International Human Rights Day Luncheon in El Paso hosted by National Lawyers Guild, San Francisco chapter. We were honored to be joined by local partners, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Initiative, Hope Border Institute, Borderland Rainbow Center & more!

#Journey4Justice2022

Our message: Children should not be locked up anywhere, especially not on a military base. Fort Bliss, Texas. #Journey4justice2022

TORNILLO

It is a place that haunts me. It was chosen to hold captive thousands of children, away from the sight of a nation horrified by what they had heard on a recording smuggled out of a detention center on the other end of the Texas border, in the east. A child crying for its mother.

In this place were congregated children stranded by border policies that incentivized separation, that took children in if they presented themselves without their parents. Desperation did the rest. The policies have different names now, but the desperation is still there today. Children, crossing, alone. Kept from family.

On the Mexican banks near the shadow of International Bridge 2 in Eagle Pass, Texas, a man contemplates crossing. His shoes and socks are off, and he has waded out into the river and stands on a rock shelf, still much closer to Mexico than to the the US side.

There is a cast on one wrist and hand, an ace bandage on his elbow. He looks up and down the river. Closer to the bridge, there are National Guard troops in military camo and personal armor floating in two inflated boats, their automatic weapons slung on their shoulders, four to a boat. On the US side, directly under the bridge, other troops are finishing loading just-crossed migrants onto an unmarked bus, and sent it off, likely toward detention.

We left Marathon and found the fog that rested in a dense bank, like snow, on the horizon. It was miles and miles to the banks of the river that divides the two nations. Miles through patches of fog, and towering peaks and desert desert desert. Some caught glimpses of javelina and deer. I saw only an animal I didn’t have time to identify, that scurried across the road furtively and furrily.

Yesterday we drove two hours to Boquillas Crossing in Big Bend National Park that sits within 801,163 acres of protected land. The feel of this post is different-it looks like we are on a tourist adventure. That’s because this port of entry is different.

This is a port B entry not normally manned with CBP. Although, aware our group was coming, there was a CBP officer on-site for our crossing.

#JOURNEY4JUSTICE , where does it begin ? Will it ever end? Let’s build bridges not walls 🙏🏽💔🙏🏽

Yesterday started with hearing about our travel partners. What brought us here? These are a couple of the stories from the 87 that have joined in from across the country.

I keep thinking- why do people say we have no room?

#journey4justice2022

#borderjustice

We turn a corner, and fragments of remembered images that I didn’t know I had open an abyss, and it feels like I am on its edge, about to fall. Crosses like shrubs planted in front of a sign placed diagonally on the corner. Robb Elementary. We have come to Uvalde, where half a divided town wants to remember, to never let go of their slaughtered children and teachers, and others want it to go away. A star-crossed town, close enough to the border between the US and Mexico that it teems with immigration police, the border patrol, the Texas Rangers.

Light Action at the POE in Brownsville TX. 2022 was a record year for migrant deaths. #nomasmuertes The Journey begins tomorrow at sunrise at Boca Chica Beach. #borderjustice

It's difficult to share this day we spent in Uvalde on the Journey for Justice. It was a heartbreaking, emotional day visiting the tributes at the school and park. The photos and faded flowers and momentos reduced me to tears. When will life be valued over the right to own such lethal toys. When will the lives of all children be valued equally. Several family members bravely spoke of their pain and resolve to change the laws. I know that I can't come close to imagining their pain.

Xavier’s uncle saw the murals for the first time yesterday. He exclaimed, Xavier loved Annabelle. They are together. It seemed to bring him some comfort .

This misty morning #Journey4Justice2022 met on the muddy banks of the Rio Grande in Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. Part of our agenda for the morning was to honor a man who was shot by CBP agents while picnicking with his daughter on the Mexican side of the river….Guillermo Arévalo Pedraza was killed in Nuevo Laredo in 2012. Say his name - Guillermo Arévalo Pedraza. #BorderJustice #Journey4Justice2022

This morning a few of us took the familiar walk across the international bridge to Matamoros, where once an encampment had grown along the banks of the river. It had undergone a growth spurt when the US adopted a policy known as Remain in Mexico, an attempt to discourage asylum seekers by exposing them to the raw danger of the border city that our State Department did then—and still does—classify as one of the most crime ridden places on the planet.

Each of us comes to this Journey for Justice with their own story. The story of what we see along the way is too big for any one person to tell. For each of us, it will take an effort to make sense of what we are looking at, and a special effort to tell the stories of what we see.

Each of our stories is like a strand. The story of our Journey is like a strand, spun to become warp and weft of our testimony. Each attempt to tell the story is an attempt at making sense, to ourselves and others, of what we see.

In only a matter of hours now, we will begin to arrive in Brownsville, Texas, making our way from every part of the country, to begin the Journey for Justice, from the Gulf of Mexico to the great Pacific. For some of us, it will be a reunion. For all of us, it will be a time to give our bodies over to our hearts and eyes. We have long been constrained by a world slowed by the pandemic, watching great waves of reaction and fear fortify the conviction that any recognition of the right of humans to pick up and move in this shared world is somehow a threat.

Nothing divides us the way the wall does.

I am not saying that the wall does a good job of stopping people from migrating, from places of despair to places of hope. It is, in fact, well established that migration cannot be stopped. People can be made to suffer, and are made to suffer and die. The wall is a small element in a scattershot of the weapons of deterrence that are doomed to failure. Failure because migration, people in motion, is as right—as unstoppable—as the rain.

Interviews with the Witness at the Border leadership team:

Lee Goodman talks with Josh Rubin, Karla Barber, Julie Swift, Tom Cartwright, Camilo Perez-Bustillo and Sarah Towle.

In 20 days or so…a group of people from all over the country will convene, having dusted off their shoes and packed their bags for a trip to the southern border. Well, not just TO the border. A trip along the whole damn border. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, with lots of stops in between….

We call it the Journey for Justice. Or el Peregrinaje por la Justicia.

Join us. There is still time.

A wall of boxcars.

Such an age we live in! It finds us wondering if things are worse than ever before. Or does it just feel that way?

… On our border pilgrimage, the Journey for Justice, we know some of what we will find. We know, because we have been speaking to people in the borderlands. They tell us of their utter exhaustion, facing defeat after defeat in their struggles to defend the right of migration, with the clamor of hatred all around them.