Posts
1/17/2022
Our Letter to the Biden Administration:
Uphold Rights to Full Reparations & Restorative Justice for Families Harmed by Family Separation During Trump Era
1/7/22
There, but for the roll of the dice, go I. I could have been born in extreme poverty, outside the borders and gates that protect my privilege. My skin could have been another color. Despite the science fictionny paradoxes presented by these me-not-me scenarios, they are nothing but an extension of the fair measure of the capacity for empathy we are all born with. Empathy that is ignited when we let ourselves look into the faces of others and imagine their plight.
1/4/21
Remain in Mexico or MPP 2.0: Can Inhumane be Less Inhumane? Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration Ep. 9
LISTEN to Sarah Towle in conversation with 3 immigration experts, SHARE & SUPPORT by becoming a PATRON of WITNESS RADIO.
“We cannot talk about MPP 2.0 without talking about Title 42. That was a really nice way for President Joe Biden to placate his side and then keep Title 42 to placate the other side. Based on an archaic public health law.”-@Charlene D'Cruz #CrueltyIsNotOK #EndMPP
12/31/21
This is a time of sensory overload. All of us have bad news either to dread or suffer. The pandemic is personal, a wolf at our door.
As for the cause that draws us together here, for those that can bear its barrage of tragic news and profound disappointment, we are more and more alone in our concerns.
12/18/21
In honor of #InternationalMigrantsDay (Dec. 18), Witness Radio's Sarah Towle and Exec. Producer Camilo Antonio Perez Bustillo release a special conversation: "What's a Migrant's Life Worth?"
Read and Listen on Medium: What's a Migrant's Life Worth?
12/7/21
What are we to make of the reinstatement and huge expansion of the Remain in Mexico policy? The current administration has gone from the suspension to the abolition to the revival of a policy that formally establishes a bilateral agreement to turn Mexico into a prison camp for asylum seekers, now to include anyone from this hemisphere, including people from new countries in the list of those who can serve their time while waiting for a court date in some of the most dangerous places in the world.
12/6/21
I remember it like it was yesterday. Witnesses from all over joined together in Brownsville, TX, to hold a vigil to #EndMPP and #RestoreAsylum. Now MPP -- one of the most inhumane border policies in US history -- is back. Not only that, it has been expanded by the very president who promised a more humane border.
Join us to discuss the return of the Migrant "Protection" Protocols, Thursday, December 9, 2021, at 4pm ET / 1pm PT.
Register here: https://bit.ly/MPPLite
12/2/21
Mexico and the United Staes will announce this morning an agreement to revive the policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, more commonly called Remain in Mexico. At its heart, it is an agreement that turns certain cities on the northern border of Mexico into a purgatory for asylum seekers, in very dangerous places. Places made dangerous by a cottage industry of kidnap, assault, robbery and rape. That is what it was like before it was briefly suspended, and that is what it is likely to be again.
Image: Alessandra Mondolfi and Josh Rubin with Alessandra’s banner: MPP Kills
11/29/21
If it seems to you that things are getting worse, it is because they are. The fears, real and imagined, that thicken every breath we take are freezing the political landscape into a tableau for the end times. Desperation charges the air. The poor are forced to their feet by the shrinking prospects for a home life where they live, and the rich, well, oddly they live in fear of their outsized share having its belt tightened. And we all, yes all of us, awaken each day to talk of twin apocalypse, climate change that moves its massive anti-glacier toward us, steep and quick enough to cast a mighty shadow; and the plague, which threatens us afresh and ominously with the Greek alphabet.
11/25/21
I remember someone saying that the older we get, the harder it is to feel the simple joy of holidays. The losses have heaped up and surround a celebration with memories of a life that, over time, has had its share of tragedy. There is no place to look where one or another of those tear-stained memories can’t be seen.
11/22/21
Check out this recording of the recent webinar "Unaccompanied Minors: Changing the Narrative & Taking Action" with our own Margaret Seiler, Mario Bruzzone USCRI-Washington D.C., Marisa Limón Garza Hope Border Institute, and Jennifer Podkul Kids in Need of Defense (KIND). Thanks to Welcoming America. https://youtu.be/dnI_aZ0TCMU.
11/19/21
This week Martín Espada won the National Book Award for Poetry for “Floaters.”
The anger and the sorrow I have felt every time Martín has recited “Floaters” within earshot strangely comforts me. It feels good to know that someone has plumbed the depths of pain, and that someone can sing with such resonance that my heart can ignore its assigned rhythm, and can beat as if free for a moment. I think what I feel is called gratitude.
11/15/21
The problem is not migration. It is not migrants.
The problem: the conditions that drive people from their homes, and the borders that stop them.
The insistence that humanity must tolerate the unequal distribution of the wherewithal to live—that production relies on avarice by an accumulating class and perforce relies on the undervaluing and undercompensation of another class—guarantees us that, just as wealth is unevenly shared, so will hardship be. And so we make borders, and we fortify them, to make sure that we can maintain inequality.
11/12/21
In this latest episode of Witness Radio, three African Asylum Seekers Tell of ICE Torture by The WRAP, before and during ICE-Air deportations back to harm on Omni Air International. It's the subject of a new civil rights and civil liberties complaint.
And you'll never guess which corporate giant, it turns out, is now in the business of WRAPping more than just packages...
https://bit.ly/WRMediumWRAP
11/5/21
A couple of days ago, I wrote about the implications of members of the Border Patrol who on social media made a practice of speaking contemptuously of migrants, not to mention profanely about political figures, particularly women, who speak up for migrants. And I suggested a psychological explanation for such ugliness: that the cruelty of our policies is so odious that they have to pretend that the horror is bogus, and that the suffering they see and personally cause in the course of their jobs is not real, or that their victims in some way deserve what they get. To wit, that they are merely punishing criminals, horrible invaders come to take things from us by force, and, in an all-too-familiar trope, despoil our women.