Deadly Failures, Nothing But Bones
New Reports on Shed Light on US Migrant Necropolitics as Bipartisan Consensus Kills at a Rapidly Increasing Rate
Premature death is a central feature of how the US maintains the global birth lottery apartheid most people call the “immigration system.” Calculated imposition of conditions aimed at rendering life precarious, miserable, and unlivable represents the key means of forcing compliance with an unjust and illegitimate border empire.
Two new reports out this week highlight the material results of this system. In “Nothing But Bones,” the incomparable Ari Sawyer from Human Rights Watch teamed up with the Colibri Center to demonstrate how the US policy of border deterrence produces death and disappearance in violation of US and international law. Author, translator, and journalist John Washington recently flagged a CBP statement on three deaths in the desert that highlights the homicidal urge of US policymakers when it comes to controlling movement:
As the US Border Patrol knew in 1994 when it began implementing Deterrence, “desert heat” didn’t kill anyone. Closed borders did. CBP is operating an illegal metering program with the collusion of Mexican cartels at all the places people would cross legally. It knows refusing lawful entry will incentivize people to try entering irregularly. And then, when people die, the US government blames that death on them.
The calculated choice to permit extrajudicial death as an outcome on display in Nothing but Bones echoes throughout ICE’s migrant detention system as well in a new research report titled, “Deadly Failures: Preventable Deaths in U.S. Immigration Detention” from the ACLU, American Oversight, and Physicians for Human Rights. The report shows 95% of deaths in ICE custody from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2021, could have been prevented with adequate care. It also documents (using FOIA records we’ve helped families and organizations obtain from agencies via litigation) how ICE’s death investigations are little more than pro forma coverups of the systemic failures that give rise to the predictable loss of human life.
At the border and behind the walls, the system is designed to send the message that your life will not be protected, and you cannot count on the rule of law or any ‘rules-based international order’ for accountability or justice. Rather, the global birth apartheid system the US imposes on the region and people all over the world uses premature, preventable death—and the threat of it—as but one of many ‘legitimate’ tools in dictating to human beings where and when and how they can move.