Posts
3/17/21
YOU THOUGHT MPP WAS BAD? WELCOME TO TITLE 42.
Under the banner of an arcane heath code, families with small children fleeing the deadly violence of Central America are being kidnapped, raped, extorted, assaulted, murdered in some of the most dangerous cities in Mexico. Cities designated by the United States State Department as “Category 4” - places to which Americans should never ever travel due to risk of kidnapping and violence.
Drawing by Marc Nelson for Every.Last.One.
3/15/21
The wall can be a stupid ugly fence.
It can be towering bollards, a word no one ever used until we started erecting them out of steel on the southern border.
It can be guards in green uniforms driving vans up and down dirt paths along a river.
It can be boats with mounted automatic weapons and itchy triggers.
It can be planes with chains that rattle as men and women, heads down, watch their feet take short steps up a gangway.
And it can be a law that calls people on the other side diseased, and removes them, even though nobody thinks it’s true.
3/15/21
Day 15 of Witnessing at Homestead, Part 2
If you'd like to join us to witness at Homestead, we are usually here from 9:00 to 4:00 every day. Just put 920 Bougainville Blvd in your GPS. If we don't know you're coming, maybe wait until 10:00 just to be sure someone is here. It would be great if you can sign up to let us know when to expect you. There are 4 links below, covering several 2 week periods. Just put your name in as many or as few hours as you'd like. We are here to see what we can see relating to preparations to open. And to be seen, so it is known there is opposition to this re-opening. Our goal is to #KeepHomesteadClosed
3/14/21
There has been a lot of debate and discussion within this group over the last few days about influx shelter and their place in the current situation at the border. Many of us argue that there are 2 key ways to reduce the need to increase shelter space, and thus reduce the need for large influx shelters like Homestead and Carrizo Springs.
3/14/21
When a judge told Biden that he could not suspend deportations for 100 days, as the administration had announced, he did not tell Biden he could not immediately cut down on deportations. He didn’t say, for instance, that this would be a great time to load up planes with Haitians, and fly them back to a land in political and economic chaos. Or to continue his policy of immediate expulsions of hundreds of thousands of people, by land and by plane.
3/13/21
How are we to understand the reluctance of the current administration to take decisive action to end the anti-immigrant hysteria of the last decades? Why does policy continue to rely on the mythology of invasion when a simpler, pacific view of the movements of rational people is plainly within our intellectual reach?
3/12/21
From Witness at Homestead: Stop the Re-Opening Campaign in Florida
We have seen this truck or one like it every day. Today is Day 12. We've also seen other pest control trucks. I wonder what kind of infestation they're dealing with. Do you think this is a good place for kids? And it's a superfund site, with dangerous pollution. And it's next to an Air Base, with frightening, noisy jets coming and going every day. Why would anyone want to imprison traumatized teens here?
3/12/21
How to make an unaccompanied minor:
1. Use a policy that relies on people’s fear of disease to pretend that migrants are a contagion threat to prevent families with children from seeking asylum. This forces families to send children across the border by themselves.
And more….
Photo: Allan Mestel, Homestead FL
3/10/21
Root Causes and the Right to Migrate
One of the key ways in which the Biden-Harris administration could take innovative, decisive steps to dismantle Trump’s devastating legacy as to immigration and border policy is through its reiterated commitments to address the “root causes” of continuing mass migration from the Mesoamerican region (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico) and beyond (Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, among other possible examples). (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
3/8/21
It began as families huddling together at the foot of the bridge across the border river in Matamoros, Mexico. Told at first that they must wait their turn for a chance to plead for asylum, for mercy, they stayed on the plaza, in a pocket of concrete in sight of the uniformed troops that stood guarding the arched path to the other side, a walkway daily slowly traversed by those clutching the documents that allowed their passage.
3/6/21
Carrizo Springs, under the direction of Baptist Child and Family Services (BCFS), which operated Tornillo, reopened after sitting empty for over a year. The facility will temporarily house children 13 through 17 in a remodeled former oil field man-camp until they are sent to their sponsors.
3/6/21
One day we may, from greater distance, understand the history of the Matamoros migrant encampment. We will see how it fit in with a broader movement. Something along the lines of another manifestation of the coalescence of migrants, forced by social disaster to leave their homes and make their way north. Key to our understanding must be the resistance, like that represented by the caravans, to the scattering of souls that so often ends in exploitation, persecution, and death.
3/4/21
We are lucky enough to share in the joy of the people we got to know in the Matamoros encampment, those forced into the limbo of MPP, Remain in Mexico, joy at their orderly release to the other side of the river, to buses and planes and the embrace of their families. Each day we glimpse their happiness in the videos they send us, the things they tell us from their soaring hearts.
3/4/21
Migrant ‘Protection’ Protocols Survivor Stories #3: Natasha
When your choices are persecution, solitary confinement, or going underground, ‘protection’ is prevarication, nada mas.
THE FIRST SOLUTION: Tales of Humanity and Heroism from Trump’s Manufactured Border Crisis, MPP Survivor Story #3
Image: Ray and Natasha
3/3/21
Took my camera to Day 3 at Homestead. More pics and video to come, but it's late and I'm tired, and clearly indecisive. Homestead Reopening Resistance.
Background: the Homestead, Florida, child detention center, closed in 2019, is set to reopen as a child detention center again by the Biden administration. Renamed Biscayne Influx Care Facility.
3/2/21
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.
