Well, that long anticipated shoe is about to drop. Title 42, which attached itself fraudulently to the COVID pandemic, was a tactic too seductive for the Biden administration to resist, but even the most convenient of crimes against humanity must come to an end, it seems. It had its disadvantages.

A few days ago we heard a report from Matamoros that there was a fire in the encampment along the banks of the river. It was in a section on the far end of the camp, a camp where some say as many as a couple of thousand migrants have set up tents and tarps to shelter themselves while waiting for their chance at the brutal lottery that has been set up by the U.S. immigration policies, policies that grow more arcane every day.

Thank you for your work, Joshua, and all the many folks who stood outside of Tornillo until it was shut down. I hope my poem does it some justice. 🙏🏽

“Unqualified Poem” for Joshua Rubin & Amiri Baraka

They tell us that the way to address the terrible ordeal of the trip across the Darién Gap, that brutal stretch of extortion and risk, is to keep people from using it to get north, to keep them from following the drinking gourd to a dream of freedom. Freedom from poverty, from crime, from homelessness.

We will start at the end. Maybe 40 burned bodies, dead. Maybe 30 more who may survive, their lungs forever scarred by the smoke. The numbers imprecise, vague. The list of names and origins incomplete.

We tend to engage the world at a point in the discussion where we have already conceded, indeed surrendered to, a number of assumptions. That inequality can only be mitigated. That there is not enough food to feed everyone, nor enough houses to shelter the unhoused. That all we can do is round the sharp edges of injustice.

A fire in a detention facility in Juárez, holding men. At last report, 39 dead, the rest injured, at the building with a capacity for 60, last night perhaps holding 68.

It takes a lot of effort to maintain the extreme degree of inequality in the human world. It requires lots of weapons, deep ranks of bureaucratic pettifoggery, and media-driven sleight of hand.

Tom Cartwright, for the leadership team at Witness at the Border, submitted this organizational comment in opposition to the proposed Asylum Ban via https://www.regulations.gov.

Use this template to write your own—make sure to add unique comments—at NoAsylumBan.us. Only 10 more days! The deadline is March 27.

𝗘𝗹 𝗦𝘂𝗲ñ𝗼 𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗼 / 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗗𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺

Tom Kiefer, originally from California moved to Ajo to photograph landscapes. He took a job as a janitor with Customs and Border Patrol.

When emptying the trash, he realized that good food was being disposed of. With permission, he collected the food and gave it to local food pantries.

He then started collecting the personal items of asylum seekers. Passports, birth certificates, private letters, rosaries, bibles, even a CD collection that one played while crossing the desert and so much more.

https://www.tomkiefer.com/

Word trickles out to us that the Homeland security folks have a table onto which they are loading tools and schemes to deal with the migration of people in our hemisphere to the frontiers of United States, notably the southern border. They are lining up possible approaches to substitute for the scam called Title 42, which claimed the right to expel migrants, no questions asked, based on the myth that they would carry COVID to us, to one of the most infected nations on the planet.

Have you been to Matamoros?

It is over an international bridge from Brownsville, Texas. As far as I can tell, it is the southernmost spot on the land border between our two countries. It is a place that migrants are drawn to on their journeys, whether from parts of Mexico itself or from the many places people are leaving to find a way for them and their families to survive. Migrants find themselves stranded there, following the changing rules about how to get into the United States. And the rules change often, lately making it harder and harder to cross that fateful river.

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.

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.

Remember Trump's Muslim Ban? Biden is about to impose an Asylum Ban.

On immigration, on the human rights of people seeking to migrate, Biden is failing. #NoAsylumBan

bit.ly/AsylumRally Tomorrow in DC!

𝐇𝐎𝐏𝐄 𝐅𝐀𝐈𝐓𝐇 & 𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐈𝐋𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄

𝐉𝐨𝐲𝐟𝐮𝐥 𝐮𝐩𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐳𝐮𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐧 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫

After many failed attempts to reschedule an appointment- on Saturday the daughter in law and her children were able to cross into the US.

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.

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.

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.

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.