Posts
5/7/23
I’ll join some people in south Texas this week, to witness what happens when a new policy to prevent desperate people from crossing to safety replaces an old policy to do the same. My plane will fly over Allen, Texas, where there was one of those regular massacres that happens because people are running around with guns that amount to personal weapons of mass destruction.
4/30/23
Well, that long anticipated shoe is about to drop. Title 42, which attached itself fraudulently to the COVID pandemic, was a tactic too seductive for the Biden administration to resist, but even the most convenient of crimes against humanity must come to an end, it seems. It had its disadvantages.
4/26/23
A few days ago we heard a report from Matamoros that there was a fire in the encampment along the banks of the river. It was in a section on the far end of the camp, a camp where some say as many as a couple of thousand migrants have set up tents and tarps to shelter themselves while waiting for their chance at the brutal lottery that has been set up by the U.S. immigration policies, policies that grow more arcane every day.
4/19/23
They tell us that the way to address the terrible ordeal of the trip across the Darién Gap, that brutal stretch of extortion and risk, is to keep people from using it to get north, to keep them from following the drinking gourd to a dream of freedom. Freedom from poverty, from crime, from homelessness.
4/3/23
We tend to engage the world at a point in the discussion where we have already conceded, indeed surrendered to, a number of assumptions. That inequality can only be mitigated. That there is not enough food to feed everyone, nor enough houses to shelter the unhoused. That all we can do is round the sharp edges of injustice.
3/18/23
Tom Cartwright, for the leadership team at Witness at the Border, submitted this organizational comment in opposition to the proposed Asylum Ban via https://www.regulations.gov.
Use this template to write your own—make sure to add unique comments—at NoAsylumBan.us. Only 10 more days! The deadline is March 27.
3/10/23
𝗘𝗹 𝗦𝘂𝗲ñ𝗼 𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗼 / 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗗𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺
Tom Kiefer, originally from California moved to Ajo to photograph landscapes. He took a job as a janitor with Customs and Border Patrol.
When emptying the trash, he realized that good food was being disposed of. With permission, he collected the food and gave it to local food pantries.
He then started collecting the personal items of asylum seekers. Passports, birth certificates, private letters, rosaries, bibles, even a CD collection that one played while crossing the desert and so much more.
https://www.tomkiefer.com/
3/8/23
Word trickles out to us that the Homeland security folks have a table onto which they are loading tools and schemes to deal with the migration of people in our hemisphere to the frontiers of United States, notably the southern border. They are lining up possible approaches to substitute for the scam called Title 42, which claimed the right to expel migrants, no questions asked, based on the myth that they would carry COVID to us, to one of the most infected nations on the planet.
3/6/23
Have you been to Matamoros?
It is over an international bridge from Brownsville, Texas. As far as I can tell, it is the southernmost spot on the land border between our two countries. It is a place that migrants are drawn to on their journeys, whether from parts of Mexico itself or from the many places people are leaving to find a way for them and their families to survive. Migrants find themselves stranded there, following the changing rules about how to get into the United States. And the rules change often, lately making it harder and harder to cross that fateful river.
3/1/23
A few years ago, those of us who started this group began by planting ourselves outside a fenced-in cluster of tents at a port of entry, east enough from the city of El Paso to feel like the middle of nowhere, an irrigated portion of the Chihuahuan desert, right at the river that forms the border with Mexico. In the camp, we had learned, were children, young teens who one way or another had separated from their families.
2/28/23
Activist groups are scrambling, trying to line up arguments that might persuade an indifferent Biden administration to change course on how it might handle the end of the xenophobic policy known in shorthand as Title 42….
…Once again from the Trump playbook, and, for those who remember, reminiscent of Catch-22, Biden revives an idea that complicates the already impossible lives of people trying to save themselves.
An Asylum Ban.
