Melissa and I were on our way home last night, changing planes in Dallas. My phone started vibrating. It was Amy Cohen, of Every.Last.One., an organization that has dedicated itself to bringing together families that have been torn apart by a country that has vilified the human act of migration.

She told me that just a few miles from where I was sitting and waiting for a plane, there were buses with migrant children aboard. Children who had been on the buses for days. They had been eating and sleeping on the buses. They were not allowed off, forced to use the cramped restrooms. No showers.

This week we sent the following statement, along with the names of more than 80 supporting organizations (including at least a dozen from countries other than the U.S.) and many individuals, to the White House, the Departments of Homeland Security and Health & Human Services. We await their reply.

Walk for the Children / Caminata por la Niñez

1. End Title 42 expulsions and admit migrant families on a priority basis.

2. Stop separating children from their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings.

3. Allow parents and other close relatives already in the U.S. to come to the border to pick up their children.

4. Release children QUICKLY to their family in the U.S.

ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 3 May 2021.

Flights of 98 for the week down from the record 119 of last week and 2 above prior 6-week average. BUT well over the March weekly average of 75 and significantly over February at 44 per week.

Shuffle flights remained at elevated levels resulting from continuing, but modified, lateral flights to El Paso for Expulsion into Juarez. There were 2 lateral flights from Brownsville and 7 from Yuma. 8 arrived for expulsions in El Paso and only 1 in San Diego this week. The week of 8 March, 14 Lateral flights went to El Paso from Brownsville, and between then and this week 1 flight per day went to El Paso and 1 to San Diego from Brownsville.

NEW REPORT: ICE AIR Flights April 2021 and Last 12 Months

Do you want to know the difference between a shelter and a prison?

It isn’t much of a riddle. A shelter is a place that you need to be. Even if there is sometimes not much food. And the conditions may be rough. It is better than what you might face outside the shelter.

You may be there, like the people in Juarez I visited yesterday, because you fled poverty and hunger and violence. And you traveled thousands of miles with your children to find hope across a border that exists only to deny you that hope.

Because when you crossed, you were arrested and sent back. Everyone I spoke to yesterday knew what Title 42 is.

Juarez, Mexico. This how El Paso looks from the Mexican side of the border on the banks of the Rio Grande. Our host Kary Bre took us down to see the activist graffiti art underneath the Paso del Norte bridge. Kary runs a shelter for migrants who have been denied entry in the US or expelled under Title 42.

In the dilapidated, empty streets of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, thousands of “pink crosses” adorn telephone poles. Each represents a woman who has been murdered there. On the Juarez side of the Paso del Norte bridge, looking toward the United States, a large black cross against a pink background bears the words “Ni Una Mas”: Not one more.

Whenever I go out west with Witness at the Border, folks react like I’m making this big sacrifice to drive to El Paso... and I gotta tell ya, nothing could be father from the truth. I fell in love with the Franklin mountain range sitting on the sidewalks during the vigil in Tornillo. Truth is, when this is the road ahead of me, I swell with bittersweet memories of my activist family and the pull to stand with them again for the values we share. Both the road to them and the brief time with them is a deep, abiding joy that gets me through the pain I experience from wandering through life with Eyes Wide Open.

ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 26 April 2021. (Photo: Plane in El Paso on 29 April with children to be detained at Ft. Bliss - Tom Cartwright)

Second highest number of weekly flights over past 12 months at 119 (ti2 weeks at 126).

Second highest number of weekly shuffle flights since recording 1/1/2020 at 97.

Removal flights remain low at 9, which is becoming the new normal now. The prior 6-week average is now 9. In February it was about 16 and in January closer to 20.

Domestic shuffle flights close to the record level of 104 at 97.

The things we do have consequences. We are told the flutter of a butterfly wing can stir a mighty tempest a world away. And we, clearly, are not butterflies, and we swing something much heavier more clumsily than anything so delicate.

Photograph by Allan Mestel

Dust...

From dust you came to dust you shall return. Words we hear on Ash Wednesday as we remember our mortality and the humility from which we are all created.

On the walk yesterday, when there was a chance, I walked on the dirt. Perhaps, I should’ve barefoot, though, I still felt the connection with the dirt.

Each footstep I considered who has and who will walk today.

I received a letter today from a Quaker Friend with a touching message to pass along to those of us who protested the imprisonment of migrant children in the Homestead detention facility. The message is from a 17-year-old girl who had been held in the camp and now is attending an alternative high school in Seattle. She said they were punished for hugging, crying, and speaking when not allowed. She said they could get glimpses of the protesters outside (us) and could hear us. They were so heartened and encouraged and uplifted, she said. Her message: THANK YOU!

I went to Tornillo yesterday. I had spent well-remembered time outside the gates of what was then a prison camp for what we call unaccompanied minors, better thought of as migrant children. I was there forever. Or for three months.

It was a thousand years ago. Or three years.

I traced the route of the Walk for the Children/Caminata por la Niñez. First I went down to the bridge, the Paso del Norte. It was very early this morning, Sunday, so there were only a few cars coming from Ciudad Juarez, pausing for inspection and creeping out into the under-construction egress to the sleeping and shuttered El Paso streets.

And I, too, pausing, look at the iconic mural of the twin sisters, JRZ and ELP, indigenous girls, I suppose Raramuri, on a wall on Father Rahm Avenue, practically in the shadow of the bridge. The sister cities.

Today community youth and youth from Temple Beth Shalom gathered outside the Homestead Child Detention Center to say Keep Homestead Closed and to remind us that it is next to several toxic superfund sites. Thanks to AFSC for making it happen.

Photos and video by Anna Mulea Greene .

ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 19 April 2021: RECORD WEEK.

Highest number of weekly flights over past 12 months at 126 (tied week of 10/25/2020).

Record High number of weekly shuffle flights since recording 1/1/2020 at 104.

Removal flights remain low at 9, which is becoming the new normal now. The prior 6-week average is now 9. In February it was about 16 and in January closer to 20.

I’m sitting at Gate B27 at LaGuardia, waiting for the flight to Dallas, connecting to a flight to El Paso, to begin boarding. El Paso, for those not familiar, is the US part of a larger city, Ciudad Juárez, which is just across a concrete-channeled section of the Río, called Grande on this side, Bravo on the other.

As of 21 April there were 2,175 kids in CBP custody, down significantly from yesterday by 543 as 972 kids were transferred to HHS. We heard about 500 kids were going to Dallas EIS and we witnessed 4 likely flights with kids to Dallas last night and 1 mid day today. Long Beach EIS opens today with 150 kids. The 972 transfers was the largest number since 29 March. Apprehensions were 419, a little lower than the past week.

It is so much harder, so much more painful, to protect our privilege by building walls and carrying guns, than it is to open our hearts and hands, to stop cleaving to our fear. Our border, the one we maintain to keep out migrants, is not our strength, but our weakness.

So many live in the fear that we will lose what we have. We celebrate free markets and a flimsy sense of social safety, and so few of us are free. Who are we protecting against the “invaders”? The poor and hungry that live in our shadows? The beggars with open hands along the city streets and at stoplights and under bridges everywhere in this land of the free?

NEW STATEMENT from WITNESS AT THE BORDER: Walk for the Children: Caminata por la Niñez

Sign On to the statement.

Art: “Children in Cages,” by Sonya Fe