Posts
7/25/21
I am in the south of Mexico, in a city not terribly far from the Guatemala border. The weather is cool, slightly chilly in the mornings until the sun comes up. This morning I linger in my room, loosening my fingers on my guitar, and sitting down to write this.
I spend so much of my time looking at the dysfunction of the world in my everyday life that I forget what wonder I feel at the miraculous way the human race works together. Usually, when I ponder this, I think of how many of us manage to get into cars and drive these tons of metallic death without incident, consciously cooperating enough to reach our destinations unhurt, alive and unimpressed. How the hell do we do it?
7/17/21
In Haddox Park, bordered on one side by fencing that surrounds all of Fort Bliss, people filter in to join a protest against the migrant child prison held inside, far from our sight.
We drove around yesterday, straight from the airport, to get a look at the cavernous tents where the children are lined up on low bunks like cordwood. We can see very little with our eyes, and must rely on reports that shock even our battle hardened souls.
7/15/21
On Saturday, Witness at the Border will join with others from across the country at the gates of Fort Bliss, to stand once again in protest of the tragic practice of imprisoning migrant children, this time on the largest military base in the country. We will raise our signs and our voices.
We will raise our eyes. We will once again bear witness to the moral failure of a policy toward people that denies them a human right. The right to migrate in order to survive. Whether they flee the ravages of climate change or the consequences of political and economic persecution, their right must be recognized and honored.
7/12/21
I was recently asked why it is that the United States has so much trouble getting its immigration policy right. It seemed to the questioner that we were failing, no matter what the party in charge.
It seems that way to me, too. Here we are, hoping for relief from a presidential term of extraordinary cruelty, and we find ourselves looking at policies that are still causing great suffering. Expulsion of people creating massive camps beneath our southern border, hungry and exposed. Children in tents huddled by their dusty bunks, losing track of who they are, and why they are alive.
Painting by Melissa Bowen Rubin
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.
