One of the principal themes in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, was Immigration Reform, established to curb deportations and allow immigrants to the United States, particularly young people, to legalize their situation.

 

All this, as a political strategy to win an election, did work. Latino voters, whose friends and family hoped to become US residents or citizens, did not think twice and a majority of them voted for Obama. Once more they confided in the promise made by a politician.

 

What has really happened?  Something different.

 

The Obama administration has deported more than two million illegal immigrants, more than the total of deportations during any previous administrations. I refer to those of Bush junior, Clinton, the elder Bush and others that preceded them.

 

In June of this year, the government of the Nobel Prize Winner asked Congress for two billion dollars in order to arrest and deport nearly 60,000 Central American children who had illegally entered the United States. Some 40,000 of these children came from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.

 

In addition to detaining and deporting these children, the Obama administration has proposed to accelerate the arrest and deportation of undocumented workers, in particular those coming from Central America.

 

As a direct consequence of this policy, it will be necessary to increase immigration police, detention centres and judges charged with examining each case and determining the deportation of those concerned.

 

Many US organizations, dedicated to vigilance concerning violations of human rights, in particular the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), have revealed that in these detention centres there is no adequate treatment of children, who are poorly fed and live in terrible sanitary conditions.

 

Immigrants detained by border patrols are subject to humiliating treatment, often held in cells where they must sleep on the floor and endure extreme cold.  The food that they are given is spare and bad, and for the most part they are not provided with cleansing supplies. Those who suffer from chronic sickness are denied any medical treatment. In the detention centres some have suffered blows and sexual assaults.

 

In order to reinforce vigilance on the frontier, significant investment has been proposed in technical equipment and other means, to allow for detecting immigrants as they are penetrating US territory.

 

This includes, among other things, the building of high concrete walls along the frontier, the use of equipment that can detect human body warmth and the use of drones for frontier vigilance.

 

With respect to this situation, the Vice-President of the United States, Joe Biden, during a recent visit to Central America, with some extremely cynical remarks, said that the problem of an increase of illegal immigration was due to poverty, insecurity and the lack of compliance with existing legislation in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

 

What Vice-President Biden did not say is that the disastrous economic and social conditions in which many Latin American peoples live are the consequence of the imperial domination that the United States has exercised and continues to exercise in the region.

 

- Dr. Néstor García Iturbe is editor of the electronic bulletin El Heraldo (Cuba).