Posts
8/8/22
Journey for Justice, December 2022
Witness at the Border will make a Journey for Justice, beginning at the mouth of the Río Grande on the Gulf of Mexico, reaching the Pacific where a cruel wall cuts into the sea. Join our border pilgrimage in Brownsville, Texas on December 2, or anywhere along the way on this 2-week journey, ending at San Ysidro, California on December 17.
8/3/22
Today is the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called "the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history." A shooter motivated by what he called a "Hispanic invasion" and the racist concept of "replacement" killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
Martín Espada wrote a poem dedicated to his dear friend Camilo Perez Bustillo and El Paso: "The Faces We Envision in the Scrapbook of the Dead." It's about the El Paso Massacre and more--about an advocate for migrants in El Paso, his Mexican children, that haunted feeling that "it could have been us."
7/21/22
People will do what they have to in order to survive, in order to see their children and families have a good life. A life that gives them a chance to have those moments of joy that are possible when they have enough to eat, a place to shelter. And there are people that find that they need to migrate to make that happen. As people have done for as long as there have been people, starting long ago in a place in southern Africa. Where we all came from, to move, to find better sources of food, better climates, less war. And those moments of joy that humans are apportioned in their short sojourns.
7/8/22
We ought to be grateful to the leadership of the Lone Star state. They cut right through the muddle and the sanctimony of our country’s position on the arrival of those driven from their homelands to our border. They don’t pretend, as so many do, that deep down we are working to rebuild a system that acknowledges our common humanity, that our failure to establish humanitarian protocols is just because there is a crisis, among other crises that need our attention.
6/29/22
NEW: Episode 15 of WITNESS RADIO, "Alvaro Enciso's Desert Monument to the Dead." Listen, rate & review at https://apple.co/39WoqZe.
"They never [understand] that when you're poor and this is your only option, you are desperate. You do it anyway....You run out of options in your life."
6/28/22
We face another day in a country, in a world, that does not want to admit a very simple truth, that people have the right to migrate in order to live. …Look at the stacks of bodies left to suffocate in a tractor trailer near San Antonio. …Yes, another day for us to mourn and wonder how it is that we live, and that they no longer do.
6/13/22
Childrens Week 2022, July 12 - 18
“Every year, the children’s community unites to celebrate kids and bring awareness to the challenges that they face.” This link includes events and actions for Children’s Week 2022: https://firstfocus.org/news/childrensweek-2022
#ChildrensWeek2022 #ItsAKidsIssue
Photo by Allan Mestel of Camilo Antonio Perez Bustillo and Marina Vasquez, Brownsville, TX 02-16-2020
6/13/22
The mask is off.
Our government has been pretending that the reason we are enforcing a public health provision with Title 42, expelling asylum seekers without due process because we are afraid that these people are bringing COVID across our borders. …But now, the government has announced that international travelers to our country don’t even have to take a rapid COVID test.
6/4/22
May 23 I went to Brownsville, Tx to stand with Joshua Rubin, Lee Goodman and Allan Mestel. The trip was planned with thin hopes that Title 42 would be lifted and we would witness a renewed asylum process. But, it didn’t happen. So we stood in the park across from the bridge with Team Brownsville members and witnessed the continuation of an inhumane, indefensible policy.
5/31/22
I have been home for a few days now, having returned from a trip to the border. I met friends there, compañeros en la lucha, friends in the struggle for migrant rights. We had hoped for a small victory, a lifting of Title 42, a brutal ani-immigrant policy masquerading as a health order, but it remains where it was, ordered by a man in robes somewhere in Louisiana to stay there for as long as it takes to figure out other tools our government can devise to deny human rights to those who make their way to the margins of our country, hope in their hearts.
5/30/22
I heard a few things during my trip to the border.
I heard the calls of birds on the American side and birds on the Mexican side. The birds on one side of the border sounded the same to me as the birds on the other side. I'm pretty sure they fly wherever they want. No one is trying to stop them. Why are we trying to stop the people? Does it make sense that birds have more of a right to move freely than people do?
5/23/22
Who noticed that we were at the border today?
A Spanish-speaking couple who had just walked in from Mexico. They were taking photos of each other at the sign that says “Welcome to the United States of America.” I used their phone to take a photo of them together. They saw my sign. I don't know if they understood it.