The following is a response to a question I am repeatedly asked: on the issue of how to handle migrant children at our borders, what would I do instead? Here are some thoughts.

The claim is that the current flow and expected increase in the flow of unaccompanied minors into the country will exceed hard-walled shelter capacity, necessitating the extensive use of temporary influx shelters which are determined to be comparatively detrimental to child welfare. This discussion accepts the premise.

What’s Next? Postcard Campaign

Postcard #6 - Mailing March 9-12

Stop Deportation Flights

You want to move your family to North Carolina. Some of your family already lives there. They went a few years ago when they heard there was work there, building furniture. Some farm work. Rents are not high, especially if you are willing to tolerate the smell of pig farms when the wind shifts in the spring.

THE FIRST SOLUTION: Tales of Humanity and Heroism from Trump’s Manufactured Border Crisis, MPP Survivor Story #3, Perla

When the US government was sued by attorneys representing a little girl named Jenny Lisette Flores, a few principles were established that were intended to improve the experience of migrant children who were going through traumatic transition as a result of their migration to this country, often involving separation from their families.

It was determined that the most damaging thing you could do to children was to restrict them, in other words, to lock them up.

Migrant ‘Protection’ Protocols Survivor Stories #1: Gabriel

Image: Gabriel, Lessy, and their three sons (image courtesy of Gabriel & Family, 2021

What’s Next? Postcard Campaign

Urgent Postcard - Mailing February 24-28

Imprisoning Children is STILL Wrong

Recently the Biden administration has announced that it is opening/reopening several “Influx” Child Detention Centers. We oppose these moves and need to make sure that the Biden administration hears our opposition.

So we wake up this morning to what feels like floodwaters rising.

The way we address the migration of people from other places, places we have sunk into poverty and criminality with our greed and indifference, falls into old familiar patterns, across administrations. So, once again, we turn a humanitarian question into one of security, this time pretending that disease is preventing us from exercising our humanity.

Many in this group would like to believe that, now that Trump is out of power, the struggle for migrant rights is over. The thing that got me involved, grabbed my attention, was family separation. I rushed down to the border, thinking i would add a voice to the cries for the policy to end.

But what I found was something different. The longer I have spent looking at the plight of people who migrate, the more I see that the issue is not one that restricts itself to one political party or leader.

The history of humans is the history of migration.

From a place in Southern Africa, where one group of great apes we call hominids turned a particular evolutionary corner and became a resourceful wanderer, the modern human, Homo sapiens, we have invaded every corner of the planet.

We don’t have to reach very deep into our xenophobic souls to find an assumption that is resilient and persistent: the belief that the threat of contagious disease comes from foreigners, a greater threat, for instance, than the risk you might run at a basketball game at an American high school gym. This unfounded belief is based on no evidence at all that disease, like Covid, is any more prevalent in the migrant population than it is at an an all-American Thanksgiving dinner. It is simply not so.

It chills me to my bones to look out of my window at the falling snow, my mind going to Matamoros, Mexico, where perhaps a thousand people huddle in summer tents, wrapped as best they can against the freezing temperatures that have gripped them.

I am at a loss every time I see this. Someone points out, as witnesses are asked to do, that policies are causing suffering among migrants. That the Biden administration is expelling people by the thousands. That people, often people we know, remain in squalor along the muddy banks of the river. People who send us messages pleading with us not to forget them. As if we could ever forget them.

Let’s look at consequences. In this case the consequences of the Biden administration trying to thread a needle.

They have been slow-walking any decision about Title 42. What’s Title 42? It is a little determination that was arm-twisted out of the CDC, an order that allows the US (contrary to international law) to immediately, with no legal recourse or a ruling of any kind, expel anyone who comes to our border. Doesn’t matter where they come from. In practice, we are expelling lots of Mexicans to Mexico. But we are also expelling Central Americans to Mexico. Haitians to Mexico.

What’s Next? Postcard Campaign

Postcard #5 - To Mail February 19-22: Restore Asylum/Humanity at the Border

We have learned that a detention camp for teens is opening again in Carrizo Springs, Texas. It is run by Baptist Child and Family Services, the organization that ran the camp along the river in the Borderlands of west Texas at a Port of Entry. It was called Tornillo. It became a symbol of all that is wrong about immigration policy. A movement grew as people gathered to witness what they could of the children inside. Without witnesses the children would have been invisible. One child later told us that there were times during his confinement when he could not remember his own name.

This group was established to be a forum, a community, and a clearinghouse for those who feel called to be witnesses to what most of us perceive to be abusive and racist policies toward migrants. These repulsive policies are going on right now. They include the practice of imprisoning migrants, often euphemistically called detention, damaging families, life-threatening deportation, and what is now called expulsion, built on the false narrative that migrants are more of a threat to your health than the Super Bowl party next door.

If you have been following this group for long, you will have noticed that the word “witness” in the group’s name gets repeated quite a bit in posts. I certainly mention it a lot.

It may leave you with the impression that I think that witnessing is the answer to the monumental problems of forced migration and racism, and the tragic and staggering inequality in human society. But I want to clarify this a bit. It seems to me that witnessing presents us with more of a question than an answer. And the question is this: Can we look straight into the face of this injustice, see it in not just an intellectual way, but a visceral one, without something shifting? Without a transformation of ourselves, and then of more than just ourselves?

#WelcomeWithDignity. Today is the 2nd anniversary of MPP. Families are still stuck in limbo in the encampments at the border in Mexico. Joe Biden ended the program for new asylum seekers (thank you!), but he must now fully #EndMPP. Thank you, Alessandra Mondolfi! We miss you.

STATEMENT ON FORCED MIGRATION:

MIGRANT MASSACRE AND REPRESSION OF MIGRANT CARAVAN SPOTLIGHT MORTAL DANGERS FOR ASYLUM SEEKERS HEADING NORTH

January 28, 2021, Brooklyn NY -- On the occasion of the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s implementation of the notorious Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), or Remain in Mexico, and on the eve of additional immigration measures to be announced by the Biden administration, Witness at the Border issues the following statement.

Image: Border Report