The encampment in Matamoros is much bigger now than it ever was under Remain in Mexico. This despite a steady line of people splashing their way to the opposite bank, which they were doing as I watched, children’s float toys that don’t float all that well anymore strewn across the weeds choking a narrow spot. Rather than the half deflated brightly colored plastic, most whom I watched used a line to work their way along, strung from bank to bank, nylon and yellow.

Executive Summary: April 2023 ICE Air Flights Report

NEW REPORT: ICE Air Flights April 2023 and Last 12 Months

3 years ago from January through mid-March, Witness at the Border was holding vigil in Brownsville standing in protest against MPP and ICE deportation flights - against the inhumane treatment of fellow humans. We witnessed men and women, feet and ankles shackled, being forced onto planes - some while holding children. We witnessed hundreds and hundreds of people forced to remain in Mexico in squalid and unsafe conditions.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you for your work, Joshua, and all the many folks who stood outside of Tornillo until it was shut down. I hope my poem does it some justice. 🙏🏽

“Unqualified Poem” for Joshua Rubin & Amiri Baraka

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.

We will start at the end. Maybe 40 burned bodies, dead. Maybe 30 more who may survive, their lungs forever scarred by the smoke. The numbers imprecise, vague. The list of names and origins incomplete.

Executive Summary: March 2023 ICE Air Flights Report

NEW Report:

ICE Air Flights March 2023 & Last 12 Months

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.

A fire in a detention facility in Juárez, holding men. At last report, 39 dead, the rest injured, at the building with a capacity for 60, last night perhaps holding 68.

It takes a lot of effort to maintain the extreme degree of inequality in the human world. It requires lots of weapons, deep ranks of bureaucratic pettifoggery, and media-driven sleight of hand.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.