Posts
6/13/22
Childrens Week 2022, July 12 - 18
“Every year, the children’s community unites to celebrate kids and bring awareness to the challenges that they face.” This link includes events and actions for Children’s Week 2022: https://firstfocus.org/news/childrensweek-2022
#ChildrensWeek2022 #ItsAKidsIssue
Photo by Allan Mestel of Camilo Antonio Perez Bustillo and Marina Vasquez, Brownsville, TX 02-16-2020
6/13/22
The mask is off.
Our government has been pretending that the reason we are enforcing a public health provision with Title 42, expelling asylum seekers without due process because we are afraid that these people are bringing COVID across our borders. …But now, the government has announced that international travelers to our country don’t even have to take a rapid COVID test.
6/4/22
May 23 I went to Brownsville, Tx to stand with Joshua Rubin, Lee Goodman and Allan Mestel. The trip was planned with thin hopes that Title 42 would be lifted and we would witness a renewed asylum process. But, it didn’t happen. So we stood in the park across from the bridge with Team Brownsville members and witnessed the continuation of an inhumane, indefensible policy.
5/31/22
I have been home for a few days now, having returned from a trip to the border. I met friends there, compañeros en la lucha, friends in the struggle for migrant rights. We had hoped for a small victory, a lifting of Title 42, a brutal ani-immigrant policy masquerading as a health order, but it remains where it was, ordered by a man in robes somewhere in Louisiana to stay there for as long as it takes to figure out other tools our government can devise to deny human rights to those who make their way to the margins of our country, hope in their hearts.
5/30/22
I heard a few things during my trip to the border.
I heard the calls of birds on the American side and birds on the Mexican side. The birds on one side of the border sounded the same to me as the birds on the other side. I'm pretty sure they fly wherever they want. No one is trying to stop them. Why are we trying to stop the people? Does it make sense that birds have more of a right to move freely than people do?
5/23/22
Who noticed that we were at the border today?
A Spanish-speaking couple who had just walked in from Mexico. They were taking photos of each other at the sign that says “Welcome to the United States of America.” I used their phone to take a photo of them together. They saw my sign. I don't know if they understood it.
5/22/22
There is an odd quality to waiting for nothing to happen….We don't expect the border to be flung open tomorrow. A judge said it can't be. The border guards will show up for a day of work that is like every other day for the past two years, in which their main job is to make sure no one gets in and nothing unusual happens.
#WitnessAtTheBorder #OpenEveryDoor
5/19/22
A few of us witnesses will journey down to Brownsville, Texas, to join our brothers and sisters to do what we know how to do: watch. To bear witness. While we are there we will visit a place that has never left our hearts, and the people who are the heart and soul of the struggle for the right to migrate, the right to live.
5/13/22
The news we learned that some folks associated with QAnon had set themselves up near the Arizona border with Mexico in order to intercept minors crossing into the U.S. was horrifying for many of us to hear. The details of their little operation, that they were investigating the relatives of these children to make sure they weren’t pedophiles, even going so far as to visit their homes, were chilling.
5/3/22
NEW: Episode 13, “Who Gets Welcomed? Who Gets to Move?”
Watch teaser here: Teaser, Witness Radio Ep. 13
4/7/22
Majorkas has instructed the people who encounter migrants seeking asylum at our southern border that they are to use discretion when they decide whether to use the machinery for immediate expulsion under Title 42, the policy that pretends to be a health order, but is actually a blunt instrument for bypassing actual immigration laws.