We didn't get all the way down to the border at Nogales, but we did take a journey down from NN15 in Phoenix yesterday yesterday to visit with some of the great nonprofits and activists fighting for human rights along the border. We met some wonderful people and found out just how huge the crisis is down here; I can't even begin do it justice in one diary, but I do want to thank the Netroots staff for putting the trip together.
We all got on buses yesterday morning from the NN15 convention hotels and first headed to Puente offices here in Phoenix. Yash Mori was leading the trip on behalf of Netroots staff, and our main organizer from Puente was Carlos Garcia.
Carlos educated us on what's been going on in recent years in Arizona....the assault on immigrant rights started with NAFTA....then Operation Gatekeeper, denial of drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants, english-only laws, Proposition 200, Proposition 300, Proposition 105,Proposition 150, Arpaio's election, and most recently SB1070.
Carlos pointed out that the programs that take away everyone's civil rights are typically practiced first on immigrants at the border. Checkpoints. Drones. Mass incarceration in private prisons for private profit. Sound familiar? (First they came for the undocumented immigrants and I didn't speak up....)
We were scheduled to next head to the courthouse in Tucson to see "Operation Streamline" in action -- where immigrants are marched in en masse, all chained together, and "advised" to plead guilty to a felony charge so they'll be deported quickly instead of languishing in a federal prison for several months or years before being deported. (Some choice, huh?) Read more about operation Streamline here: http://www.nytimes.com/... . The newly-built (at considerable taxpayer expense) U.S. courthouse in Tucson would have very little to do were it not for all these federal immigration charges.
But we received word on the way down that the Operation Streamline proceedings had been cancelled for the day (perhaps due to our impending visit? Who knows. Well, at least we may have slowed down the wheels of injustice for a day...but I have no illusions that those wheels won't continue grinding away, today, tomorrow, and into the future.)
So instead we then headed over to visit with the Coalición de Derechos Humanos in Tucson
Offices of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos in Tucson.
There we heard from Isabel Garcia about the incredible work they do on a shoestring budget, trying to track down missing people in the rugged wilderness of the border region. After 9/11, many of the easier routes in California and Texas have been heavily militarized, so much of the flow of migrants has been pushed eastward into wilderness areas of Arizona. That basically means that lots more people die along the way.
(And a note about the grim reality of making that crossing...the typical journey involves 1-2 weeks of walking, usually about 75-100 miles total. And in the summer, IT IS F***ING HOT out here -- 105-115 degrees in the day, and not dropping under 95 at night. Ask yourself if you could even survive out there under those conditions for more than 24 hours. I know I couldn't.)
From Tucson, we headed out to the Eloy detention center. Can you say, prison-industrial complex run amok, on steroids? (I knew you could.) Even worse, since a lot of the prisoners there are undocumented, the abuses can run even more rampant. Eloy is operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, which gets $200 a day per detainee. (Do the math -- it would be far cheaper to enroll them at Harvard.) As a private corporation, they just don't respond to FOIA requests from family members to learn about the status of their loved ones, and obviously have a profit motive to keep prisoners as long as possible. It's, well, horrible.
Eloy Detention Center. Hard to tell from this shot, but it's MASSIVE, and just one of several here in southern AZ.
Operated by the CCA, of course.
After that, we were scheduled to visit the Pima County Medical Examiner ... but unfortunately things were really busy there yesterday, so for the last part of our trip we headed back up to Puente in Phoenix where Robin with the
Colibri Center for Human Rights visited with us (from Tucson) and told her about her work with the Medical Examiner's office.
Yearly deaths on the border. The big ramp-up is after 9/11.
Where they died. (And these are only the ones who were found. Many never are.)
I'll spare you all the gory details of identifying bodies that have been out in the desert for a week, two weeks, or even more. But suffice it to say that conditions are so harsh out there that after a week or two, many sets of remains just can't be identified -- leaving migrants' families with no closure whatsoever as to the fate of their loved ones. The Pima medical examiner's office is apparently very cooperative with the work of Colibri, which is awesome, but of course they face budget limitations -- and there isn't exactly a mass demand from the Anglo community to do something about this problem.
I wish I could offer a silver bullet solution, but our immigration policies are SO screwed up (especially by Republican intransigence and overall dislike of persons of a brownish nature) that there just isn't one in sight. But basically, we created this crisis through OUR policies (NAFTA crushing Mexico's rural economy, 9/11 throwing up huge walls between family members, corporate demands for cheap labor, US support of death squads and right-wing regimes in Honduras, Guatemala, etc.) and WE need to be the ones to fix it. Any sane immigration policy really needs to be evaluated in the framework of.... will the deaths at the border increase, or decrease?
In the short-term, though, a small step you could take would be to support one of the organizations I linked above. They're all doing heroic work on very little resources, so anything you can donate would be much appreciated -- and used very well.
(Another account of our visit, with a little more of the human touch of the people we talked to, is here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/... .)
Thanks for reading. Remember -- we were all immigrants once.
Corn. In the desert. Why?