4/24/21

By Josh Rubin

I’m sitting at Gate B27 at LaGuardia, waiting for the flight to Dallas, connecting to a flight to El Paso, to begin boarding. El Paso, for those not familiar, is the US part of a larger city, Ciudad Juárez, which is just across a concrete-channeled section of the Río, called Grande on this side, Bravo on the other.

The pandemic has kept me and others away from the border that is the locus of our attention, the tragic line that as we speak divides children from their families as it expels migrants into streets and towns where they are assaulted, kidnapped, ransomed and raped. The border, physical and military and invisible, is enforced by our country. A country afflicted with racism, fear of strangers, inequality, full prisons, and hungry children, who we now call food-insecure. Fear for ourselves translates to fear that we might lose what we have, and makes many hate those who are seen as possible threats to what for some is a tenuous grip on homes and medical care and jobs.

The border is the place that focuses us. Witness at the Border is traveling to El Paso for a Walk for the Children, La Caminata por la Niñez. We will walk from the bridge that we use to expel migrant families in the middle of the night, to Fort Bliss, where thousands of migrant children, many sent across by their families in an act of desperation, languish inside, waiting as the wheels of placement grind slow, for their release from anguish and loneliness.

We will beg for an end to expulsions. We will demand an end to practices that trap children in huge rooms full of cots, filled with the sounds of weeping, the signs that the tortures of confinement are injuring young minds and hearts. We will walk the long miles from the border to the largest military base in the country, now holding children separated from their families. April 30. At the Paso del Norte Bridge. 8:30 AM.

Join us.

My flight is boarding.