NO BORDERS, NO WALLS, NO USA AT ALL We are holding space together today, as a united, multiracial front, on stolen Lenape and Matinecock land (Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens) to say one thing and one thing only: fuck ICE. We march on July 10th, 2021 to highlight the importance of radical solidarity with all who migrate seeking a better life on the land colonially known as amerika. US imperial wars and policies have displaced countless populations across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and NYC is home to many of these immigrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and NYPD are part of the same carceral system that seeks to punish Latinx, Asian, and Black people whose lives were shaped by US imperialism abroad. VP Kamala Harris’ call for migrants not to come to the US reflects not only an appalling lack of compassion and care, especially considering that she is a child of immigrants, but is the most honest thing that this regime has said about their immigration policy so far. Usually, democrats try to coopt radical movements, positioning themselves as "allies" of oppressed peoples. But Harris' brazen demand that immigrants/refugees "don't come", is an honest reflection of what the U.S does overseas: destroy lives, create miserable conditions, accept none of the consequences, and further punish and criminalize the victims of its crimes. We cannot stand by while ICE continues to be wielded as an instrument of terror against our communities. More than 500,000 people have been deported since Biden took office. We are raising awareness that the violent immigration policies deployed by ICE are harmful not only to Latinx people, but also to Black and Asian people of all diasporas. Working class Asians, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders are often invisibilized in discourse around “Asian” issues. Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders are deported at three times the rate of immigrants as a whole, and are five times more likely to be deported for criminal convictions than other immigrant groups (1).
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Caribbean and African immigrants face the double peril of police and immigration enforcement. The criminalization and disproportionate policing of Black people means that more Black immigrants end up in ICE custody and are subsequently deported (2). We must recognize these intertwined systems of state repression and protect our communities from further trauma. NO ONE IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND This nation was built off the labor of enslaved African people on land stolen from Indigenous people via acts of genocide. We are a nation of settler colonialists and its victims of empire and capitalism. Although we were forced to migrate to this country - whether it be by enslavement or by displacement via imperialist wars - we are inherently complicit in and benefit from settler colonialism. As such, we have a duty to unite with our Indigenous relatives as they fight for their righteous land and stewardship back. We must recognize the longstanding, genocidal history and its continued effects today. We must uplift and support our Indigenous siblings who are taking back their land by any means necessary. Posted on @indigenousaction: "No colonial gods, no masters. The genocidal legacy of the christian church has yet to come to terms with the violence it has perpetuated against the earth and Indigenous Peoples throughout the world. Our sacred sites are continually destroyed with impunity by capitalists with sanction by the state. Yet where is the outrage and condemnation? This is an exemplary anti-colonial action. Repost from @blackpowderpress At least 7 Catholic churches have been burned to the ground across socalled Canada in the wake of over a thousand bodies of Indigenous children that have been discovered on the grounds of Catholic residential schools over the past few weeks.
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@mauricio_perdomo__ Image description: a painting of a catholic church burning
The residential schools were part of Canada's genocide against Indigenous communities, where young Indigenous children were torn from their families, forced into these schools, and western culture was quite literally beaten into them, often fatally. Only a small percentage of the hundreds of residential schools across Canada have been searched, and the discoveries of mass unmarked graves have been turning up anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred bodies on each campus. These schools, which were not shut down until the 1990s, have stolen the lives of thousands (almost certainly tens of thousands) of Indigenous people. Those people will never be able to pass on their traditions or have children or grandchildren, and Canada's ongoing campaign against indigenous peoples and land is finally being exposed for what it is: genocide." MELT ICE, FIRE TO THE PRISONS. The criminalization, detention and deportation of migrants by ICE is a means of social control and immobilization. It serves not only to control and restrict the movement of all racialized people who migrate to the US, but also subjects them to precarious labor. Migrants are often forced to accept jobs which prey upon and exploit their labor for massive profits, while migrants workers themselves are paid unlivable wages, or forced to engage in criminalized, illegitimized (and often gendered) labor such as sex work and domestic work. Migrants also face the constant threat of detention and deportation if they dare to resist and rise against their bosses to demand better working conditions. ICE and the threat of detention and deportation ensure that there is an exploitable, expendable pool of migrant labor, maintained through the enforcement of genocidal policies of family separation, incarceration in concentration y camps, and constant physical, mental, emotional, and sexual abuse by fascist gestapo pigs, whether they be prison guards, border patrol/ICE agents, or local cops.
