DEATH FLIGHTS - WEEK OF 6 July – please share for transparency

(photo: Save the Children protest, Columbus OH, today. Translation " I am not an animal.")

EARLY NEXT WEEK WE WILL PUBLISH THE JUNE, AND JUNE YEAR-TO-DATE, DEATH FLIGHT SUMMARIES – BOTH DEPORTATIONS AND DOMESTIC.

This group began when a few people, informed by experts in child welfare, assembled a pretty lonely protest at the gates of a child migrant prison in Tornillo, Texas. We were there to draw attention to the unnecessary confinement and consequent traumatization of children who were classed as unaccompanied, many of them separated from adult relatives as they came across the border, having fled violence and poverty in their own countries.

Please watch this extremely well done piece by the New York Times and the Marshall Project illustrating how ICE and ICE Air seed and export COVID. We were proud to have contributed some photos and video from our Witness at the Border actions.

It’s like treading water. You don’t get anywhere, but if the waters ever recede, you’ll still be around.

For now the waters are rising. Asylum is no more. The Matamoros encampment is shut to new arrivals and the refugees cower behind fences, wading through the deluge of southern downpours, and Covid at the gates.

DEATH FLIGHTS - WEEK OF 29 JUNE

GUATEMALA RELENTS - REGULAR FLIGHTS REINSTATED AFTER BLOOD MONEY PROMISE

MEXICO FLIGHTS CONTINUE AT ELEVATED LEVELS

WEEKLY SUMMARY : 81 Flights. Down 20 from the extreme 101 last week and just a bit below the prior 8-week average of 87. Deportations of 15 however, was equal to the last 8-week average.

From my Cuban friend in Trump’s MPP prison camp for asylum seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. By now you know that the law said asylum seekers must wait in the US. In his overwhelming cruelty he just changed that, and like garbage and dumped them in this hell. If we don't fight for them, who will? English translation is after the Spanish.

Witnessing is the politics of seeing. To witness is to participate in the unmasking of the obscured, the hidden. We start by noticing the ragged threads of the shroud covering the inevitable consequences of the hoarding of the material underpinnings of life. We use our eyes to tease the threads from our field of vision, and we see enough, after some time on the ground, to turn these glimpses into narrative. Who is doing what to whom.

A confirmed case of COVID in Matamoros encampment. Two others in isolation awaiting results. Let’s hope, and pray if you do, for containment.

DEATH FLIGHTS – ICE ACCELERATES FLIGHTS AS COVID RAMPS UP IN THE US

21 DEPORTATIONS– THE MOST SINCE THE COVID SHUT DOWN ON MARCH 15

10 COUNTRIES PUNISHED WITH COVID EXPORTATION

WEEKLY SUMMARY – Friday 26 June, for the week of 22 June 2020 (please share for transparency)

101 Flights. UP 22 from 79 last week, and SUBSTANTIALLY over the last 8 week average of 76.

Expulsion and deportation. Expulsion is the mechanism by which all asylum is denied. No hearing. No chance to plead for mercy. Even children. Thousands. Sometimes within an hour you are back on the other side of the border. Sometimes they put you on a plane. Goodbye.

ICE Air continues to seed and spread COVID with no restraint. Here is our Witness at the Border view of all the likely ICE Air death flights through May of this year.

**Total ICE Air Flights YTD 2020: 2,036 **

Total ICE Air Deportations YTD: 388

** Total ICE Air Deportation Returns: 364 **

Total ICE Air Domestic Flights: 1,284

Still hiding from the pandemic, we watch deportation flights, venture timidly out to the streets, some of us, to join in the uprising against systemic racism. My weather app still sounds alerts every time there are storms encroaching on Brownsville, Texas, a few steps across the bridge over the bloody Rio Grande, on the opposite bank, where those storms pour rain onto the clay-rich mud and flood the tents of the people we left behind, in a ragged, fenced camp in Matamoros, Mexico.

DEATH FLIGHTS –ICE AIR CONTINUES TO SEED AND SPREAD OF COVID TO OTHER COUNTRIES AND IN DETENTION CENTERS.

WEEKLY SUMMARY – Friday 19 June, for the week of 15 June 2020

79 Flights this week. Down from the huge 92 last week, and still a bit over the last 8 week average of 75. But, deportation flights were almost the same as last week.

On the subject of the comments period open for response to newly proposed asylum rules...

Here is my comment. It starts further back, it steps us away from the framework we are being asked to work with. My comment asks: by what right do we tell people that the river makes a line that they cannot cross on their journey to a better life. By what just principle do we defend this line with massive military might?

DEATH FLIGHTS – THERE WAS NO SLOWING DOWN IN THE SEEDING AND SPREAD OF COVID

WEEKLY SUMMARY – Friday 12 June, for the week of 8 June 2020

92 Flights this week. – MORE ICE AIR FLIGHTS THIS WEEK THAN IN 7 OF THE LAST 8 WEEKS. THE ONLY WEEK IN THE LAST 8 WITH MORE HAD 94 FLIGHTS.

Good lawyers, lawyers who are good people, fight the battle on the ground for more just treatment of supplicants who come to our borders and line up on the bridges over the rivers polluted with the bodies of the defeated. And there is special language that goes with the job, and that language forgivably hardens into the structure of the battle lines.

The power of bearing witness.

It may seem self-evident, but in the last days we have seen the seismic power of bearing witness. We have not seen the witness who kept her cell phone camera pointed at a man slowly dying under the pressure of oppression, the brutal poetry of watching a man stop breathing, his heart stopping, his voice stilled.

DEATH FLIGHTS – WEEKLY SUMMARY – Friday 5 June, for the week of 1 June 2020

73 Flights this week. Less than last week’s 90 driven by fewer deportation related flights with shuffle flights remaining about the same.

WEEKLY SUMMARY

- 73 Flights, 17 less than last week

- 11 Deportations – down 6 from last week

Life is a long journey. And the struggle, la lucha, is long. The trail taken by those who flee their devastated homes is long, and may not end anytime soon. The heavy slog from captivity to slavery to justice is long, and never over, it seems.