I am posting this on behalf of your Witness at the Border team and we are asking those that can to help the volunteer groups in Matamoros. Josh posted a thoughtful update on what we know, and do not know, about what is to come for our brothers and sisters in the camp at Matamoros. None of us know what is yet to come over the next few days with the Rio Grande.

What we know about the situation in the Matamoros encampment for asylum seekers.

The river has risen. We do not believe it has risen over its banks.

Update: we have heard that most of the people in the camp resisted evacuation and are still there.

UPDATE: They are still at that damn Hampton Inn in McAllen. Can anyone follow them?

Some thoughts this morning.

The Hilton chain backed down and will no longer allow themselves to be used as a prison. We need not wonder that greed, and a little desperation in these hard times for hotels, led them down this hellish path in the first place. And we need not wonder that those same motivations led them to disown the practice after the heroic actions of the Texas Civil Rights Project uncovered this, and allowed us all to spread the outrage all over social media and television.

In McAllen, Texas, not many miles from Brownsville and the bridges that cross the river into Mexico, along a highway, there’s a Hampton Inn. Hampton Inn is a motel chain run by Hilton Hotels. I stayed at that Hampton Inn the day after I was released from Hidalgo County jail, after my arrest at the detention center at Ursula Road, the detention center made famous for the cages that held children who had been separated from their parents.

Photo by Texas Civil Rights Project

I have never liked rollercoasters. I haven’t ridden many and even those few times I spent the ride wishing fervently for it to end and wondering, after that first time, what possessed me to try it again.

But the one we are on right now is not one that I could have avoided. And it is lasting a long time. And we are climbing higher and higher, ready for a harrowing plunge into the abyss.

Witness stands proudly in the tradition of nuestro hermano John Lewis and the struggles for the "beloved community", at the heart of the African-American liberation and civil rights movements.

Photo: John Lewis with witnesses at Homestead FL Detention Center, July 2, 2019

This group began when a few people, informed by experts in child welfare, assembled a pretty lonely protest at the gates of a child migrant prison in Tornillo, Texas. We were there to draw attention to the unnecessary confinement and consequent traumatization of children who were classed as unaccompanied, many of them separated from adult relatives as they came across the border, having fled violence and poverty in their own countries.

Please watch this extremely well done piece by the New York Times and the Marshall Project illustrating how ICE and ICE Air seed and export COVID. We were proud to have contributed some photos and video from our Witness at the Border actions.

It’s like treading water. You don’t get anywhere, but if the waters ever recede, you’ll still be around.

For now the waters are rising. Asylum is no more. The Matamoros encampment is shut to new arrivals and the refugees cower behind fences, wading through the deluge of southern downpours, and Covid at the gates.

From my Cuban friend in Trump’s MPP prison camp for asylum seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. By now you know that the law said asylum seekers must wait in the US. In his overwhelming cruelty he just changed that, and like garbage and dumped them in this hell. If we don't fight for them, who will? English translation is after the Spanish.

Witnessing is the politics of seeing. To witness is to participate in the unmasking of the obscured, the hidden. We start by noticing the ragged threads of the shroud covering the inevitable consequences of the hoarding of the material underpinnings of life. We use our eyes to tease the threads from our field of vision, and we see enough, after some time on the ground, to turn these glimpses into narrative. Who is doing what to whom.

A confirmed case of COVID in Matamoros encampment. Two others in isolation awaiting results. Let’s hope, and pray if you do, for containment.

Expulsion and deportation. Expulsion is the mechanism by which all asylum is denied. No hearing. No chance to plead for mercy. Even children. Thousands. Sometimes within an hour you are back on the other side of the border. Sometimes they put you on a plane. Goodbye.

Still hiding from the pandemic, we watch deportation flights, venture timidly out to the streets, some of us, to join in the uprising against systemic racism. My weather app still sounds alerts every time there are storms encroaching on Brownsville, Texas, a few steps across the bridge over the bloody Rio Grande, on the opposite bank, where those storms pour rain onto the clay-rich mud and flood the tents of the people we left behind, in a ragged, fenced camp in Matamoros, Mexico.

On the subject of the comments period open for response to newly proposed asylum rules...

Here is my comment. It starts further back, it steps us away from the framework we are being asked to work with. My comment asks: by what right do we tell people that the river makes a line that they cannot cross on their journey to a better life. By what just principle do we defend this line with massive military might?

Good lawyers, lawyers who are good people, fight the battle on the ground for more just treatment of supplicants who come to our borders and line up on the bridges over the rivers polluted with the bodies of the defeated. And there is special language that goes with the job, and that language forgivably hardens into the structure of the battle lines.

The power of bearing witness.

It may seem self-evident, but in the last days we have seen the seismic power of bearing witness. We have not seen the witness who kept her cell phone camera pointed at a man slowly dying under the pressure of oppression, the brutal poetry of watching a man stop breathing, his heart stopping, his voice stilled.

Life is a long journey. And the struggle, la lucha, is long. The trail taken by those who flee their devastated homes is long, and may not end anytime soon. The heavy slog from captivity to slavery to justice is long, and never over, it seems.

Witness at the Border Statement for the “Examining Best Practices for Incarceration and Detention During COVID-19” Hearing, Committee on the Judiciary, 6/2/20