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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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Migrant, Citizen Worker Solidarity is Key

By A New Orleans Resident

The collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans is a clear example of how the blood and sweat of workers are exploited only to make the rich even richer. Because rich bosses hire workers, exploit their labor, and show time and time again that they do not value us, worker solidarity is more critical than ever for the well-being and safety of the working class.

Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma is one of five workers who rightly filed a lawsuit seeking damages for the physical wounds suffered during the building collapse. The workers are taking a stand because they know that the building collapsed as a result of materials that were inadequate and supports too thin and insufficient for the building.

After filing the lawsuit and speaking to the media about the experience, Ramirez Palma was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), preventing him from telling his firsthand experience, preventing him from fighting for his rights, and preventing him from accessing much needed medical attention for the injuries he suffered.

The capitalist system which exploits the labor of workers for the benefit of the rich does NOT care if the labor is provided by Black workers, poor white workers, or migrant workers.

Mourn for the Dead, Organize for the Living: Construction unions, migrants’ supporters gather to honor Hard Rock workers. The Oct. 17 vigil was organized by the Southeast Louisiana Building and Construction Trades Council. These unions should p[ledge to open organizing campaigns in every construction site and open their doors to all workers, including migrants.
The capitalist system uses racism, documented vs undocumented, or gender-based discrimination to create roadblocks to worker unity. In the end, these forms of divisiveness only end up hurting workers. When we come together and turn our attention to those who exploit us, then and only then, will workers win what is rightfully ours.

It’s intolerable that in pursuit of tourist dollars in the city of New Orleans, which already brings in the most tourist dollars in the world, the rich business owners are putting workers, residents, and tourists in harm’s way by cutting corners. They are putting the safety of the workers and the general public at risk.

Migrant workers (and all other workers) gave labor, blood, sweat and tears to rebuild this city, so we must stand together when workers need to speak up, rise up, and fight for rights and safety. This is our duty!

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Peoples’ Assembly Women’s Dinner In Solidarity with Immigrants

By Shera Phillips

May 2nd was my second People’s Assembly Women’s Dinner. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I knew there would be women of different religious and cultural backgrounds speaking about their unique experience in the “Land of the Free and Brave”.

The evening was entitled Solidarity with Immigrant Women. The guests were from Central America, Haiti as well as a Muslim woman. Our sister from Central America allowedus, the audience members, to see a glimpse of what life was like for her as an undocumented woman. She explained that the act of merely paying a traffic ticket could mean the end of life as she knows it. I immediately could draw from my own experience as a brown woman in the U.S., but listening to her amplified my experience and overwhelmed me with emotion. I had never before heavily considered what being pulled over might mean for an immigrant. When I go to court, praying that my ticket will be thrown out, Maria is praying that she can pay hers and go home. I had never even thought about the variation of discrimination that immigrants have to endure here, being mistreated by employers and landlords, fearing to speak out about injustices because it could mean deportation, imprisonment or worse. This one conversation caused a change in perspective in which I was able to awaken to an entirely different existence, one that would cause fear to pulsate through the veins of any suspecting body.

Most people build a reality and only include in it things and people that correspond with it. Many of us rarely socialize with people who aren’t a part of our social and cultural existence. We live in a bubble, and our circle becomes a focus group that confirms and reaffirms variations of our own experience. We travel through life in this vortex, in which we are the center of the universe and anything that doesn’t conform to this matrix is unpleasant and therefore we defend our position or avoid anything outside of it. Just take a look at yourself and your friends. Are any of them from different countries or states, different social, religious, economic or racial backgrounds? If your answer is yes, congratulations. You are unlike a majority of the population. The People’s Assembly provides a safe space for people of different walks, to come, learn and work together towards liberation.

The Women’s Dinner is the first Wednesday of every month. Transportation, childcare and dinner are provided all by the men of People’s Assembly. Women are appreciated, celebrated, encouraged to relax and converse about the issues we experience, find resources, and learn how we can collectively combat our oppression.

