Markus Spiske on Unsplash
border fence with wire
There’s no argument that desensitization can happen when an individual is repeatedly exposed to violence. And if you’re constantly tuned in to the news, or are an advocate of any sort, compassion fatigue can set in when faced with so much collective suffering.
It becomes easier to normalize or rationalize trauma when it isn’t happening to us directly, when we are helpless to intervene, or when the pain we are exposed to is too hard to process.
But when does desensitization, especially as it relates to issues of human rights, become a tool for the oppressor? When does an unjust system start to rely on the fragility of the human spirit to get away with injustice?
This weekend near Del Rio, Texas, border patrol agents met Haitian migrants seeking asylum in the United States. Riding on horseback, agents herded refugees — with at least one agent swinging his reins vertically — as if they were cattle to carry out one of the most chilling and shameful displays of white supremacy in our recent history.
The display could only be explained as deep moral rot — white men on horses living out a nostalgia where they are masters and cruelty is the point. Harrowing seems almost too soft a word to describe what we saw.
But most of us scrolled through the photos and articles — stopping for a second to maybe retweet or like and then moving on to the next sensational headline; the horrific nature of the event blending in with other horrors vying for our attention.
With a global pandemic and all its variants, climate catastrophes, and an imminent overhaul of our reproductive rights, Americans are not short of traumas to deal with.
But I fear we have not fully processed what is unfolding at the southern border. Anti-immigrant phobia has become so normalized that we are likely to overlook the inhumanity of this crisis.
This isn’t about enforcing the law or protecting our borders; this is about cruelty. In Del Rio, we were the aggressors.
Texas border patrol agents blatantly violated domestic and international asylum laws by charging at Haitian refugees with whips and subjecting them to violence when they should have been met with refuge.
The Biden administration must not only condemn how Haitian families and individuals have been treated in Del Rio, but they should fire and prosecute every single agent responsible from the top down for these human rights violations.
Seeking asylum is not a crime. Trying to escape a country marred by political turmoil and ravaged by a recent earthquake that killed over 2,000 people is not a crime.
Rounding up and whipping tired, poor, and faultless Black and Indigenous people as if this were the 1800s is a crime.
It is time we understand that our immigration policies are a continuation of America’s original sin: settler colonialism. We cannot reduce those fleeing environmental catastrophe to numbers on a whitepaper, a policy question to be solved by bureaucrats in a state building. These are migrants displaced from their homes because of a climate crisis we have helped perpetuate. Meeting them with dignity when they knock on our door for help is the least of what we must do.
This is a shameful chapter in our country's history.
Nada Elmikashfi is a former candidate for state Senate and chief of staff to state Rep. Francesca Hong.
[Editor's note: This column was corrected to delete an earlier reference to border patrol officers whipping Haitian refugees; A PolitiFact analysis found that one officer was seen instead swinging his reins around in a menacing fashion.]
