Posts
11/25/21
I remember someone saying that the older we get, the harder it is to feel the simple joy of holidays. The losses have heaped up and surround a celebration with memories of a life that, over time, has had its share of tragedy. There is no place to look where one or another of those tear-stained memories can’t be seen.
11/22/21
Check out this recording of the recent webinar "Unaccompanied Minors: Changing the Narrative & Taking Action" with our own Margaret Seiler, Mario Bruzzone USCRI-Washington D.C., Marisa Limón Garza Hope Border Institute, and Jennifer Podkul Kids in Need of Defense (KIND). Thanks to Welcoming America. https://youtu.be/dnI_aZ0TCMU.
11/19/21
This week Martín Espada won the National Book Award for Poetry for “Floaters.”
The anger and the sorrow I have felt every time Martín has recited “Floaters” within earshot strangely comforts me. It feels good to know that someone has plumbed the depths of pain, and that someone can sing with such resonance that my heart can ignore its assigned rhythm, and can beat as if free for a moment. I think what I feel is called gratitude.
11/15/21
The problem is not migration. It is not migrants.
The problem: the conditions that drive people from their homes, and the borders that stop them.
The insistence that humanity must tolerate the unequal distribution of the wherewithal to live—that production relies on avarice by an accumulating class and perforce relies on the undervaluing and undercompensation of another class—guarantees us that, just as wealth is unevenly shared, so will hardship be. And so we make borders, and we fortify them, to make sure that we can maintain inequality.
11/12/21
In this latest episode of Witness Radio, three African Asylum Seekers Tell of ICE Torture by The WRAP, before and during ICE-Air deportations back to harm on Omni Air International. It's the subject of a new civil rights and civil liberties complaint.
And you'll never guess which corporate giant, it turns out, is now in the business of WRAPping more than just packages...
https://bit.ly/WRMediumWRAP
11/5/21
A couple of days ago, I wrote about the implications of members of the Border Patrol who on social media made a practice of speaking contemptuously of migrants, not to mention profanely about political figures, particularly women, who speak up for migrants. And I suggested a psychological explanation for such ugliness: that the cruelty of our policies is so odious that they have to pretend that the horror is bogus, and that the suffering they see and personally cause in the course of their jobs is not real, or that their victims in some way deserve what they get. To wit, that they are merely punishing criminals, horrible invaders come to take things from us by force, and, in an all-too-familiar trope, despoil our women.
11/3/21
Barbarians at the Gate: On the Inside
We have watched the border, seen the casual cruelty of those our country posts there, cruelty to people in their liminal, vulnerable condition. We are not surprised at the cruelty of the language, the easy brutality of the words that are exchanged online by the barbarians I speak of. Nonetheless, we are bruised by it, and sickened by knowledge that we ourselves have a hand in it. It is our money and our land and our stranglehold on the wealth of the world that brews the arrogance.
10/29/21
It has been said that until all are free, no one is free. And for those of us who choose to identify with the struggle of the oppressed, the sensation that we are not free is a burden we rise with each morning.
I don’t mean to compare the plight of the hungry and homeless and impoverished to the pain I feel. I only want to acknowledge that chains, though not now around our wrists, waists, and ankles, weigh on those of us who see them. They make us unfree, and not just in the poetic sense in which it is ordinarily spoken.
10/28/21
Witness Update: We kicked off a new season of WATB Webinars on Oct 14, 2021, with a topic befitting the current climate of deporting Black immigrants back to harm en masse: ICE and CBP's Cultures of Impunity: Is Reform Possible? All while recording the highest number of ICE-Air flights since our sky-witnessing began 20+ months ago.
10/26/21
Heather Cox Richardson suggests in her daily essay that the right is fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment to help distract from things like the Jan. 6 revelations, and to aid the slow collapse of many of the things the democrats originally put in the reconciliation package, namely climate change and the expansion of the social programs that are sorely needed.
10/24/21
The situation we find ourselves in is only a continuation of a policy, one that was not new from Trump, although the rhetoric was different: discourage migration of poor people across our southern border. The difference is that one administration trumpeted the cruelty, while this one tries to hide it. The example of the massive airlift of Haitians was an example of how desperate this administration is to hide things, while at the same time failing to do so!
If the policy is to disincentivize migration, there are only a few tools, similar but with variations. Variations on a theme. There’s Title 42, which may have to be phased out if the pandemic is controlled and that lame excuse evaporates. There is metering, using the excuse of processing capacity to make people wait in Mexico, which usually provides a great business for human smugglers. And there is that innovation, MPP, which combines metering with expulsion to wait, a double wait that multiplies the risks of being in brutal places. First you wait to apply, then you wait for a hearing, then you wait for a ruling. Those who survive the wait will have to see if the numbers granted will be higher than under the previous regime. Some are too endangered and discouraged to wait that long.
10/20/21
People are coming. There are stories in newspapers that tell us, in either solemn tones, or nearly astonished, that we as a country are arresting record numbers of people at the border. Some detail, as Witness at the Border has done for dozens of months, flights that (gasp!) carry migrants around the country.
10/12/21
In about three weeks’ time in September, we learned just how efficient the technocratic administration of our Democratic president can be. While he has dampened the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the last president, this president has sent us searching through history for other examples of rapid and massive deportation of immigrants. We have to go back decades to find such examples.
10/11/21
Since Witness at the Border began watching the heartbreaking deportation flights at the small airport in Brownsville, Texas, we have learned to see ICE Air fill the skies with these carriers, our watchers counting, as best they can, the planes and the bodies involved in this grim work.