Near the Border, A Trail of Tears

Denver Post
OPINION
Near the border, a trail of tears
By Chandra Russo
6/14/2009

It is the threatening hour of the day. At just 10 a.m., we plod on in 100 degree heat under a vicious sun. Even the desert insects have stopped their rattling below the dry burn.

I sip at my water bottle. I find it difficult to quench my thirst without filling my belly to sloshing. My lips are chapped. My joints ache as we continue into our fourth day.

About 50 of us are walking the Migrant Trail, a 75-mile trek over seven days through Arizona's border lands. We follow the general path taken by so many migrants forced into this remote, brutal desert. We begin in Sasabe, Mexico, a mile south of the border, and head toward Tucson, traveling just east of the Baboquivari range and the Tohono O'odham Nation.

Despite the discomfort, I recognize the immense beauty of this place, stark peaks, fierce but glorious cacti flowering everywhere. The land is saturated with the rich history of peoples and fragile ecosystems that have made this place home for centuries.

The Migrant Trail began in 2003 with about 20 members of this border community. After years of setting out water in a helpless attempt to curb migrant deaths, having recovered far too many human remains, these 20 wanted to experience the journey and expose the daily reality out here. They commit to walk yearly until the deaths stop.

In the years since, many have joined them. This year, five students and their professor from Manitoba, Canada, have come to learn more about the other U.S. border. A French sociologist has driven from California, motivated by his own immigration experience and the immigrant students in his classroom. Many are called by their faith to walk — an Argentine missionary living in the Mexican town of Altar, a nun from Chicago, and a Franciscan monk who walks in his robes.

This is my second year on the Migrant Trail. I was invited in 2007 to better understand human rights issues on the border. In returning, I am reminded of the urgency of fixing the nation's broken immigration system.

Our walk comes at a conspicuous political moment. A week ago, 700 people from around the country convened on Washington to meet with Congress, demanding a comprehensive immigration reform package be passed within a year. Yesterday, hundreds packed into a church in Northglenn as Colorado Congressman Jared Polis and Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez heard testimony from families torn apart by our immigration system. And this Wednesday, President Obama will pull both parties together to push this same idea. This reform has the potential to save lives.

Here's the bottom line when it comes to sealing our southern border: It doesn't work.

In the decision to cross to the United States, economic forces and familial ties trump walls, material or virtual. Since the mid-90s when we cut off the urban crossing points of San Diego and El Paso, and began implementing the latest in military technology, the number of undocumented in the country has more than doubled from 5 million to 12 million. While the most aggressive and expensive border enforcement has forced migrants into ever more perilous crossings, thousands of deaths have proven to be no deterrent to those facing dehumanizing poverty at home.

Pointing to a recent decline in immigration to the U.S., we see that the economy, not border policy, is the determining factor. Any measurable drop begins about four years ago, when our economy began to decline. There were no dramatic shifts in border policy at that time, making it obvious that fewer job opportunities are what stemmed the flow.

After being out here myself with all the comforts we are afforded as walkers, what is surprising to me isn't that people have died. It's that anyone makes it at all. I remark at this as we pass abandoned backpacks along Route 86, signs of migrants who likely survived many days in the desert to be picked up by vehicles.

We look back over the terrain we have walked on our final morning. "Our killing fields," offers a nurse who regularly resuscitates migrants near heat stroke in her hospital.

There is a policy fix for this. We can allot a realistic number of immigration visas so that needed workers and families can safely cross between countries. We can rethink the way we police our southern border.

Already this year, 79 of the dead have been recovered. The season of death, deep summer, has not even begun.

Chandra Russo is communications coordinator at the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC), based in Denver

David McCabe also posted some beautiful pictures from the Walk at the following link: http://www.dsmccabe.com/David_S._McCabe/Photos_From_the_Migrant_Trail.html
Tony put up some amazing pictures as well at http://www.tsjugephd.com/PCC_Courses/Migrant_Trail_2009.html

Aurora Tragedy: Avoiding Misplaced Blame

Last Thursday in Aurora, two women and an infant child were killed in a horrendous and tragic car crash. When something so unimaginable occurs, our entire community is thrust into mourning.

However, in the aftermath of this terrible event, the discussion has turned fully from the tragedy itself into what Tom McGhee of The Denver Post is fairly calling "the car crash blame game." Rather than allowing a family and community to mourn the heartbreaking loss of three people's lives, the public discussion has turned to anti-immigrant hatred and bigotry.

This heartbreaking incident has ignited a painfully myopic and divisive discussion. One individual with a history of grave traffic violations is being used to leverage terror and rage at an entire community. It is fair to be outraged at the driver's recklessness. It is an illogical leap to tie this to his immigration status.

Study after study shows that immigrants in every ethnic group in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than do native born citizens. Yet one person's egregious behavior is being discussed as somehow derivative of the manner in which he entered this country. More offensively, criminality is projected onto the millions of hard-working folks who come to this country seeking a better life for themselves and their children. 

