Antifascist International: Kidnapping the Maikelys Espinoza Bernal girl is necropolitics in action

Published at: 01/05/2025 08:59 PM

The Anti-Fascist International, this Thursday, May 01, issued a statement denouncing that the kidnapping of Maikelys Antonella Espinoza Bernal, the Venezuelan baby just two years old, kidnapped by the United States immigration authorities, is a crime against humanity.

In the statement, published by the Deputy Minister for Latin America and the Caribbean, Rander Peña, on his account on the social network Telegram, he says that “this crime is not a bureaucratic error: it is necropolitics in action”.

“The U.S. government, through its border control agencies, decides who deserves to live in freedom and who should be subjected to social death, they intend to decide with impunity who lives and how they live, carry out forced disappearances of infants and family separations,” the letter states.

Below is the full text of the statement:

THE KIDNAPPING OF MAIKELYS ESPINOZA IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!

IMPERIAL NECROPOLITICS AGAINST CHILDREN.

Today the world is witnessing barbaric practices, and the cruelest and most malevolent expression of these is the kidnapping of children as a form of political punishment. From the Anti-Fascist International, we strongly denounce and reject the kidnapping of Maikelys Antonella Espinoza Bernal, a Venezuelan baby barely 2 years old, torn from her family by the United States immigration authorities in April, in a perverse and profoundly inhuman act. His parents were accused without evidence or due process of belonging to an alleged criminal organization, revealing the racist, xenophobic and neo-Nazi nature of a migratory system that acts as a machine of repression and hatred against the peoples of the Global South.

This crime is not a bureaucratic error: it is necropolitics in action. The U.S. government, through its border control agencies, decides who deserves to live in freedom and who should be subjected to social death, seeks to decide with impunity who lives and how they live, carry out forced disappearances of infants and family separations. Maikelys is today a victim of this genocidal logic that, under the rhetoric of “protection”, exercises sovereignty over her life by taking away her identity, her family and her future.

Where is the “best interests of the child” when the State uses migrant children as spoils of war? What justice can there be when institutions turn the border into a space of exception where human rights are suspended? This is not “law and order”: it is State terrorism, a chilling repetition of fascist methods that took children from Jewish, indigenous or dissident mothers to erase their existence.

Imperial necropolitics not only imprisons Maikel Espinoza in a concentration camp in El Salvador (as part of the criminalization of migration), but it condemns Maikelys to legal and emotional limbo, denying her even the right to feel the warmth of the arms of her mother, Yorely Bernal, who today cries out with insurrected dignity: Give me back my daughter!

We demand:

1. Immediate release of Maikelys Espinoza and her reunification with her family in Venezuela.

2. End the necropolitical policies that turn migrant children into hostages of imperialism.

3. Dismantling of detention camps and ending the criminalization of migration.

We call for international solidarity: unions, anti-racist movements, feminist groups and human rights defenders to join the #FreeMaikelysEspinoza campaign. We will not be silent until we see her free, or until every child stolen by fascism returns home.

WE WILL NOT ALLOW IMPERIAL NECROPOLITICS TO CONTINUE TO DECIDE WHO LIVES, WHO DIES AND WHO IS CONDEMNED TO DISAPPEAR IN SILENCE

Mazo News Team