By Carlos Borrero
Soldiers!
All of you that have enlisted out of genuine feelings of duty to country as well as those that serve out of economic necessity, we make this appeal to your sense of humanity and class consciousness. Today the President of the United States made official plans to deploy active military personnel to the southern border to combat the supposed threat of a few thousand Central American migrants desperate to escape extreme poverty and violence in their homelands. The men, women and children that have joined together to make this 2,000-mile trek by foot pose no threat to the United States.
They are the modern day tired, poor, huddled masses of which Emma Lazarus wrote over a century ago. What these people are seeking is the right to work and live in peace, to raise their families and build a future for themselves and their loved ones. Is this any different from what you seek for yourself and your family? Of course not! Indeed, many of you are the descendants of immigrants also forced to flee poverty and violence in order to build a life for themselves and their families by the sweat of their brow.
Soldiers!
The order to deploy active duty military personnel on US soil against unarmed and peaceful civilians, no matter their country of origin, is an illegal one. The President and his advisors know this. That is why they fabricate the lie that desperate men, women and children seeking asylum in the United States constitute an “invading army!” They can only justify this unlawful and morally reprehensible order on the basis of lies.
For this reason, we make this urgent call for you to defy any unlawful and immoral order!
History will judge all those that turn a blind eye on what is moral and just, just as it has those that blindly obeyed the Nazi high command. Do not let your sense of duty and honor blind you to the fact that the President is trying to use you against a fabricated “enemy” with whom you share more in common than with him and the billionaires whose interests he defends. You are the sons and daughters of workers and those that travel north by foot are the working poor who only seek to build a life from their own labor.