Posts
11/3/21
Barbarians at the Gate: On the Inside
We have watched the border, seen the casual cruelty of those our country posts there, cruelty to people in their liminal, vulnerable condition. We are not surprised at the cruelty of the language, the easy brutality of the words that are exchanged online by the barbarians I speak of. Nonetheless, we are bruised by it, and sickened by knowledge that we ourselves have a hand in it. It is our money and our land and our stranglehold on the wealth of the world that brews the arrogance.
10/29/21
It has been said that until all are free, no one is free. And for those of us who choose to identify with the struggle of the oppressed, the sensation that we are not free is a burden we rise with each morning.
I don’t mean to compare the plight of the hungry and homeless and impoverished to the pain I feel. I only want to acknowledge that chains, though not now around our wrists, waists, and ankles, weigh on those of us who see them. They make us unfree, and not just in the poetic sense in which it is ordinarily spoken.
10/28/21
Witness Update: We kicked off a new season of WATB Webinars on Oct 14, 2021, with a topic befitting the current climate of deporting Black immigrants back to harm en masse: ICE and CBP's Cultures of Impunity: Is Reform Possible? All while recording the highest number of ICE-Air flights since our sky-witnessing began 20+ months ago.
10/26/21
Heather Cox Richardson suggests in her daily essay that the right is fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment to help distract from things like the Jan. 6 revelations, and to aid the slow collapse of many of the things the democrats originally put in the reconciliation package, namely climate change and the expansion of the social programs that are sorely needed.
10/24/21
The situation we find ourselves in is only a continuation of a policy, one that was not new from Trump, although the rhetoric was different: discourage migration of poor people across our southern border. The difference is that one administration trumpeted the cruelty, while this one tries to hide it. The example of the massive airlift of Haitians was an example of how desperate this administration is to hide things, while at the same time failing to do so!
If the policy is to disincentivize migration, there are only a few tools, similar but with variations. Variations on a theme. There’s Title 42, which may have to be phased out if the pandemic is controlled and that lame excuse evaporates. There is metering, using the excuse of processing capacity to make people wait in Mexico, which usually provides a great business for human smugglers. And there is that innovation, MPP, which combines metering with expulsion to wait, a double wait that multiplies the risks of being in brutal places. First you wait to apply, then you wait for a hearing, then you wait for a ruling. Those who survive the wait will have to see if the numbers granted will be higher than under the previous regime. Some are too endangered and discouraged to wait that long.
10/20/21
People are coming. There are stories in newspapers that tell us, in either solemn tones, or nearly astonished, that we as a country are arresting record numbers of people at the border. Some detail, as Witness at the Border has done for dozens of months, flights that (gasp!) carry migrants around the country.
10/12/21
In about three weeks’ time in September, we learned just how efficient the technocratic administration of our Democratic president can be. While he has dampened the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the last president, this president has sent us searching through history for other examples of rapid and massive deportation of immigrants. We have to go back decades to find such examples.
10/11/21
Since Witness at the Border began watching the heartbreaking deportation flights at the small airport in Brownsville, Texas, we have learned to see ICE Air fill the skies with these carriers, our watchers counting, as best they can, the planes and the bodies involved in this grim work.
9/30/21
NEW
Kidnapped by Uncle Sam! episode 6 of WITNESS RADIO
In a month that history will remember for the US welcoming Afghan refugees fleeing political chaos, violence, and persecution while expelling Haitians fleeing all these things and more, we perhaps lost sight of the nearly 13,000 children still being held captive by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
One man for whom those young souls are always top of mind: Larry Cox. He lost his child to US Customs and Border Protection officials while attempting to bring her to safety in 2011.
9/29/21
The wealthiest nation on earth, with the most powerful military, with a police force at its borders that is larger and better funded than the militaries of most nations, stands ready to defend its wealth against some of the poorest people on the the same planet. The vast empty spaces within our borders, the hungry job market and plenty do nothing to persuade administrations, Democratic and Republican, that they might re-examine, from a practical, moral, and political point of view, their policy of violent prevention as deterrent to migration. Fear of the foreign, marked by color and culture, lies at the root of our immigration politics, and no one with the power to change things is willing to face down the hatred inspired and exploited by this fear.
9/20/21
We have managed to momentarily stanch the flow of refugees across the border at Del Río, Texas. We closed the bridge, yellow-ribboned the shallow crossing at the dam where families waded across. Border Patrol agents in vans and on horseback are rounding up families who penetrated the border, outraging and horrifying an America that fears the pictures and numbers coming from the television cameras that have finally been turned on.
9/20/21
We are here for a while and then we are not. We will all suffer for some of that time; rich and poor will both know loss and sorrow. There is no border that can protect us from all of it, and even the comfort of wealth and privilege does not fully shield us.
Image: Melissa Bowen Rubin
9/19/21
In the dark, as state troopers flashed their lights, Border Patrol began gathering up refugees, mostly from Haiti, and busing them, the first phase of a mighty airlift to remind the world that the border will stand and protect us from the chaos and brutality that swirls around like the whirlwind, our unwelcome inheritance.
