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The Black Alliance for Peace condemns the U.S. Supreme Court’s TPS Decision on Haiti and Syria

The Black Alliance for Peace condemns the U.S. Supreme Court’s TPS Decision on Haiti and Syria

The Black Alliance for Peace condemns the U.S. Supreme Court’s TPS Decision on Haiti and Syria

On the July 9 National TPS Day of Action, BAP calls for a Zone of Peace in Our Americas that Confronts and Defeats US/EU/NATO Axis of Domination in the Western Hemisphere

The Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team condemns the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 25 decision allowing the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti and Syria. This decision clears the way for the Department of Homeland Security to begin deporting approximately 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian TPS holders while advancing the fiction that countries subjected to years of U.S.-led destabilization are now safe to return to.

Across Haitian and Syrian communities, this ruling has already created a climate of fear. Families are increasingly afraid to send their children to school, attend religious gatherings, seek medical care, go to work, or participate in public life out of fear that routine activities could expose them to detention or deportation.

However, the solution to this fear and predation cannot be running into the arms of the Democratic Party for “protection” via perpetual legal limbo. On this National TPS Day of Action, we share a reminder that what is presented as an “immigration crisis” is, in reality, what BAP has for years identified as a crisis of imperialism. The resolution of this crisis requires the defeat of U.S.-led imperialism and other structures of oppression, and the advancement of popular sovereignty based in People(s)-Centered Human Rights.

As the Haitian Popular Press Agency recently reminded the world, “TPS was not a gift from Obama to the Haitians. It was a temporary protection won amid conditions shaped by catastrophe, displacement, and decades of U.S.-led intervention.” The agency further affirmed, the organizations that defend the rights of Haitians will continue to fight to force the racist extreme right to reconsider the TPS case.” Defending TPS is therefore not an appeal for charity from the U.S. government, but part of the ongoing struggle for Haitian and other global south people’s right to live free from violent displacement, neocolonial intervention, and imperialist domination both in the U.S. and their home countries.

Much of the armed violence concentrated in Port-au-Prince has been fueled by the trafficking of U.S.-sourced firearms, particularly through South Florida, alongside years of foreign intervention overseen by the U.S.-led Core Group, that have strengthened armed groups while undermining Haitian sovereignty.

The termination of TPS cannot be understood in isolation. It is the latest expression of a bipartisan system that first meddles in countries like Haiti and Syria through occupation, economic coercion, and foreign control, then criminalizes the very people displaced by those policies. Those contradictions are on full display as the United States hosts the FIFA World Cup while stripping humanitarian protections from Haitians, expanding deportations, and further restricting Haitian mobility. 

Even FIFA’s decision to ban Haiti’s World Cup jersey depicting the Battle of Vertières represents a long pattern in which Haitian revolutionary history is treated as something to be erased. That is why we say: Boycott the World Cup and Boycott the U.S. The concurrent denial of dignity of Haitians in the games and in the geopolitical sphere is linked, and U.S. impunity for its crimes — global and domestic — must end.

We condemn the Supreme Court’s decision in the strongest possible terms and stand with the struggle for self-determination and a People(s) Centered Human Rights. We reaffirm our call of the necessity for popular and revolutionary forces to build a Zone of Peace in Our Americas, where sovereignty, not intervention—determines the future of its peoples.

Any U.S. Attack on Syria Is International Gangsterism

Any U.S. Attack on Syria Is International Gangsterism

Media Contact:

Ajamu Baraka

National Organizer

info@blackallianceforpeace.com

APRIL 10, 2018—The pending military intervention into Syria by the United States represents yet another case of unilateral illegality that continues the systematic assault on international law and morality that has characterized U.S. foreign policies since the end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, when the United States found itself without any countervailing global power. The result for the people of the world has been unending military conflicts, destabilization and the destruction of whole nations.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., correctly identified exactly a year before his assassination that the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet. The 50th anniversary of his murder just passed on April 4—five decades later, the United States continues to hold that distinctive position. This reality makes any declaration on the part of the United States that it alone has the responsibility to intervene on the side of human-rights protection an absurdity and an insult to the intelligence of the national and international communities.

Today, the people of the United States are supposed to believe the racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic Trump administration is supposedly so concerned about Arab life in Syria that it feels morally compelled to engage in direct military intervention. That is a position we in the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) do not believe based on the documented actions of this administration and all previous administrations. These regimes have demonstrated their utter contempt for the lives of non-Europeans in their quest to maintain their global dominance.

U.S. support for the continued brutality of the apartheid state of Israel and its immoral justifications for Israeli crimes against humanity committed at the apartheid wall in Gaza reflect the bi-partisan moral degeneracy of the ruling parties, media and ruling oligarchy. Their lack of real concern for Palestinian life reveals not only their lack of morality, but the real imperialist interests that determine their opportunistic position on Syria.

Just a few weeks after the massive marches to address U.S. gun violence, the people of the United States are being asked to support the ultimate form of gun violence—war. For BAP, the only way the movement to oppose gun violence in the United States will have any moral credibility is if people link gun violence in the United States to militarism and war abroad.

BAP takes an unequivocal position against U.S. intervention in Syria. We say the only institution with the right and power to protect the peace and resolve international conflict is the United Nations. We condemn any and all unilateral interventions by any state and assert that any state that violates the international norms that are committed to the maintenance of peace as established by the United Nations Charter is a rogue state that deserves international condemnation.

We say if the United States is concerned about human rights, it should:

  • prosecute killer cops who savagely murdered Stephon Clark in Sacramento, California;
  • investigate the approximately 1,000 killings each year at the hands of police in the United States;
  • stop the mass transfer of children from juvenile courts to adult courts;
  • stop the militarization of its domestic police forces;
  • stop the raids of migrant communities;
  • release its political prisoners; and
  • cease the collaboration with the corporate media and private communication companies in its effort to censor and limit news content on the Internet.

But we know centering human rights has never been a commitment of the U.S. state. That is why BAP says if you want peace, you have to be willing to fight for it. This weekend, BAP is mobilizing with groups across the country to highlight our opposition to U.S. warmongering, demanding an end to U.S. lawlessness, calling for the closure of more than 800 U.S. military bases around the world, and ending the war against the Black and Brown working-class and poor. We support self-determination for all oppressed peoples—domestically and internationally.

Stop the ongoing agony in Syria. Demand the United States withdraw its forces from Syria and respect international law. Call for the United States to adhere to international human-rights norms and cease its status as a rogue state.

 

Media Contact:

Ajamu Baraka

National Organizer

info@blackallianceforpeace.com

 

Photo credit: FAIR