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Americans and countries around the world are preparing for another Trump term. Global Exchange, a nonprofit that focuses on international human rights, held a Zoom meeting Sunday night titled “How Progressives Can Talk About Immigration: Root Causes and Why People Cross the Border.”
Several guest speakers spoke, including the mother of a Uvalde victim, a Mexican lawyer and activist, as well as several activists. The main theme of the Zoom meeting was that despite Republican rhetoric about immigrants, both the United States and Mexico have border security problems.
But it is actually America's lax gun laws that are creating this crisis, with thousands of guns crossing the southern US border into Mexico each year, both legally and illegally, through purchases at gun shops and gun shows, and taken to the neighboring country to the south for criminal activity, according to John Lindsay-Poland, who coordinates Stop US Arms to Mexico, a project of Global Exchange.
The Stop US Arms to Mexico project has been able to recover criminal weapons in that nation and trace them back to purchases in American states such as Florida, Texas, Arizona and Georgia.
During the meeting, it was said that a gun purchased in the United States is just as likely to be used in a homicide in Mexico as it is in that country, and with the high rates of mass shootings in the United States, it is impacting both nations.
During the first Trump administration, he had transferred oversight of most firearms exports from the State Department to the Commerce Department. The Commerce Department approved $16 billion in firearms exports in the first 16 months, a 30 percent increase over the State Department’s licensing approval rate.
In Mexico, the military is the only authorized importer of firearms, and also the only legal seller of them. Almost all firearms imported from the U.S. are sold to state, local and federal police forces or are for military use.
Kathy Kruger is an attorney for the other side based in Tijuana and San Diego. She says 70 percent of her clients are unaccompanied Mexican minors seeking asylum in the U.S. to escape violence in Mexico.
“These children have the option of getting involved in crime, running away or being killed,” which is why many seek asylum in the U.S., especially indigenous Mexican children. “Mexican families and children are not fleeing poverty, they are fleeing violence,” she said.
Kruger went on to say that gun violence is forcing Americans to bury their children and Mexican parents to send their children to the United States to escape the extreme gun violence that has taken over cities.
He blames not only the United States, but also Mexico: “The Mexican government has never confronted what the U.S. has been causing. They have only put band-aids on it.”
Some of the recommendations provided by Global Exchange and Community Justice Center include supporting the ARMAS Act, authored by Congressman Joaquín Castro, which will require a global, interagency strategy to address firearms trafficking and diversion in this hemisphere, establish mechanisms to control the end use of exported firearms, and return oversight of U.S. firearms exports from the Department of Commerce to the Department of State.
Representative Joaquin Castro's Stop Arming the Cartels Act would ban the sale of .50-caliber firearms and would report multiple rifle sales to the same individual (as is currently done with handguns) to state and local law enforcement. These multiple rifle sales are a sign of possible trafficking.
The Resolution to Reduce Forced Migration and Displacement, authored by Representative Greg Casar, calls for reducing gun trafficking and the influx of weapons to Haiti, Mexico, and the region by strengthening U.S. gun laws, controlling the scale and end users of U.S. exported firearms, and banning assault rifles.
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