By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

The more things change the more they stay the same. The only place where that seems more true than Washington is at the border. Obama and Biden built the camps. Trump filled the camps. And Biden is building more as thousands of desperate people are racing to overcrowd them. After another election season of empty Democratic promises, we were all told that things would be different now. Joe Biden had somehow miraculously evolved in his old age into a kinder, gentler, racist neoliberal sack of shit. Wokeness was supposed to be a symptom of his dementia. But as the migrants came, one promise after another fell to shit. 72 hour detentions swelled to 177 and counting. Closing the private prison pipeline included everything but ICE’s notorious private immigration detention centers. And Trump era concentration camps like Corizo Springs opened back up for business. Even now, we’re told reforms are on their way. But we were told this back when it counted and now we’re being told this again as the number of refugees rises and FEMA moves to reenact Hurricane Katrina at a sports venue near you.

They call this a crisis at the border, but the border is the crisis. Ever since Bill Clinton moved to militarize this countries massive federally centralized border back in 1994, we’ve been violating migrant rights as if it were a competitive sport. Building bigger and bigger prisons and meaner and meaner posses of Border Patrol thugs who’s authority stretched deeper and deeper into the heartland. All for a senseless war on the crime of crossing an invisible line scribbled by conquistadors and other assorted savages in the desert centuries ago. Borders, especially big borders, are nothing but another excuse to give the state unspeakable powers to do unspeakable things to desperate people. Fuck all of them. They all make me fucking sick.

My violent allergy to borders is more than just a side affect of my anarchism. It runs in my veins as an Irish Catholic daughter of renegade stock. There was a time when this awful country at least had relatively open borders. When they welcomed your poor, your tired, your sick…. My ancestors were all of the above, fleeing for their lives from an English enforced starvation genocide straight out of Madeline Albright’s wet dream journal called the Irish Potato Famine. In fact, if it wasn’t for the lax border politics of 19th Century America, there is a very real possibility that I wouldn’t even exist to bitch at you today. Millions more would have starved in the Crown’s final solution to their long Irish problem. So Morrigan help me, this issue is more than a little personal. Just add a history of child abuse and stir and you get one pissed off tranny who sees herself in the thousand yard stare of every hungry five year old confined in one of Mr. Biden’s fabulous decorated new cages. I get sick headaches just writing about it. But my Irish heritage includes another very different border crisis that I believe shines a light on not only the famines, but the bitter sweet policies that saved us from them, and the very nature of mass immigration laws themselves.

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