It’s been a hard week

We have learned that nearly nine thousand children were sent out of the country, expelled summarily, sent to the countries they fled. We have heard about ICE Air, that miserable operation that carries the bodies—boxcars in the sky—reminding us of yet another episode of genocide, by transporting COVID to a Virginia prison, infecting hundreds.

In about two weeks’ time, seven bodies have turned up floating on the river known on the south bank as the Río Bravo and on the north bank as the Río Grande.

The deaths were not accidental.

Despair.

Bodies turn up on the Matamoros banks. The worst leader since Hitler—I say that without hesitation—gins up a frenzy of hatred to distract us from the sea change in our lives brought on by his failure to respect a scourge of nature and the science that would have saved so many of us. And his minions work furiously to expel the tired and poor across the border to their wretched fates.

Word comes to us, from the edge of that river, of the death of Edwin Rodrigo Castro de la Parra. He leaves a family behind on those banks. We are told he may have plunged into the river to save someone whose desperation had pushed them over that edge, someone who saw hope on the other side and lost all hope behind.

A few things to think about.

Things are getting worse. Our country is expelling people, denying them even the farce of a legal proceeding. It is justified by the claim that foreigners, at least the ones that come to our southern border, carry the disease that we have in higher numbers than almost any other country.

Witnessing the atrocity of the Homestead detention center, summer 2019

As Hurricane Hanna fed the swelling Río Bravo, as its banks overflowed into the lives of the Matamoros encampment of refugees, and as now swarms of mosquitos, zancudos as they are known, bring still more misery and perhaps illness, we cannot help but reflect on the predicament just faced and still faced by these friends of ours forced to perch precariously on the very edge of Northern Mexico, eyes toward the United States.

COALITION DEMANDS RELEASE OF TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DOCUMENTS REGARDING THE DETENTION OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.

Latest update: Good news. Weather service reduces its estimated crest by 1.5 feet. Should begin subsiding soon.

Update: Weather Service has revised downward its prediction of a crest. We are only an inch or two from it, now. Soon the waters will begin to recede.

Photo by Josué Rolando Cornejo Sabillon

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.