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Texas: Federal Court Puts Vicious Anti-Immigrant Law on Temporary Hold—Fascists Begin Implementing It Anyway

National Guard apprehends migrants on the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, March 21, 2024.

 

National Guard apprehends migrants on the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, March 21, 2024.    Photo: AP

In Texas, cops can go around detaining anyone they “suspect” of entering or having entered the state “illegally.” At least according to Texas Senate Bill 4 (SB4), they can. The bill is now being held up in the courts. But this is Texas. And Texas is a stronghold of the fascists who are now organizing countrywide to defy the federal government and the U.S. Constitution.

Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republi-fascist governor, apparently doesn't give a fuck about court rulings. He said that Texas pigs will continue to "arrest people coming across the razor-wire barrier" (along the Rio Grande, the river that separates Texas from Mexico). That razor-wire barrier is also illegal, by the way. 

And he has continued deporting migrants. The Houston Chronicle reported on March 22 that the Texas National Guard has begun illegally forcing people back into Mexico. They are using SB4 as their pretext. 

SB4 is a huge leap in the already brutal repression coming down on immigrants, at the border and throughout the entire country. It will make millions of non-white people across the enormous state increasingly subject to racial profiling, harassment, arrest, imprisonment, and deportation. And it is deliberately defiant of federal authority. Well-established and long-standing U.S. law says immigration and control of U.S. borders must be regulated by the federal government.1

SB4 ping-ponged back and forth in the courts last week. The Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect for a few hours. But for now, due to another court ruling, it is back on hold. Yet another court hearing is scheduled for April 3.

Get a Grip

At a statewide rally in Austin against SB4 last weekend, some speakers actually called on Abbott and Trump to find a way to be kind by “talking to Jesus” and “finding their souls.” Another argued we can just leave this to be fought out in the courts. 

This is insanely delusional! People need to get a grip, pull their heads out of their asses, and confront reality. Relying on the courts to end the criminalization of immigrants is a ridiculous and deadly strategy. The federal courts are stocked with stone-cold fascists, up to and including the Supreme Court (yes, the same Supreme Court that allowed Texas’s illegitimate six-week abortion ban to stand before it overturned the right to abortion nationwide). Fascists like Trump and Abbott couldn't care less about the legal norms of this country—in fact, they are trying to rip them apart, and replace them with fascist laws and norms. They have made clear their intent to escalate their racist attacks on immigrants and their drive to consolidate all-out fascism on a national level. 

Fight the Mounting Repression, Organize for Revolution

Biden doesn’t vilify and demonize immigrants with the racist viciousness Trump does. He doesn’t rally racist mobs to scream insults and abuse at Mexican people. He calls for legal and orderly enforcement of U.S. control of the border. But Biden has vowed he would “shut down the border” if a bill he proposed is passed. He has announced heavy new restrictions on asylum. He is allowing Abbott to continue placing miles of rolled razor wire along the border, snaring adults and children alike, and to build a military “base camp” for the soldiers he is sending to repress immigrants.

poster BEB immigration 834

 

This is because both the Republi-fascists and the Democrats serve the same system of capitalism-imperialism—a system built on global plunder, enforced by ruthless violence. A system that has no answer to what they call their “immigration problem” except ever harsher horrors. But they have sharp differences over how best to “control the border” in the interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism. Abbot’s fascist defiance of federal authority is potentially explosive. Just imagine if, even by accident, an armed clash occurred between the Texas National Guard and federal border agents. Something like that could spiral out of the control of any particular political force, and take on a dynamic of its own. 

Banner drop in Austin, Texas capitol building says "SB4 Illegitimate Fascist Attack on Immigrants."

 

RevComs stage a banner in Austin, Texas Capitol building, March 5, 2024.    Photo: @txrevcoms

The Revcom Corps for the Emancipation of Humanity in Texas is determined to fight the mounting repression of immigrants, while organizing people into the revolution that is the ONLY liberating answer to mass migration driven by this system of capitalism-imperialism. The ferocity of the conflict and turmoil between the rulers that is tearing apart the institutions that have cohered this society for over 150 years makes revolution to overthrow the entire putrid system they both represent more possible—not in the distant future, but in these times.

WE call on YOU to stand with and defend immigrants, and spread these slogans: 

We don’t have an immigration problem. We have an imperialism problem.

Stop the demonization, criminalization, and deportations of immigrants and the militarization of the border. 

We demand a whole new way to live, a fundamentally different system. Revolution, nothing less!

from @BobAvakianOfficial
REVOLUTION 14: What is really to blame for women dying with their children trying to cross the border?

_______________

FOOTNOTES:

1. Uniform, countrywide border and immigration policies have long been central to the U.S.’s development as a capitalist-imperialist power, including in its relations with countries across the world. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently wrote that SB4 would upend “the federal-state balance of power that has existed for over a century, in which the national government has had exclusive authority over entry and removal of non-citizens." She added that a lower court has declared that SB4 amounts to "nullification of federal law and authority – a notion that is antithetical to the constitution and has been unequivocally rejected by the federal courts since the civil war.” 

In fact, in their advocacy of SB4, Abbott and his fellow fascists are in part relying on legal traditions and arguments that were used to justify the secession of slaveholding Southern states during the period of the Civil War, and the white supremacist use of “states’ rights” legal theories to uphold segregation and Jim Crow laws.  [back]

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From the genocide in Gaza, to the growing threat of world war between nuclear powers, to escalating environmental devastation… the capitalist-imperialist system ruling over us is a horror for billions around the world and is tearing up the fabric of life on earth. Now the all-out battle within the U.S. ruling class, between fascist Republicans and war criminal Democrats, is coming to a head—likely during, or before, the coming elections—ripping society apart unlike anything since the Civil War. 

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