Posts
7/9/21
I cannot start at the beginning. It goes back too far, to the reasons people leave their homes, the things that drive them from their homes. Then they reach the border, where policies intensify their desperation. Policies like racist expulsion, and separation driven by cultural self-righteousness.
The result is children without adults who are judged to have committed a crime. Is the crime migration itself? Is the crime being alone? Unaccompanied?
7/7/21
Our enemy is legion. It wears a thousand masks, and must be unmasked a thousand times before we are done. That is why we witness.
Fort Bliss is an army base that holds a prison that wears the mask of a shelter. Its mask is flimsy, but it is held up with fences and guards and distance. It is kept out of sight. The children held there are never seen. All we can see are faraway tents.
6/29/21
When a storm rained heavily on Fort Bliss the day before yesterday, the remaining tents leaked. Water puddled on the rubber tiles that fit together a little like jigsaw pieces. The ventilation system that struggles to cool the tents that sit under the desert sun had the added challenge of humidity.
Fewer than 800 migrant children remain in the makeshift encampment that once held well over 4000 children, when the holding facility was by far the largest de facto child prison in the country. Tents have come down as story after story hits the press describing conditions inside.
6/25/21
Say it out loud -- loud enough for Vice President Kamala Harris to hear:
FORT BLISS IS NO PLACE FOR KIDS!
Listen here: WITNESS RADIO Ep. 2: March for Detained Children
6/24/21
We see things differently. So what we mean when we witness things can be very different depending on our perspectives. Some of us see the suffering of people at the border caused by the barriers we erect to our common humanity. Others see, so they tell us, an earnest attempt to right a ship that nearly capsized into a four year eruption of xenophobia.
6/23/21
“Matamoros Pietá” by Melissa Bowen Rubin
Today we remember Óscar and Valeria.On June 23, 2019, two Salvadoran migrants, father and daughter, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos, drowned crossing the river between Matamoros, Mexico and Brownsville, Texas.
6/20/21
If it were not inflicting terrible pain on desperate humans, it would only seem ridiculous to try to contain the movement of people from places where their homes are gone, where there is no way of working for a living and feeding their families. Telling people they “should not come” in full knowledge of their dire straits would be like a joke of some kind. Like pouring a shaken up beer into a glass and making a fool of yourself trying to keep the foam from overflowing onto the table. Or packing a bigtop full of clowns into a tiny car.
Photo by Allan Mestel
6/10/21
The wind does not stop at the border. Guns and walls and troops and concertina wire barely ripple the currents of whatever river remains along that line. Although it is drawn on the earth, it disappears from a distance, out of sight from the foothills of the Franklin Mountains, the division of El Paso and Juarez blurring before the eyes.
6/4/21
Activism is a humbling experience. Not only does it remind us of how little we can accomplish in this world, but it throws into doubt the assumptions we make about human nature and the social forces that drive the tides in the affairs of humans.
Many of us—and I am thinking of myself here—construct their political strategy from a notion that in all of us can be found a common substrate of ideas about right and wrong, love and hate, righteousness and shame. But I am beginning to have doubts that these are easily found, and if found, may not provide the best basis for leverage, for persuasion.
6/3/21
And the news comes spilling out of Fort Bliss. Remember Fort Bliss? The place where we put children who we have separated from their families with decades of cruelty and greed? The place where it is hard to see the children, because no one is allowed inside. The place where employees must surrender their phones so no pictures can get out. The place where there are children on suicide watch.
6/3/21
Our statement was released to the press today, with sign-ons from partners listed below.
FT. BLISS AND OTHER DETENTION MEGASITES ARE NO PLACE FOR CHILDREN
Ft. Bliss detention facility must be shut down, immediately
NEW TODAY: "Fired Workers Claim Poor Conditions at Ft. Bliss Migrant Shelter," El Paso Times, 6/2/21
Photo: Allan Mestel
5/31/21
It is said from time to time that history is written by those who hold power. It is only a small step further to infer that the manipulation of our social memory serves the purposes of the powerful. That the story that is chiseled into posterity supports a social order. And it follows that the stories of those without the podia of power are rarely told. They can be seen by those who watch closely, but all too quickly are obscured by the steady flow of time, the greatest wave barely a ripple, mostly gone once the eyes that witnessed them close for the last time. The story then goes untold, and we are left to wonder whether those lives and loves and struggles ever happened. Whether most of us ever existed at all.
5/28/21
FT. BLISS AND OTHER DETENTION MEGASITES ARE NO PLACE FOR CHILDREN
Ft. Bliss detention facility must be shut down, immediately
Witness at the Border/Testigos en la Frontera calls for the megasite migrant youth detention facilities--especially at Ft. Bliss--to be shut down immediately. Recent testimonies from staff and volunteers at the site, together with reports from independent observers as reported in the media provide convergent evidence that the tent facility is operating, in effect, as a prison, and not as a shelter for vulnerable youth.
5/27/21
When people migrate, and they always have, it is because things are not going well where they live. And in a world as fraught with inequality and climate change as ours seems to be, migration will be happening at an accelerated pace. If we could make choices as a species, the choices would be simple. We would address the causes of inequality and climate change, while making space for those dislocated. We would, in a word, cooperate.