borderlinks trip

Crossing Bordersan experiential learning trip

to Tucson, AZ and Nogales, Mexico

sponsored by Unitarian Universalist Association

www.uua.org

with BorderLinks

www.borderlinks.org

January 23-26, 2012

Participants:Rev. Peter Morales, Phyllis Morales, Steve Sealy, Dea Brayden, Revs. Bill & Barbara Hamilton-Holway, Rev. Harlan Limpert,

Elinor Mattern, Ramon Urbano, Rev. Eric Cherry,

BorderLinks guides: Tito Bojorquez and Susanna McKibben

Tuesday, June 26, 12

http://www.borderlinks.org


BorderLinks

BorderLinks is an organization in Tucson that educates delegations about what is happening along the US/Mexico border through tours and introduces participants to other organizations involved in immigration issues. www.borderlinks.org

Susanna McKibben, an American, and Tito Bojoroquez, a Mexican, are our teachers and guides at BorderLinks. Healthy meals are cooked on the premises and sharing and spiritual reflection are encouraged throughout the tour.




The first presenter was the public relations person for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE.) He showed a film that portrayed border crossers as dangerous individuals who are a threat to Americans. Of 375,000 undocumented people detained while crossing the border since 9/11, not one has been held as a terrorist although the buildup of the border was justified as a response to 9/11.

ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement


We had a break from talking to glean oranges and grapefruit for the Refugee Harvesting Network. Tucson is a center for refugees from all parts of the world and this volunteer group organizes gleaning operations all over the area that particularly benefit the refugees and helps them integrate into the community.

Harlan uses a picking basket for reaching the high fruit while Peter gets the low hanging fruit.

http://www.iskashitaa.org/

Refugee Harvesting Network


http://www.iskashitaa.org

http://www.iskashitaa.org

Phyllis and Susanna took the high road by climbing trees and walls to get that very last one.


We ended up with two truck loads of beautiful fruit that would otherwise have gone to waste.

Tito, Elinor, Ramon, Bill, Barbara, Harlan, Susanna, Dea, Phyllis, Eric, Peter


This artwork had been along the Mexican/US border until recently when the wall was replaced by a larger one. This artwork is now on the Univ. of Arizona campus in Tucson. The figures were not allowed on the US side of the wall.


Scholarships A-Z

We met with undocumented students, brought to the US as children, who have graduated from high school with top grades and are now unable to attend college due to restrictive anti-immigration laws. They participate in an organization called Scholarships A-Z to help undocumented students like themselves apply for scholarships that don’t require citizenship. These are few and far between.

These students broke into tears of shame and frustration when recounting how their classmates would ask them, “Where are you going to college?” They couldn’t reveal that they are going nowhere because they are undocumented. That would put them at risk of deportation. These are students who would benefit from the DREAM act which did not pass Congress. www.scholarshipsaz.org


http://www.scholarshipsaz.org

http://www.scholarshipsaz.org

Gene LeFebvre from the organization No More Deaths showed us a map of the border area which pinpoints the location of immigrants whose bodies have been found. With the new wall and increased border patrolling, immigrants are forced farther out into the desert. Thousands have died; several hundred every year. More immigrants have died crossing the border than US combatants in all the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Then we headed out into the desert ourselves.

http://www.nomoredeaths.org/

No More Deaths


http://www.nomoredeaths.org

http://www.nomoredeaths.org

We walked along a rough, barely visible trail used by immigrants. They travel this at night with no light. In the winter the temperatures can get below freezing at night and in the summer over 110 degrees during the day. It takes at least three very long days on two gallons of water to get to a pick up point.


We climb to the top of the ridge where a memorial site has been laid for a teenager found dead here. Volunteers for No More Deaths leave bottles of water along the immigrant trails year round and search for people who are dead or dying. Ones who cannot keep up, especially women with children, are sometimes abandoned by the guides or “coyotes.”


The trails go through incredibly rough, steep and dry countryside for as far as the eye can see.


Walking at night makes this plant particularly dangerous.


It is a profound experience to be in this cruel and desolate place and know that people are so desperate they will attempt this crossing again and again to get back to their family in the States or look for employment to feed those at home.


On a cheerier note, we visited Casa Mariposa, an intentional community of five who do what they can to support immigrants who have been caught and are in the process of deportation. Private for-profit detention centers will hold immigrants from months to years at an a rate of $125 per person per day paid by the federal government. Sometimes they are released (at midnight at the bus station in Tucson) on bail. Members of Casa Mariposa are there to give them a place to stay and a warm meal. They are known as the Restoration Project Community. www.facebook.com/RestorationProjectCommunity

Restoration Project Community


http://www.facebook.com/RestorationProjectCommunity




We enter Nogales, Mexico where this white bus is dropping off its daily load of deportees.

