Very, very late tonight, as tomorrow’s sun dawns on the child detention tents at Fort Bliss, all of the so-called youth care workers assigned to that prison in the desert will leave for the last time. Every last one of them is being fired. They will go for the last time to the intake tent and they will turn in the barcoded badges they wear around their necks. The badges that say they can have contact with the thousands of child prisoners.

Bad news, bad news comes to me where I sleep.

We are hiding children in the desert again. In tents, huge tents, on the grounds of a fort that once established dominance over the local indigenous peoples, notably Apaches. Now it holds native children, pried from families long suffering from the war of conquest that is never quite over.

Hiding them. They were not sufficiently hidden in the enclosed, lightless places opened for them in convention centers.

The Buffalo Soldier gate of Fort Bliss faces an exit from the El Paso International Airport. One would need only to keep driving straight ahead from the airport to find oneself at the checkpoint, the guardhouse, that first announces that you are entering the fort, then stops you to challenge your presence before you arrive at a southern corner of the desert base, larger than any other, spanning state lines, lined at its northern extremes with the scars of missiles fired as tests of our power.

This man out of the blue started telling us about the Immigrant Children as he called them and we acted as if we didn't know anything about what was going on with the children. He said some of these kids have tested positive for Covid so as soon as buses arrive they are cleaned and sanitized. In Spanish he said, Lady, these kids that get on these buses have Visas and telephone numbers and I don't know why they are being kept here instead of turning them over to their families!

PRIMO LEVI, A JEWISH ITALIAN SURVIVOR OF AUSCHWITZ, ON THE ETHICAL AND POLITICAL "DUTY OF WITNESSING."

From “Revisiting the Life and Intellectual Legacy of Primo Levi”

BY ENZO TRAVERSO, Jacobin Magazine

Over 1,000 people have used Resistbot to make their voices heard to say that the solution to the influx of asylum-seeking children at our border is NOT to build more detention centers! The solution is to release children to their parents. Children need your help, and it’s as easy as sending a text.

Text GO REUNITE to 50409.

Once more, we are compelled to see, and to believe what we see.

It is all about seeing, and doing battle with those who would prefer that we don’t look. In the last administration, the policy known as MPP, better known as Remain in Mexico, turned migrants back into the streets of border towns and cities so dangerous that few dared to cross and report on the devastating results of the policy.

Next week, on Thursday evening, I will join others in welcoming Martín Espada to the latest in the webinar series presented by Witness at the Border. This is a very special event for me.

Martín gives voice to feelings that rattle around inside me, as I witnessed at Tornillo, as I stood at the cross that marked the bank of the river, the cross that bore the name Valéria.

RSVP: bit.ly/MEspada

Melissa and I were on our way home last night, changing planes in Dallas. My phone started vibrating. It was Amy Cohen, of Every.Last.One., an organization that has dedicated itself to bringing together families that have been torn apart by a country that has vilified the human act of migration.

She told me that just a few miles from where I was sitting and waiting for a plane, there were buses with migrant children aboard. Children who had been on the buses for days. They had been eating and sleeping on the buses. They were not allowed off, forced to use the cramped restrooms. No showers.

This week we sent the following statement, along with the names of more than 80 supporting organizations (including at least a dozen from countries other than the U.S.) and many individuals, to the White House, the Departments of Homeland Security and Health & Human Services. We await their reply.

Walk for the Children / Caminata por la Niñez

1. End Title 42 expulsions and admit migrant families on a priority basis.

2. Stop separating children from their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings.

3. Allow parents and other close relatives already in the U.S. to come to the border to pick up their children.

4. Release children QUICKLY to their family in the U.S.

Do you want to know the difference between a shelter and a prison?

It isn’t much of a riddle. A shelter is a place that you need to be. Even if there is sometimes not much food. And the conditions may be rough. It is better than what you might face outside the shelter.

You may be there, like the people in Juarez I visited yesterday, because you fled poverty and hunger and violence. And you traveled thousands of miles with your children to find hope across a border that exists only to deny you that hope.

Because when you crossed, you were arrested and sent back. Everyone I spoke to yesterday knew what Title 42 is.

Juarez, Mexico. This how El Paso looks from the Mexican side of the border on the banks of the Rio Grande. Our host Kary Bre took us down to see the activist graffiti art underneath the Paso del Norte bridge. Kary runs a shelter for migrants who have been denied entry in the US or expelled under Title 42.

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.

Whenever I go out west with Witness at the Border, folks react like I’m making this big sacrifice to drive to El Paso... and I gotta tell ya, nothing could be father from the truth. I fell in love with the Franklin mountain range sitting on the sidewalks during the vigil in Tornillo. Truth is, when this is the road ahead of me, I swell with bittersweet memories of my activist family and the pull to stand with them again for the values we share. Both the road to them and the brief time with them is a deep, abiding joy that gets me through the pain I experience from wandering through life with Eyes Wide Open.

The things we do have consequences. We are told the flutter of a butterfly wing can stir a mighty tempest a world away. And we, clearly, are not butterflies, and we swing something much heavier more clumsily than anything so delicate.

Photograph by Allan Mestel

Dust...

From dust you came to dust you shall return. Words we hear on Ash Wednesday as we remember our mortality and the humility from which we are all created.

On the walk yesterday, when there was a chance, I walked on the dirt. Perhaps, I should’ve barefoot, though, I still felt the connection with the dirt.

Each footstep I considered who has and who will walk today.

I received a letter today from a Quaker Friend with a touching message to pass along to those of us who protested the imprisonment of migrant children in the Homestead detention facility. The message is from a 17-year-old girl who had been held in the camp and now is attending an alternative high school in Seattle. She said they were punished for hugging, crying, and speaking when not allowed. She said they could get glimpses of the protesters outside (us) and could hear us. They were so heartened and encouraged and uplifted, she said. Her message: THANK YOU!

I went to Tornillo yesterday. I had spent well-remembered time outside the gates of what was then a prison camp for what we call unaccompanied minors, better thought of as migrant children. I was there forever. Or for three months.

It was a thousand years ago. Or three years.

I traced the route of the Walk for the Children/Caminata por la Niñez. First I went down to the bridge, the Paso del Norte. It was very early this morning, Sunday, so there were only a few cars coming from Ciudad Juarez, pausing for inspection and creeping out into the under-construction egress to the sleeping and shuttered El Paso streets.

And I, too, pausing, look at the iconic mural of the twin sisters, JRZ and ELP, indigenous girls, I suppose Raramuri, on a wall on Father Rahm Avenue, practically in the shadow of the bridge. The sister cities.

Today community youth and youth from Temple Beth Shalom gathered outside the Homestead Child Detention Center to say Keep Homestead Closed and to remind us that it is next to several toxic superfund sites. Thanks to AFSC for making it happen.

Photos and video by Anna Mulea Greene .