The tragedy in Aurora should not be a platform for discussing our broken immigration system, but we can clearly agree that it is broken.

Had the federal government enacted policy reform to resolve the legal status of the millions of folks who are unable to regulate their immigration status under current law, the immigration status of those arrested for crimes would be a non-issue. In the absence of such reform, the current vitriol against immigrants as a whole unjustly divides us at a moment when we should be united to support the families of the victims.

In this moment of great sorrow, let's not lower ourselves to misguided assumptions. The intolerable and premature loss of three lives is a reason to pull together in mutual caring, not give into the politics of blame.

Reflections on the Greeley meeting

WORKING FOR UNITY
Down the street on this same night, a meeting of over two hundred people took place to do exactly that. Realizing Our Communities (ROC) met to discuss how all of Greeley can be safer for everyone, welcoming of all peoples, and one community. The ROC meting did not recieve coverage in either the Post or the News. It did draw diverse people from all over Greeley together and continued a conversation that will end in healing and a stronger community someday.

Why do I write this reflection? Becuase the truth is important. I write this because there is a real need for us to bring our community together and to engage in actions that unite us. In order to do that we need to speak the truth of the fear, the racism, and the hate that undergird much of the anti-immigrant movement. I have not yet been anywhere where this was so evident as at "the forum".

The "FORUM"
Last night we entered a room of over five hundred people for an event organized by public officials; The District Attorney Ken Buck, the Sheriff and the United States Assistant District Attorney. The event opened with a police color guard presenting the flags of Colorado and the Minutemen side by side and the pledge of allegiance. I am a really outgoing person however I felt no invitation or desire to sit down and join the attendees.

The racism was palpable as each white person at the door was greeted with a smile and a handshake while my friends of color received neither. While there were some people who were white that weren't clapping as the presentation went on, the vast majority were.

The event was advertised as a forum. The first thing the DA did was to tell us all that the meeting was informational and that they would not tae questions from the audience. Each official began by saying that the foreign born population does not make up much of the crime in Weld County. As the slides rolled by they sent a contradictory visual message which didn't match the words of the officials. So we watched 12 slides go by of men with Latino surnames who were foreign born and had been convicted of drunk driving over the last year. The officials never mentioned how many people born here were convicted of drunk driving or what percentage of convictions the foreign born population represents. They also used foreign born interchangeably with "ixxxxxl immigrants". This generalization was meant to communicate again the underlying message that you should be afraid of brown people in general. And so it went with progressively more serious crimes.

We listened to the testimony of victims of crimes committed by immigrants. All of the testimonies were either done in the hall or by video in the victim's home, except the last one. The organizers saved the testimony of an immigrant woman whose husband was killed by an immmigrant driving drunk as the last testimony. She was being interviewed by a staff member of the DA's in an official room with an American flag in the background. The translation wasn't simultaneous so that her testimony was robbed of its emotion as the DA's staff member translated in a flat voice. As she spoke of the loss of her husband, and her daughter cried for her father, more than 100 people got up and left. Apparently they were uninterested in any crime in which the victim is an immigrant.

Absent from the forum was any mention of the crimes committed by citizens against immigrants. Unpaid wages, hate crimes, robberies, assaults, rapes, intimidation and threats.

The sheriff passed out Colorado Alliance for a Secure America (CASA) flyers as people left. The flyers attack the Mayor of Greeley, who went to DC to lobby for comprehensive immigration reform. This group of officials who insist that immigrant crime is a problem in Greeley apparently do not want a solution and are uninterested in immigration reform.

The group of us who were there spoke with the Sheriff and the District Attorney afterwards. The District Attorney literally walked away from two of my friends of color in midsentence. They were trying to make a point about the images and the presentation and the stereotypes his office is furthering. One of my friends was saying the whole event was a shame. as the DA walked away, I followed and watched him listening attentively to members of CASA. I approached him, and he listened to me, a white woman, who was saying the exact same thing that my friends had said.

Statement by the Anti-Defamation League
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20071003/READERS/110030117

Denver Post covers Elvira's Vigil

Manny Gonzales (mgonzales@denverpost.com) wrote an excellent article covering the vigil for Elvira last night at the Iliff School of theology. It might be nice to drop Manny a nice email thanking him for a thoughtful and compelling story. Here is a quote:

"There are still a lot of people here who haven't heard of Elvira Arellano or her plight, but they know how this country's immigration policy has created a climate of fear for families in Colorado," said one of the vigil's organizers, Danielle Short, human rights program director for American Friends Service Committee.

If you click on the above link you'll see some comments on the Denver Post webpage, some that are supportive and others that are not. Free free to add your thoughts on this site as well.

Here are a few extra pictures from last night. Thanks to everyone who was able to come!