Posts
3/1/23
A few years ago, those of us who started this group began by planting ourselves outside a fenced-in cluster of tents at a port of entry, east enough from the city of El Paso to feel like the middle of nowhere, an irrigated portion of the Chihuahuan desert, right at the river that forms the border with Mexico. In the camp, we had learned, were children, young teens who one way or another had separated from their families.
2/28/23
Activist groups are scrambling, trying to line up arguments that might persuade an indifferent Biden administration to change course on how it might handle the end of the xenophobic policy known in shorthand as Title 42….
…Once again from the Trump playbook, and, for those who remember, reminiscent of Catch-22, Biden revives an idea that complicates the already impossible lives of people trying to save themselves.
An Asylum Ban.
2/3/23
We are watching a new season of the anti-immigrant crowd grinding fresh red meat, this time liberally laced with fentanyl hysteria. Although all signs point to a large business that involves using vehicles to move the drug through our ports of entry, those with skin in this game like to point to men and women and children with naught but the meager goods they carry as the purveyors of a potent drug that is the latest moneymaker for an international consortium.
2/1/23
For the better part of December, I traveled with Witness at the Border, in the Journey for Justice Caravan. We started on Boca Chica Beach at the Gulf of Mexico, gathering before the sun rose to hold a candle light vigil and remembering all our brothers and sisters on both side of the border who have been affected by policies of governments who put economic greed, profits and fear over the lives, dignity and humanity of people. We reached the Pacific Ocean at San Ysidro, CA. on International Migrant Day.
1/19/23
Migrants fleeing their home countries to stand at the gates of ours must stand like beggars. It is the posture we expect and the one, for the most part, they accept. Notwithstanding the lies of those who despise them, they do not not bear arms or malice. They arrive in states of desperation that they are aware might crush them. They dare not raise their voices. They fear the wrath they see before them: armed men wearing uniforms adorned with patches that bespeak authority; and they hear, even if they do not understand the words, the tone of authority and, all too much, derision.
1/18/23
The immigration apparatus of the United States has introduced a smart phone app called CBPOne. It allows the owner of a charged iPhone to register and schedule an appointment with someone at one of a few Ports of Entry along the southern border with Mexico. It collects information about the applicant, like what the basis is for the applicant’s claim of eligibility for entry, typically making a request for asylum, along with information attesting immediate personal vulnerability.
1/13/23
Amen ... For spreading the word and holding our elected officials accountable!"
My Letter To the Editor, holding Abbott's feet to the lump of coal he left at VP Harris's door dropping-off about 100 migrants (including children) in the freezing cold of Christmas Eve 2022, made the January 9th edition of the Brownsville Herald. They are part of My RGV including the Harlingen Valley Morning Star and McAllen Moniter in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. They've also published others, carrying on the tradition established by my dad when my parents were Harlingen residents*, https://myrgv.com/?s=Rev.+Barry+Abraham+Zavah.
Image: John Moore, Getty Images
1/8/23
The debate over how we should respond to the plain fact that there are places in the world that do not offer their inhabitants the things that make life livable—things like safety, food, shelter and hope—that debate seems to force us into dark corners that are premised on the belief that injustice is not only defensible but natural. This narrows the range of our discussions, since they begin from a position that rests on concessions that would lose us the battle, even if we got what we asked for.
12/27/22
“Titulo 42”
Standing with migrants in the Mexican border cities, I heard it a lot. It was the thing that those with dwindling funds and cold hands and hungry children hinged their hopes on: the end of Título 42. The policy that libels darker skinned people with the vilest lie: that they carry a disease that justifies suspending human rights.
12/10/22
He is from Venezuela. We are on the flat-scraped bank of the cement-channeled Río Bravo, watching around fifty people who have crossed to the US side wait patiently in a line to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol up a slope on the opposite bank.
Where we stand had been a small town of tents set up by mostly Venezuelans who got caught in the ever-shifting sands of the US policy of deterrence. The last shift was a collaboration with Mexico that created that small settlement, then wiped it away when considered an eyesore, bulldozed down, scraped clean.
He traveled for three months to get here.
12/19/22
#Journey4Justice2022
We set out on a journey to bring attention to the cruelty of the way we as a nation, indeed as a civilization, respond to people who must take to their feet to escape poverty and violence and despair. Our trip lasted only a few weeks, but gave us a glimpse at the enormity of their journeys, which they tell us, take months, sometimes years.
12/17/22
We come to a pause in our Journey. People we have traveled with begin to scatter, back to their families. There are none that did not weep often, and while our minds are intact, we will not unsee what we have seen. Our efforts were humble, and my head is bowed before the immensity of the injustice of the border, which has been thrown into such high relief in these last days of our Journey of witness.
#Journey4Justice2022
12/13/22
We are on a journey. We call it a Journey for Justice, but it might have been better to call it a journey of discovery. Although many on our journey think we speak some of the the same languages as those we have come to see, most of us are still strangers. There is a lot to learn.
We have encountered places where golfers play along a line marked by ancient containers reinforcing a fence topped by concertina wire, bordering a river patrolled by armed men in boats as another species of pilgrim contemplates crossing that river and throwing themselves upon the mercy of strangers. Asking for help. For shelter in a storm-ripped world. Pidiendo posada. Is there room for them, for their children?
12/15/22
Some of the people migrating to the United States are routed through the deserts of the Southwest by agents of the criminal cartels. This is a very profitable sideline for the sindicatos whose main business is cashing in on the fentanyl traffic through the very ports of entry denied to asylum seekers.
Pay your money and while Title 42 is in force get several chances to get past the border control checkpoints along the road to survival. Get caught and you will return to cartel warehouses to rest until your next try through the desert.
12/14/22
Our eyes are seeing more things than our hearts and minds can absorb. I find myself perched in an unfamiliar place, on the edge of tears. This trip along the border is no easy trek, even for one hovering above the tragedy such as myself, with a home to go back to, with a life free of privation.
