress them.

Ashlee Pintos, a member of the Hospitality Workers Alliance and the New Orleans Workers Group, spoke to the importance of showing solidarity for migrant workers who are at risk of being deported the moment they step foot on U.S. soil: “We have to build up our communities so that we can actually protect our community members.” Her words were echoed by Yolanda, a member of Congreso, who denounced the El Paso shooter for claiming that America was being threatened by the “Hispanic invasion.” She called the ICE raids the “true invasion,’’ emphasizing the need for solidarity with migrant workers.

Jessie, a resident of Gordon Plaza, warned the crowd of the extent to which white supremacy has been internalized and institutionalized in New Orleans. Speaking of Mayor Cantrell, who had refused to acknowledge the residents of Gordon Plaza until recently, he said, “The white supremacists control the Black puppets…If we had been white, we would have been relocated.” The residents of Gordon Plaza have been fighting for over 30 years to be relocated off of a toxic landfill. The city has always had more than enough money to provide the residents with a fully funded relocation; however, 63% of the city budget continues to be allocated towards jails and the police, who uphold white supremacy and capitalism.

White workers must also organize to educate one another and dispel the propaganda that continues to fuel racism in the U.S. As Gregory, a member of the New Orleans Workers Group put it, “We have to build a movement that can bring white workers into the struggle as well, along with workers of color, who are sick and tired of this brutal system, who are sick and tired of being murdered in the streets by crooked, racist cops…We have to stand united.”

Our political power lies in our ability to organize against our oppressors. If we want to see a better world, we must actively create that world by organizing in our communities and by educating ourselves and others. We must collectively resist all forms of oppression: capitalism, racism, sexism, imperialism, and attacks against LGBTQ people. Only then can we begin to build a world in which people are truly free.

Photo credit: Fernando Lopez

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Mass Shootings Are Part and Parcel of US Political Culture

By Malcolm Suber

“Violence is as American as cherry pie.” These words were first spoken in 1967 by H. Rap Brown (now Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), a Black revolutionary leader of the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A reporter had asked whether Brown would renounce calls for violent resistance to the oppression of Black people. He replied that the U.S. white ruling class has always embraced violence against those whom they want to control. They have no right to request from the oppressed that which they will not renounce for themselves.

The entire settler state created by European colonizers was founded on the violent taking of indigenous lands and the kidnapping and forced enslavement of Africans.

Throughout its history, the U.S. ruling class has been determined to wipe out indigenous peoples through genocide. Following the Civil War, to maintain the now-freed Black workforce as cheap, exploitable laborers, the ruling class imposed over 150 years of racist tyranny through Klan terror, public lynchings, and racist pogroms such as those in Rosewood, FL and Tulsa, OK. To this day, white supremacist terrorists serve as an auxiliary to police forces, from the FBI down to the local cops. The USA has created the world’s largest police and prison system, primarily to contain and control its Black, formerly enslaved population as well as other non- whites and poor people within its borders.

Despite all the posturing by Republican and Democratic party spokespeople, there is no admission of the violent nature of the U.S. state or criticism of the murderous history of white supremacist rule.

The U.S. has a 500-year history of using mass killings as way to enforce its will on other countries and peoples. The crocodile tears now being shed by the white supremacist ruling class over the mass shootings in Gilroy, CA, El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH are just a cover to hide this history. Despite all the posturing by Republican and Democratic party spokespeople, there is no admission of the violent nature of the U.S. state or criticism of the murderous history of white supremacist rule.

The ruling class media and leaders of the twin parties of capitalist rule have finally had to call the armed white nationalist right wing “terrorists.” These latest atrocities have even compelled white supremacist-in-chief Donald Trump to verbally condemn “racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” However, U.S. police forces from the FBI on down are reluctant to attack their auxiliary forces. That is not the enemy they joined the police force to subdue. Their racism forces them to identify with fascist elements.

The military budget consumes 60% of all U.S. tax dollars. These funds are transferred to the billionaire owners of Pentagon-contracted companies that comprise the Military Industrial Complex. Domestically, the white supremacist rulers allow the mass distribution of weapons to right-wing armed white supremacists as well as urban gangs. These urban gangs engage in fratricide that helps to create a lack of trust among the working class masses.

The U.S. is the world’s largest arms dealer. It forces its junior partners to purchase its weapons and disperses millions of weapons and ammunition to right-wing governments and reactionary fascist movements all over the world. As a result, from Venezuela to Yemen, thousands of innocent people die daily.

The intent of the U.S. ruling class is to keep the multi-national working class divided. Our task as class-conscious freedom fighters is to uproot these white supremacist poisonous weeds that have been and are presently being sown by the U.S. ruling class. We must overcome their efforts to divide us and unite to overthrow the capitalists and their state.

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Migrant Children Held in Brutal Conditions

The separation of families has a long history in the U.S. This image shows the fate of many Indigenous and African children.

If this can happen, whose children are next?

Attorneys visiting a detention facility near El Paso, Texas reported that 250 infants, children and teens had been held for 27 days without adequate food, water or sanitation. Children were taking care of sick infants. 15 children had the flu. They were fed uncooked frozen food and had gone for weeks without bathing or a change of clothing. The facility is located in Clint, Texas, in the desert.

The children had been separated from adult caregivers. At least six children have died in detention since December. A teenage mother with a premature baby was in detention for nine days.

The attorneys went to court, but the Trump administration argued that the government is NOT required to give children soap, toothbrushes or diapers.

The Justice Department argued that the camps were not required to provide children with beds. Children have been sleeping on concrete floors with aluminum foil blankets.

Toddlers have been separated from parents and caged in camps.

U.S. imperialist policies like NAFTA have destroyed rural economies. They have put in place dictatorships such as the one in Honduras which has driven thousands from their homes. But they don’t find refuge here.

The Trump administration has threatened to carry out terror raids to deport millions across the U.S. Trump also says the U.S. can keep migrants in unlimited detention. These concentration camps are being run by private corporations for profit so the government wants to fill them up.

This is what was done during slavery to Black and Indian children. This is what they did to Japanese Americans during WWII. This is what the Nazis did.
This policy is an attack on all workers, citizen and immigrant. They want to push down all our wages and take away all benefits. We must stand up together to demand their release.

Close the concentration camps!

Abolish ICE!

Free the children and the families!

Full legalization and equality for all immigrants!

Children at the McAllen, Texas, Border Patrol station are denied bedding, nutrition, and sanitation.