5/2/21
By Amy Cohen
In the dilapidated, empty streets of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, thousands of “pink crosses” adorn telephone poles. Each represents a woman who has been murdered there. On the Juarez side of the Paso del Norte bridge, looking toward the United States, a large black cross against a pink background bears the words “Ni Una Mas”: Not one more.
And yet, every day, often in the wee hours of the morning when there is no one to protect them, women and small children who have been flown to El Paso from Brownsville and McAllen are lied to by CBP officials. They are told they are going to Houston but are instead forced across that bridge and into the deadly streets of Ciudad Juarez. All under the despicably false banner of an arcane public health code referred to as “title 42”.
I am told that Juarez is one of the child and baby pornography capitals of the world. Pregnant women have been kidnapped and had their bellies slashed so the babies could be removed. No one knows what happens to those babies. Some suspect that they become part of the infant pornography industry. Some are probably sold for adoptions.
Juarez is known to be a center for the trafficking of women, children, and infants.
This morning I spent time in a city-run shelter there. In the enormous gymnasium type room, rows of bunk beds lined both sides, many with mothers holding their children close. These mothers and their beautiful children, all having fled unspeakably intolerable conditions in their countries of origin, all seeking refuge in the United States, all flown to El Paso and pushed across the border into Juarez.
That these women and children are being delivered into the home of traffickers by American policy is especially ironic.
Not far from the American side of this bridge sits Fort Bliss, the largest military base in the United States, now home to a detention center for up to 5000 migrant children as young as 6 years old, the majority snatched from the arms of loving grandmothers, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers. Alarming reports of inadequacies and conditions for these children are surfacing from Fort Bliss.
At lease half of these children have mothers and fathers living in the United States from whom they remain separated because of our government’s suspicion that each and every one may actually be a “trafficker”. Every one of those children has been traumatized by the actions of our government - the separations, the incarceration, often in intolerably harsh conditions - all in the name of “protection” from “traffickers”.
The extraordinary hypocrisy and racism of these policies cannot be overstated.
Especially as every one of those migrant children is earning large corporations, international security agencies (such as Culmen), and greedy nonprofits a boatload of money. Off the backs, the miseryof these children.
Think of this the next time American officials claim concern for the “trafficking of children”.
Every Last One. We get them out. Come help us fight these appalling crimes against humanity.