Why Chicago’s progressive mayor is building tent cities for migrants

Over the last year, more than 10,000 migrants- people fleeing the devastation caused by imperialism- have been bused into Chicago from Texas and other southern border states. Having survived a harrowing journey and with no legal right to work, these migrants and refugees have been housed in temporary shelters, on the floors of police stations, and in the airports, and currently more than 2,000 of these migrants are in need of a permanent shelter with winter approaching.  Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson announced earlier this year a “plan”  to house thousands of migrants in so-called winterized base camps: i.e. refugee camps. These refugee camps are going to be built by the defense company GardaWorld, which is one of the contractors that busses migrants across the country in the first place. Rather than being embarrassed by the obvious inhumanity of the plan, the mayor and his closes allies—including the chair of Chicago City Council’s Democratic Socialist Caucus, Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa—have doubled down on supporting it.

As an organization that stands with the people of the world, we salute the critical efforts extended by individuals and organizations to provide much needed services to the migrants, and we add our voice to the too-small but growing demand: no GardaWorld, no tents, no camps. We offer this intervention and analysis to our members, supporters, and friends to raise crucial questions for debate, and to raise the key role of US imperialism in causing mass displacement. 

Who are GardaWorld and Aegis Defence Services

GardaWorld is a Canadian defense contractor that has gleefully participated in, and profited from, US, UK, and Canadian imperialism for decades, and incorporated Aegis, a provider of mercenary security forces in the Middle East and Africa, as a subsidiary in 2015. Garda/Aegis has a record of inhumane treatment so extensive that Denver, Colorado canceled a contract with them earlier this year. A Garda run facility at Fort Cavazos (formerly Fort Hood) in Texas has a particularly grotesque record: the detention center for children has allowed the unmitigated spread of COVID and lice, and served undercooked meat, and a BBC investigation found credible allegations of the rape and sexual abuse of minors. Aegis has participated in the brutal US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. In Iraq, Aegis mercenaries shot “trophy videos,” filming themselves as they fired on Iraqi cars at random for sport. Aegis employees in Iraq included mercenaries from Sierra Leone, among them former child soldiers who were paid 16 dollars a day. 

What are the roots of the migrant crisis? 

Migration from Latin America to the US has always been, as the journalist Juan González wrote, “a harvest of empire.” The plundering of the land by agricultural monopolies, the overthrow of popular governments, funding and training of death squads, crippling sanctions, and increasingly climate change have forced people to flee their homelands. Upon arrival to the US, new immigrants often constitute a highly exploitable labor force, working long hours for low pay. The current wave of migrants is no different: Since 1999, the US has been waging a campaign to topple the successive governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro through various covert and overt schemes, including coup attempts and naming a phony president. These attempts have been defeated by the heroic resistance of the Venezuelan people. 

Under presidents of both political parties, the US has used sanctions as a form of economic warfare aimed at achieving regime change in Venezuela to bring to power a government that will be more pliant to US interests. These coercive sanctions have had a disastrous impact on the Venezuelan people:  bans on the imports of medicine, the freezing of Venezuelan assets, the confiscation of Venezuelan companies, an embargo against Venezuelan oil exports, and sanctions against the central bank have strangled the Venezuelan economy. A 2021 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur reported a 99% shrinkage in government revenue since the imposition of sanctions.  This has led to approximately one hundred thousand deaths, led more than two million people to become food insecure, and caused millions of Venezuelans to flee the country or become internally displaced. 

The bipartisan consensus and the role of liberal “humanitarian” imperialism 

Both political parties have been responsible for imperial interventions in Latin America: It was Bill Clinton, with assistance from then-US Senator Joe Biden, who initiated Plan Colombia, a counterinsurgency program that armed and funded the Colombian armed forces against peasants in that country, leading to the assassination of indigenous activists and environmentalists by death squads. The 2009 US backed coup in Honduras occurred under Barack Obama’s presidency with Hillary Clinton playing an important role. The sanctions against Venezuela were significantly tightened under Donald Trump and have been continued under Joe Biden. 

Since the cold war ended, the US ruling class has used various means of building public support for US imperialist aggression including the anti-Muslim bigotry of the “war on terror” and Donald Trump’s “America first” jingoism. Opposite the openly reactionary methods of building public support is the pernicious ideology of liberal “humanitarian” imperialism that thrived under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, arguing that the US war machine is actually in the interest of its victims. While this justification was used to build public support for NATO interventions in the former Yugoslavia and Libya,  liberal interventionists have also argued that various forms of sanctions and economic warfare are an alternative to conventional wars. 

Reactionary and liberal imperialism serve to reinforce each other and maintain the status-quo. As the Behind Enemy Lines mission statement says:

Because the hegemony of American imperialism is by and large agreed on by both political parties, it isn’t part of the mainstream political discourse. Dominating other countries is so deeply built into the DNA of the US that for most Americans, passively acquiescing to the empire and receiving its benefits goes without any recognition.

The mayor, the empire, and the canary in the coalmine 

That same basic logic animates the discussion over the situation of the migrants and refugees: a divide and conquer polarization between reactionary anti-immigrant hysteria (taking on increasingly heinous and open forms, including vigilantism), and liberal humanitarianism leaves out any discussion of US imperialism as the main factor driving mass migration.  Brandon Johnson speaks the NGO-style language of humanitarianism while laying the groundwork to have a  military contractor build refugee tent camps for migrants. And this is entirely consistent with his historical political record. Johnson belongs to a long line of progressive Democratic party politicians who advocate for progressive policies domestically, while marching lockstep with US imperialism and bringing sections of their supporters along with them. In Johnson’s case, as in nearly every other example, Palestine is the canary in coalmine. 

 While running for mayor as a progressive underdog (against a truly ghoulish opponent) Johnson went out of his way to turn his back on Palestinians, saying “Any speech or any effort to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist, that’s how I view antisemitism.” At the time of that statement, too few of his supporters were willing to criticize him for those comments, and few have brought it up after the election. Johnson has made no public comment about whether the Chicago Police Department should train with the Israeli Defense Force. 

The most damning indictment of Johnson’s posture (and that of his supporters) is that while migrants continue to arrive in Chicago, the mayor alongside the whole apparatus of the Democratic Party are actively rolling out the welcome mat for Chicago to host the Democratic National Convention in 2024 to nominate Joe Biden. The mayor and his allies could address the root causes of mass displacement by speaking out against US imperialism, but instead are actively preparing an international stage for the number one war maker on the planet today. 

Anti-Imperialist resistance is the way forward

The current plan to have a military contractor house thousands of migrants in 21’st century Hoovervilles as the Chicago winter approaches is cruel and absurd, as is any plan short of safe, stable, indoor housing. And far too few people have been willing to state and act on that obvious fact, especially the people and organizations who were involved in supporting the campaign of Brandon Johnson. The ugly reality is that Brandon Johnson is running cover for US imperialism, and much of Chicago’s institutional left is running cover for Brandon Johnson. 

This is precisely why we need to build resistance outside of the official channels and the electoral arena, and take up the challenge of building anti-imperialist resistance, by standing with the people of the world against this empire, and bringing anti-imperialist politics to the people. We reject the logic of begging the rulers for concessions, or failing to criticize the rulers because they’re on “our team” and instead are laying the groundwork for new waves of rebellion outside the stifling channels of electoral politics. We reject the logic of choosing between migrants sleeping in police stations and migrants sleeping in refugee camps. We reject the logic of choosing between economic warfare and deathsquads. We won’t run cover for US imperialism, no matter what party is in office. 

The empire is the enemy. From the belly of the beast, we choose to resist it.

Behind Enemy Lines