Class lines. Racial lines. Cultural and ethnic lines. And it should come as no surprise that those are exactly the categories along which our immigration policy is drawn. And that all those lines are deeply etched into the political earth along those strong borders.

At the border, which I just left yesterday, it is quieter than usual. The thousands of people waiting for a chance to cross are being held back from presenting themselves at the ports of entry by, of all people, Mexican authorities. Uniformed functionaries stand at the foot of the bridge in Mexico to make sure that only people who have appointments through CBPOne can reach the CBP officers that stand in the middle of the arc that spans the river. The others are being prevented from even asking for a chance.

Migrant camp of Matamoros, MX. First day of many of rain. Mexico is not allowing access to the bridge for asylum seekers without CBP One appointments today, after yesterday allowing.

Standing on the Mexican side of the border, I hear a recorded voice. It comes from the American side, across the river that separates the two countries. Again and again, it says the same thing over a loudspeaker, in Spanish. My companion translates for me. The voice is saying, “Stay in Mexico. Do not cross the river.” It is the same message that Vice President Kamala Harris voiced two years ago. “Do not come,” she said, speaking from a podium during a visit to Guatemala, standing next to the President of that country. Vice President Mike Pence delivered the same message three years before that, also in Guatemala. This time, the message is being broadcast directly to the people who want to be here. Reinforcing the message are three rows of razor wire, and at the top of the riverbank, behind the wire, are Texas National Guard troops carrying rifles.

“Go back. Go back.” This from the men carrying automatic rifles, above the families struggling to keep their footing on the US bank of the Río Grande. They had just swum across, using inflated pool toys to keep their children’s heads above the water.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and a couple of his fellow senators came to Brownsville, Texas to say that the people seeking asylum are actually an invasion of Chinese members of Mexican drug cartels, rapists, child sexual abusers, and slavers, supported by President Biden, VP Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC in her white pantsuit. Joshua Rubin, founder of Witness at the Border, stood among the reporters, holding a sign.

Photo: Allan Mestel

Bus after bus of migrants who had just been released from custody were dropped off by the US government today at the bus station in Brownsville, Texas, so they can continue their journeys, now legally in the US. People, many of whom had traveled for months and had camped outside our gates for an untold stretch of time and had been confined in our detention centers were now taking their first steps of freedom. I stood on the sidewalk holding a sign that said, “Open Every Door – Welcome All Immigrants.” The new arrivals couldn't read my sign. It didn't matter. “Bienvenidos!” I called to them. Welcome! “Gracias!” they said as they smiled back.

We are down in the Río Grande Valley for what is billed as a monumental shift in our country’s strategy for handling the people who migrate to our southern border. Title 42 goes away at 11:59 tomorrow night, and some new rules that weaponize the section of law known as Title 8 go into effect.

They put on a show for us today.

A couple of dozen members of the Texas National Guard assembled on a road near the border and marched a few yards, just so the news cameras could get pictures of them marching in their riot gear. But they weren't going anywhere and there was no riot.

Photo: Allan Mestel

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.

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.

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.