Posts
11/11/22
In 20 days or so…a group of people from all over the country will convene, having dusted off their shoes and packed their bags for a trip to the southern border. Well, not just TO the border. A trip along the whole damn border. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, with lots of stops in between….
We call it the Journey for Justice. Or el Peregrinaje por la Justicia.
Join us. There is still time.
10/31/22
A wall of boxcars.
Such an age we live in! It finds us wondering if things are worse than ever before. Or does it just feel that way?
… On our border pilgrimage, the Journey for Justice, we know some of what we will find. We know, because we have been speaking to people in the borderlands. They tell us of their utter exhaustion, facing defeat after defeat in their struggles to defend the right of migration, with the clamor of hatred all around them.
10/19/22
It would take a kind of generosity that humans do not seem to have in abundance to tear down the barriers we have built and continue building to protect what some small numbers of us do have in abundance….The crisis, driven in part by what are known to some of us as “root causes,” the economic exploitation of weaker peoples by stronger ones, combined with changes in the weather and oceans that will drive many from their homes, would be better addressed by cooperation than by retrenchment, but that truth is hidden behind fear.
The southern border, with its bollards and razor wire and assault weapons, is the visible face of that fear.
10/14/22
Venezuelans, driven from their homes by poverty and hunger and drawn by the possibility of a better life in the United States, have been making their way, along with others from other countries similarly afflicted, up along the spine of Central America. They pass through the Darién Gap, a strip of jungle that lies along the way. We are told, by reporters who have made the trip with the families that brave this harrowing place, that most of them, some of them sick, with bones broken and feet blistered, would never do it again.
9/28/22
You draw a line. When you cross that line the rules, the simple rules, change. Here’s a rule: children need their parents, their families, and they should be together. But the line says that adults can be expelled, but children can stay, and be put in places, like military bases, while they are “processed.” So the folks who care about these children, in desperation, send them across that line. The one that changes the rules.
Join us for the Journey for Justice, Dec. 2 - 18: https://bit.ly/JourneyJForm.
8/19/22
All I can say, all I have found to say, is that we should make sure that somebody sees these children, and that these people who travel toward the North Star need to be seen. That we can never let them become the vanished, the disappeared. That we honor them by witnessing them. And by witnessing at not only the margins of national territory but the margins of humanity. And that we see, not just them, but ourselves, by standing on those margins.
8/8/22
Journey for Justice, December 2022
Witness at the Border will make a Journey for Justice, beginning at the mouth of the Río Grande on the Gulf of Mexico, reaching the Pacific where a cruel wall cuts into the sea. Join our border pilgrimage in Brownsville, Texas on December 2, or anywhere along the way on this 2-week journey, ending at San Ysidro, California on December 17.
8/3/22
Today is the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called "the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history." A shooter motivated by what he called a "Hispanic invasion" and the racist concept of "replacement" killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
Martín Espada wrote a poem dedicated to his dear friend Camilo Perez Bustillo and El Paso: "The Faces We Envision in the Scrapbook of the Dead." It's about the El Paso Massacre and more--about an advocate for migrants in El Paso, his Mexican children, that haunted feeling that "it could have been us."
