In the spirit of Carmelita Torres:

Dignity, hope and resistance: from our roots and towards the future

Today, we,  more than 200 people and 80 organizations and communities from Mexico and the United States, part of the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice, raise our voices in commemoration of International Human Rights Day,  observed on December 10th and remembering the date when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, in 1948, at the headquarters of the United Nations (UN) – we are also commemorating December 18, Migrants International Day, marking the day in 1990 when the first international treaty to protect our rights, on a global scale, was adopted.

This year, we mobilize on both sides of the border in defense of our internationally recognized rights and for the universal right to free mobility, which has been exercised ancestrally by our people for thousands of years before the European conquest and invasion of our lands and territories. At the same time, we are rising from our roots, with dignity and hope, in resistance to the violence faced by indigenous, Afro-descendant, migrant, and communities of families of missing persons in the region.

We stand, without borders, against the threats of mass arrests and deportations with which the incoming Trump administration and those who are complicit with it try to intimidate and silence us. 

By raising our voices, we are accompanied and inspired by the example of the struggle of thousands of people like Carmelita Torres, a young Mexican migrant woman, a 17-year-old 

domestic worker, who refused to be abused by US border agents at the crossing between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso on January 28, 1917, unleashing what has been called “the bathroom riots” carried out by thousands of border women during one of the most critical moments of the Mexican Revolution. We commit today to follow their example. We are all Carmelitas!!

The security and immigration policies prevailing on both sides of the border – and the even more drastic, cruel, and brazen ones that will come with Trump – promote militarization, criminalization, and the imposition of racial and ethnic profiling on Afro-descendant and indigenous communities and people. , migrants, and the working classes. All of this comes wrapped up in the supposed imperatives of “national security” and “free trade,” which are ultimately those of savage capitalism, projecting its genocidal and ecocidal essence. 

Within the framework of immigration policies, it is the model of “prevention through deterrence” which has resulted in the death of thousands of migrants in transit, including multiple massacres of hundreds of migrants and hundreds of thousands of forced disappearances in Mexican territory, carried out with weapons from the United States and fueled by the intensification of human trafficking that these types of policies produce. This framework is also reflected in the structural complicities in Mexico between authorities at all levels of government (federal, state and municipal), the Armed Forces, and the National 

Guard, and their allies among the new paramilitarism constituted by sectors of organized crime.

In 2025, the principal aggressions against our rights will come from the US government in the immediate future, but it is very likely that they will be accompanied by the complicity of the Mexican state, as previously, in trying to accelerate the transfer (“externalization”) of the containment and repression measures of migratory flows to Mexican territory. All of this constitutes a recurring pattern of crimes against humanity – the most serious recognized by the international community – for which the governments of the United States and Mexico are co-responsible. 

These measures go against the equality of dignity and humanity that our people and communities deserve, and our desire to build a better future, without borders, on the basis of justice and solidarity. This includes our right to free mobility or movement (to migrate or not to migrate, and not to be forcibly displaced) as an expression of our rights to self- determination, autonomy, and to a decent life and future as peoples.

This repressive pattern was resumed during the first Trump administration, with the mass detention of thousands of migrant minors in makeshift camps like Tornillo. in Texas and Homestead in Florida, at military installations like Fort Bliss in El Paso, or out in the open – where several died from medical negligence in Border Patrol custody. It is sadly likely that the new Trump administration will soon resort to the same methods, with equivalent human costs.

Our People’s Movement for Peace and Justice emerged from the will of the communities impacted by violence in the Mexico-United States recognizing that, from Tegucigalpa to Washington DC, the guns that kill us are the same, that the strategies of security do not protect people, that economic priorities favor a few rich and do not include the well being of the majority, and that immigration policies are criminalizing and discriminatory. 

From this vision, the people, communities, and organizations participating in our movement call on the societies of both countries to recognize the pain caused by the evident failure of the dominant security and rights paradigm in the region and demand systemic change. 

At the same time, we call on organizations, communities, and social movements in the region to hold assemblies to build an unprecedented binational front that confronts the violence that is coming to us.  On January 20, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, we will hold a Virtual Binational Assembly. 

Only an autonomously organized society, collaborating between all sectors and across borders, will be able to prevent the advance of hatred and follow the example of Carmelita Torres. 

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CONSTITUENT PLATFORMS