Nogales, Mexico


A half mile across the border into Mexico is the Kino Border Initiative run by the Jesuits. In previous years local women would bring food to the deportees huddled under the bridge and then the Jesuits set up a lunch room. Every day they provide lunch, a smile and a handshake to people who failed in their effort to cross or were apprehended by ICE in the US and eventually deported. www.kinoborderinitiative.org

Kino Border Initiative


http://www.kinoborderinitiative.org

http://www.kinoborderinitiative.org

Father Pete, in the straw hat, talks about the Kino Border Initiative. He continues doing this ministry every day in spite of the enormity of the problem with no end in sight.


In a tiny kitchen, women cook rice, beans and tortillas for at least 80 people. The women sit at one table and men fill the other five.


We greeted each immigrant with a smile and a handshake, then formed a bucket brigade to pass the plates to the tables.


After lunch, we had an opportunity to listen to their stories. The man on the left, who was talking with Peter, was fluent in English. He had lived in the US for 16 years and his two children are US citizens. He was stopped for allegedly not wearing a seatbelt and, since he didn’t have a driver’s license, he was jailed. He has spent the last eight months in a detention facility and then was deported to Nogales, Mexico where he has no connections and no where to go. Elinor spoke to three men, one from Honduras was trying to decided whether to go there or back to the US. The man with the yellow plate had lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 16 years. He has a two-year-old there so is planning to go back. Another man lived in Phoenix for ten years and primarily did landscape work. He is originally from Chiapas and was planning to travel by bus (3-5 days) to see his family. The last time he saw them was when he was about 12 years old. He wasn’t sure if he would try going back to the US.


One man’s feet were totally bandaged and he could barely walk. But after lunch they all left to who knows where.


We visited the new wall made of steel posts filled with concrete and rebar. When the US construction crews knocked down the corrugated iron that made up the old wall, Mexicans hauled it away to use for their own home building projects.


The wall stretches for miles in both directions and is lined with surveillance towers and flood lights. A US border patroller we talked with said that people get through it anyway. “They’re very creative,” he says. He likes being on border patrol. “It’s fun.”


We stayed in Nogales, Mexico overnight at Hogar de Esperanza y Paz, Home of Hope and Peace (HEPAC). A sister organization of BorderLinks, HEPAC was founded by locals to feed and care for hungry neighborhood children whose parents were working in the factories. HEPAC provides food and lodging for BorderLinks delegations and adult education for people in the neighborhood including a Women’s Jewelry Cooperative and baking and arts workshops.

HEPAC: Home of Hope and Peace

Director, Jeannette Pazos


Neighborhood which HEPAC serves.


Nogales is a center for US and foreign manufacturing plants that benefit from low wages, weak labor law enforcement, lax environmental regulations and NAFTA tax benefits.

Across the street from this factory is a neighborhood that started out as shacks on the hillside. With the signing of NAFTA in 1994, cheap US subsidized corn forced 2 million small farmers off their land and into cities to work in factories. Immigration to the US also doubled since NAFTA.


We have a delicious lunch at the home of Alma, who cooks at HEPAC, in the home that she built in one of the most poverty stricken areas of Nogales.

Dea is in the doorway at right.


We are all captivated by 18 month old Christian who is fascinated by the iPhone.


Although Christian is not yet talking, he pulls up a chair and joins the conversation in the front yard.


We walk through this neighborhood which is one of the poorest in Nogales. People are essentially “squatters” in this draw and use whatever materials they can find to create a shelter. Although the weather is pleasant in January, this becomes blistering hot in the summer.


http://www.immigrationforum.org/images/uploads/2010/OperationStreamlineBackgrounder.pdf

http://www.citypages.com/2010-10-20/news/operation-streamline-an-immigration-boondoggle/2/

Back in Tucson, we visited the Federal Courthouse where 80 recently captured immigrants are shackled hand and foot and “processed” in batches. They are encouraged to plea guilty by the public defender and sentenced to jail time. Instead of being a misdemeanor, they now have a federal conviction and if caught a second time they will have a felony record. In spite of the horrendous costs, this has not been a deterrent to people who are trying to reunite with their families. See the links below for more information.

Operation Streamline






We came back with so much to ponder. We made valuable friendships and connections that will help us confront this tragedy of US-Mexican relations that brings suffering to so many innocent people.

Steve Sealy, Dea Brayden, Tito Bojorquez, Phyllis & Peter Morales, Bill Hamilton-Holway, Eric Cherry, Harlan Limpert, Barbara Hamilton-Holway, Elinor Mattern, Ramon Urbano, Susanna McKibben


borderlinks trip

Documents

undocumented students

high fruit

border crossers

usmexico border

mexicanus border

phyllis morales

borderlinks guides

immigration issues