Indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres knew she would not live to see old age. Her country with its vast natural resources—plundered by agribusiness, mining companies, and timber companies—would retaliate. The Honduran corporate oligarchy, propped up by the United States government, which facilitated a coup in 2009, made sure of it.
It didn’t stop her from defending the very lifeblood of her people, the rivers and dams and forests that run through her country, her Madre Tierra. She is not unlike the millions of women who fight for themselves and for their families, risking their lives to cross dangerous borders, perilous journeys north, south, east to west, fleeing war, famine, patriarchy, militarism. The root causes that push migration come from trade policies of the United States, neoliberalism, drug wars, the legacy of colonialism and the economic relationship between countries of the global North and global South.
On International Women’s Day and throughout Women’s Month, women and allies gather to denounce detention centers and jails, to push back against criminalization and deportation of immigrant communities and the violence and abuse in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) privately owned detention centers, where funding is made available based on the number of beds that are filled.
ICE’s corrupt quota system, along with many other factors including xenophobia, has driven an increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement strategy.
In several states, raids have targeted women and children who have faced and fled horrific violence, with agents bursting into their homes. This criminal attack on immigrant families is a war on women’s livelihood and right to survival. Trans-women, women victims of violence and domestic violence and working-class mothers have all been and continue to be caught up in criminalization, mass incarceration and mass deportation across the country.
More than 60 percent of women with children placed in deportation proceedings are deported every year; many don’t have access to legal representation because of their economic marginalization. Trans-women are denied medical treatment and placed in solitary confinement in detention centers. The deportation machine is the last link in a chain of U.S. foreign policies of economic and political intervention, worker exploitation and environmental degradation that destroys the livelihood of women and forces them to migrate.
As they demand changes in immigration policies that incarcerate and dehumanize them, immigrant women remain at the forefront of fighting back against deportation and criminalization, and are the builders of a vision of social welfare for all working-class communities.
As Grassroots Global Justice (of which we are a proud member) stated:
“We need to fight the right [wing and its policies] and challenge the culture of fear and hatred, as well as the military and economic conditions and policies that set the stage for brutal and inhumane repression like the assassination of our dear sister Berta.”
Berta stood for human rights, for indigenous communities, and for women. She was a feminist and an internationalist, unwavering in the face of great obstacles. She gave every last bit of her being to defending against great injustice. May her death galvanize women and allies across the world to stand up, unafraid, and demand justice.
— Maria Poblet, Executive Director of Causa Justa