Tear Gas and Tough Talk - The US Border Crisis Escalates

Tear gas, classified as a chemical weapon by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, has been banned from use in warfare. It’s effects, which include a “burning, watery sensation in the eyes, difficulty breathing, chest pain, excessive saliva… skin irritation” and, after prolonged exposure, vomiting and diarrhoea, can in some cases also lead to death. Yesterday, it was used to disperse 500 migrants at the US-Mexico border after some attempted to breach the fence between Tijuana and San Diego.

This is not the first time that the US government has used tear gas against civilians. Indeed, somewhat illogically, whilst the use of tear gas in a conflict zone is tantamount to a war crime, it is perfectly legal and standard operating procedure for police forces around the world to use it for the purposes of crowd dispersal and control. It was used in 2014 during the Ferguson protests and the use of chemical agents such as tear gas and pepper spray against peaceful protesters has become so normalised that the UC Berkeley Science Review hosts a handy guide to the difference between the two and how to treat the effects of an attack.

The use by American law enforcement of a chemical weapon to combat civilian demonstrations by US citizens is nothing new, and therefore it should be unsurprising that such force would be extended to the “stone cold criminal” migrants just south of the border. Trump’s inflammatory language following the gas attack and the administration’s previous policy of separating families at the border leave no doubt as to the position of the US government on the migrant caravan, and it seems as though this latest escalation may be only the start of an even tougher response to those seeking refuge in the United States.

Which begs the question, exactly what is this a response to?

Trump has previously described the migrant caravan as “an invasion” that has required the deployment of troops to the southern border. But an invasion is usually identified as an aggressive act undertaken by an organised armed group, which the migrant caravan is not. If it were, and the migrant families at the border could be defined as an enemy combat force, then the use of tear gas against them could potentially be treated as a war crime.

The migrant caravan consists of around 7,000 migrants who have made their way from Central America to the US/Mexico border at Tijuana after fleeing conflicts in their home states. Although additional numbers of migrants continue to make their way towards the US, the notion that this constitutes a major increase in those seeking asylum from Central America is incorrect. As the journalistic fact-checking site Politifact notes: “the recent numbers of people apprehended at the southwest border also aren’t as high as they were in the early 2000s. Border Patrol apprehensions during that time often surpassed 1 million. Total southwest border apprehensions in fiscal year 2018 were below 400,000.”

This is a manufactured crisis. Trump ran on a platform that outright labelled Mexican migrants as criminals, rapists, and animals. His push for a border wall is also designed to stoke anti-immigrant fear in a rapidly fracturing America, and my fear is that the rhetoric, and the response it generates towards immigrants, is going to get worse before it gets better. The day after the tear-gassing, the Associated Press referred to the migrant march towards the border as a “show of force”, again portraying the scenes at the “war-like” border as some sort of battle between US troops and a dangerous invading enemy.

Men, women, and children have been stopped at the border after walking thousands of miles to flee violence and unrest in their homelands. Allowing unrestricted access to the United States may not be a possibility, and that is not what I, or anyone else, is suggesting. But turning them into scapegoats – making them at turns into enemy combatants, criminals, or animals – is a dangerous and deeply worrying development. Now stranded in Tijuana, the migrant families are finding that the Mexican authorities and local residents, themselves being portrayed as rapists and security threats by their increasingly aggressive northern neighbour, are also turning against them.

This is dehumanisation unfolding in real time. This is the most powerful country on earth gearing up to go on the offensive against some of its weakest and most vulnerable people. The anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been festering in the US and Europe over the last few years is now poisoning everything, including, with this latest tear-gas attack, the migrants themselves.