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For-Profit Immigrant Prisons Add to Mass Incarceration, Thousands of Children Jailed

by Joseph Rosen

U.S. immigrant detention prisons hold captive more than 40,000 men, women, and children daily.

Though most have never been charged with a crime, detainees are bound by shackles or handcuffs and forced to endure inhumane conditions including cavity searches, solitary confinement, physical and sexual abuse. By law, undocumented immigrants are denied a public legal defender. On average, a person will spend nearly a month in detention. Many individuals, torn from their family and friends, spend months and years awaiting freedom.

More than 37,000 immigrants are detained each year at sites across Louisiana. As is the case nationally, for-profit prisons handle the vast majority of this awful “business.” The GEO Group, the world’s largest for-profit prison company, runs major detention centers in Jena, Pine Prairie, Basile, and Alexandria, LA. The deplorable conditions at prisons run by the GEO Group have been met with prisoner uprisings and hunger strikes across the world, from Louisiana to South Africa.

Tens of millions of dollars in bribes by for-profit prison companies have been lavished on Congress. In return they get laws that actually say that ICE must meet “bed quotas.” And compared with other capitalist enterprises, GEO Group enjoys extraordinary profits, largely due to the unpaid labor of its detainees, 60,000 of whom are seeking damages for having been forced to work for free under the threat of solitary confinement. Last October, at an annual leadership conference held at Trump’s Miami-area golf resort, GEO Group executives celebrated an annual revenue of $2.26 billion, double that “earned” ten years ago.

Workers should recognize these racist concentration camps for what they are and demand full legalization for every one of our immigrant brothers and sisters; history will pardon nothing less.

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Immigrant Rights Benefit U.S. Born Workers, No Rights = Lower Wages for All

With the non-renewal of Temporary Protected Status for some 300,000 immigrants (from Haiti, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) and the cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump opens the door to deporting 1 million immigrants. That means ripping apart a million families, putting children in prison, and sending some to a country they have never seen. Immigrants don’t want to leave their homes and relatives but are forced to to survive. They come here, pay taxes, get no benefits, are often unpaid, and live in constant threat of ICE.

U.S. government trade agreements, policies and wars are the main causes for the displacement of so many men, women, and children. Death squads funded and trained by the U.S. military have been used to maintain the rule of business oligarchs in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Haiti while outright devastation has been wrought by US bombs in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

What then do the bosses hope to achieve by ratcheting up deportations and terror against immigrants to the U.S.? Their goal is to drive down the wages of all workers—immigrant and U.S. born. If any group of workers can be paid less, we all get paid less.

Undocumented immigrant workers live under the constant threat of detention or deportation and the devastating toll that this takes on their families. This insecurity is exploited by bosses who threaten to turn their workers in to immigration authorities if they bring attention to workplace safety violations or if workers decide to organize a union. Raids such as the one carried out by ICE at the Postville Agriprocessor Plant in 2008 (resulting in the arrest of 389 workers) have been instrumental in frustrating organizing efforts of unions such as the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. It is not the presence of immigrant workers in the workforce that drives down wages, it is that bosses can take advantage of their “illegal” status and fear to pay less. It’s bosses, not workers that bear the blame.

Likewise, it’s the legacy of legalized racial exclusion—Jim Crow—and current racism that’s to blame for low wages that prevail throughout the U.S. south. When Black and white workers unionized together both saw their wages rise. So, if immigrants had full rights, could no longer be threatened into accepting low wages, all workers wages would rise.

The very bosses and bankers who send run-away plants all over the world to pay pennies a day, who hoard their profits off shore, pay no taxes, oppose raising the minimum wage and all safety laws are telling us workers to blame immigrants. They scapegoat immigrants to disguise their greed and exploitation.

U.S.-born workers should call for the full legalization of the more than 11 million immigrants currently deprived of their full legal labor rights. As the central union, AFL-CIO writes, “history has shown, whenever one group of workers is denied access to workplace protections, all workers’ rights are in jeopardy.”

Workers of all nations must resist the global “race to the bottom” that the capitalists will never cease to egg on with their racist rhetoric. La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras: the workers struggle knows no borders!