“Negroes Driven South by the Rebel Officers,” Harper’s Weekly, November 8, 1862. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Last month our executive director Gabriel Solis published “Resisting the Allure of Innocence” in the Texas Observer, writing, “The horizon between the land and sky are the same, as is the space between the living and the dead. Taken a hundred years apart, the images reveal the deep roots of an enduring border narrative, one that views migrants from the global south as criminals that require constant policing, and the southern border as a warzone that requires permanent militarization.” We could not have known at the time that a new set of horrific photographs would soon appear. The images of Haitians seeking refuge in Del Rio, Texas, only to be whipped and driven back into the river by Border Patrol agents on horseback, are evidence that the very worst of the United States is not history, but lives on today. There is a clear analogue in the visual and written accounts of slavecatchers using horses and whips to terrorize and capture Black people during the era of chattel slavery. Like the Haitian refugees, those escaping slavery were in search of asylum. Like the slavecatchers, the Border Patrol agents whipped and attacked refugees in broad daylight and in full view of observers, with brazen impunity. Nothing was there to stop them.
As Gabe wrote in his essay, “The photographs demonstrate that the cruelty we see today is rooted in long histories of white supremacist violence. They remind us that the disposing of BIPOC people deemed uninnocent and therefore undeserving of life, dignity, or humanity, is nothing new. It’s an American tradition.”
We cannot allow such inhumanity to stand. We encourage you to follow the calls to action made by Haitian Bridge, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Avanse Ansanm, and others. Contact your representatives and demand they put a stop to this white supremacist violence and allow Haitian refugees to exercise the basic human right to seek asylum.