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FUCK YANKEE IMPERIALISM "K*ill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives." PSY "Imperialism has laid its body over the world. The head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it and serve the world revolution" - Ghassan Kanafani From the siphoning of resources and labor, to ongoing genocidal sanctions and wars of aggression, US imperialism has ravaged and continues to ravage countries all over the globe, leading to mass displacement and dispossession of colonized peoples. What we see now today is not a border crisis, but a global system of apartheid. As Harsha Walia writes, "There is no “border crisis” in the United States or anywhere else. Instead, there are the “actual crises” that drive mass migration – such as capitalism, war and the climate emergency – and “imagined crises” at political borders, which are used to justify further border securitization and violence (3)." Capitalism/imperialism is why in the US we see so many nurses, nursing aides, and home health aides from the Philippines, the Caribbean and Latin America, and Africa. Because of the high need for laborers who perform reproductive labor, and because of imperialist violence in their home countries, people from these countries - particularly women and people who experience gender based violence - are forced to migrate to the US, their labor value becoming yet another resource that amerika extracts from their homeland. Capitalism is not only what causes the mass migration of people from these countries, but also causes mass death during the COVID-19 crisis among these communities. 30% of all nurses in the US who died from COVID-19 were Filipinx. Although nurses of all genders were represented in this statistic, a disproportionate amount of them were women and people who experience gender-based violence. 6
"Capitalism has always required the social differentiation and hierarchization of race. Cedric Robinson theorized the linkage between racialized expropriation and capitalist plunder as 'racial capitalism' to make clear that the social differentiation of race is not a secondary outcome of capitalism, but, rather, the racial expropriation of land, labor, and life is innately constitutive of capitalism" - Harsha Walia, Border and Rule
Additionally, Title 42 was enacted in March 2020, riding a wave of COVID-19 fear and public safety rhetoric to deprive migrants of the right to asylum. Many Black and Brown asylum seekers were expelled, in the process contracting COVID-19 in ICE facilities only to return to countries that lacked the healthcare infrastructure to deal with an influx of people with the virus. These expulsions further healthcare apartheid, wrongfully deny people the right to asylum, and continue to this day under the Biden administration. Capitalism/imperialism is why we see so much violence at the southern amerikan border, especially in Tijuana, Mexico. The genocidal, anti-communist wars of aggression against Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Korea created the conditions for mass migration. The violent sanctions against Venezuela, and the CIA backed coups and subsequent fascist dictatorships terrorizing people in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Chile, etc, created the conditions for mass migration. The framing of displaced peoples seeking safety and security as a "border crisis" lends legitimacy to the US government's genocidal immigration policies, and obscures the US's role in destabilizing other countries for capitalist gain. This sets up migrants to become othered, racialized, and criminalized. The framing of migration as a "border crisis" or "border surge" is deeply racialized. It invokes a "flood" of Black and brown people who come with the goal of "taking over" the country from its "rightful owners", AKA white people. This idea has been shaped by hundreds of years of anti-Black and antiIndigenous violence. White, european colonizers, who committed viscious acts of genocide upon this land and its peoples, established the United States as a settler colonial project that serves the interests of white people and protects their capital. Black indigenous people were originally stolen from Africa to be used as slaves for the U.S. empire. The stolen labor value of enslaved Africans continues to this day to create untold wealth for this country and its capitalist class, yet African, Haitian, and other Black migrants are viciously criminalized, incarcerated, and deported at extremely high rates. 8
Image description: photo of graffiti on wooden table with text that reads "Abolish ICE!"
This history of colonial extraction and exploitation around the world has been the primary force behind anti-immigrant ideology. Both anti-Asian exclusion in the 19th century, which very explicitly targeted Chinese laborers and especially Chinese women presumed to be sex workers, and anti-Latinx exclusion stem from colonialism/imperialism. If we were to think about one situation as anti-Asian racism and one as anti-Latinx racism, one as anti-Black racism, etc, they might seem disconnected. But all forms of racism are fundamentally anti-immigrant, and all are fundamentally rooted in the looting of land and labor for the benefit of empire. Racial violence is connected to the idea of who belongs and who doesn’t. Whose humanity is questioned in a moment of crisis. The system that sees colonized people only for the value that can be extracted from their land and labor, is not a system capable of recognizing or honoring their humanity. This is what ties us all together -- our shared traumas. Although sometimes seperated by physical distance, we remain connected in our ongoing, collective resistance to the same imperialist regimes that have attempted to steal our land, cultures, ancestors, children, and livelihoods in order to maintain a global empire that dehumanizes and exploits us, both domestically and abroad. The amerikan empire must fall! Death to amerika! We must unite as one and each do our part to topple the paper tiger that is the amerikan empire. We must continue the work of those before us so that we may live to see a liberated world. "People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs! People of the world, be courageous, and dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed." - Mao Zedong
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INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY FOREVER "Fascism is colonialism turned inward" (Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism) We recognize that the brutal, depraved policies of ICE were first used, honed, systemized, and perfected by amerikan imperialist butchers during the colonization of Indigenous land in North America, and by european Slave traders who ravaged and enslaved the peoples of Africa using the same tactics of terror, violence and family separation. These methods have now led to the deportation of almost 600,000 people since Biden came to office earlier in January. That's 100,000 people per month just in the year 2021. Intertwined with the war on terror and the war on drugs, the deportation machine has targeted colonized people from all over the world, capturing them, subjecting them to inhumane conditions inside concentration camps, then deporting them to their home countries from which they were only forced to flee because of the violence of imperialism. We recognize and commend the tremendous efforts of incarcerated folks and their comrades outside fighting to abolish ICE and free them all. From the people who risk their lives and go on hunger strike while in ICE detention (read "Words From Inside NY & NJ's ICE Facilities" at issuu.com/rw4bl to learn more), to the people who put their bodies on the line to block deportations, each and every effort to dismantle the violent system is a step closer to our collective liberation. 11
Recently so-called New Jersey voted to prohibit local jails from entering new contracts with ICE. This vote does little to nothing to free detained peoples who are hunger striking for their lives. Instead detainees are being transferred to other states away from their communities, families, and legal rep. We must not be fooled by "progressive" legislation without real outcomes. We must mobilize to shut these places down and liberate all people for good. We invite you today to join us in the fight. We leave you with the immortal words of the Dragon Philosopher, General George L. Jackson. May his words, his actions, and his memory serve as an example for the love and severity with which we must approach the struggle for liberation and abolition.
“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution." - George Jackson 12
TAKE ACTION TODAY Read about ICE in NY and NJ. Scan the QR code or go to issuu.com/rw4bl to read zines on ICE, including "Words From Inside NY & NJ's ICE Facilities," "A Compilation of Phone Zaps to Abolish ICE in NJ & NY and Free Them All," and "It's Not A Hate Crime, It's White Supremacy." Follow @abolishice_nynj, @asians4abolition, @nycbrownberets, @queerdep, @rw4bl_ on Instagram for more antiICE content. Sign up for an anti-ICE direct action training with @abolishice_nynj: bit.ly/ICEBLOCKTRAINING Show solidarity with our comrades inside. Go to bit.ly/marvinjpena for ways to support Marvin Jerezano Peña, who faces imminent deportation. Go to linktr.ee/QDEP for ways to support Jorge RondonTorrealba and Maura, who are both fighting to be released from ICE detention. Support people arrested while fighting to abolish ICE. New Yorkers and New Jerseyians alike have been arrested in both states while at actions opposing ICE. Donate via Venmo @NJjusticefund and go to bit.ly/marvinjpena for more ways to help the 14 people who were arrested on June 8, 2021 at Bergen County Jail for blocking a van and stopping 3 deportations. Go to bit.ly/legalsolidarity to support the people arrested at Bergen County Jail for doing nothing except being at a protest yet targeted and brutalized senselessly. 3 people are still facing charges, some of which are felony charges. Show solidarity with the Ramapough Lunaape Turtle Clan as they continue to build their Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm. Go to munseethreesisters.org to sign up and volunteer at the farm and to donate via Gofundme or Venmo.
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RESOURCES See ICE activity? ICE comes to your door? - Go to bit.ly/KYRnilc for info on your rights in English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Korean. If you see something, say something. (To comrades, not cops). If you see ICE, contact us. (201) 731-8940 @NYCICEWATCH (Instagram) Si ves algo, di algo (a tus compadres y no a los policías). Si ves a ICE (la migra) secuestrar a alguien, contáctanos. (201) 731-8940 @NYCICEWATCH (Instagram)
如果看到移民局抓人，不要保持沉默。请立刻联系我们！
(201) 731-8940 @NYCICEWATCH (Instagram) Ready to fight back against ICE? On Signal, text “Hello” to (718) 866-3391 to be notified immediately of any verified ICE activity. Listo para luchar contra ICE? En Signal, envía “Hello” a (718) 866-3391 para ser notificado inmediatamente de cualquier actividad verificada de ICE. ICE Signal ”Hello” 718-866-3391
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Facing eviction? Live in Brooklyn? brooklynevictiondefense@gmail.com (917) 982-2265
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SOURCES 1. https://asiasociety.org/northern-california/not-just-latino-issueundocumented-asians-america 2. https://www.afsc.org/blogs/news-and-commentary/immigrationblack-issue 3. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/07/us-borderimmigration-harsha-walia
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