Today was the first day of a two day border witness trip that I am on. It is called Courts and Ports. It is organized by Texas Impact and the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry. The trip was organized especially for the members and friends of First Unitarian Universalist. There are seven of us on it. The group includes Michelle Venegas-Matula, who is on staff at TXUUJM, the minister from the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church, the Rev. Ed Proulx, First Unitarian Universalist’s A/V Tech and Communications Coordinator, Christian Holmes, and three members of the congregation. We were supposed to have a larger contingent but amazingly three people, independently of each other, came down with COVID.
The trip is pretty similar to the human rights delegations I used to organized in Mexico and the one I participated in where we visited El Salvador. Those were all a decade or more ago. Probably my biggest takeaway is how little everything seems has changed. It is still brutally awful to be a migrant trying to get into the United States. It is dangerous. It can be expensive. The whole process is designed to be dehumanizing. Everything is arbitrary. Luck is a huge factor.
This was emphasized, though not intentionally, when we began the day with a presentation by the Border Patrol. The presentation included a lot of statistics. The Border Patrol agent was in favor of building a wall but not for the reasons I would have thought. He didn’t argue that it was effective. He said that he liked the wall because with the wall came all sorts of other money for monitoring and security equipment.
My main takeaway from his presentation, however, was that what the Border Patrol does and how its officers respond to migrants changes regularly based on the whims of those in power in Washington. One President will put in place a bunch of procedures. The next President will put in place another set. The agent we spoke to said that dealing with the constant shifts in policy was one of the most challenging parts of his job.
After the presentation from the Border Patrol, we headed to Brownsville and walked across the bridge into Matamoros. It is exceptionally easy to leave the United States. You have to have four quarters to pay a toll and then all you need to do is walk across the bridge. On the Mexican side we didn’t even talk to an immigration agent. There was someone from customs who looked at people’s bags–the woman ahead of us had three puppies in a box that she was bringing across the border–but that was it.
In Matamoros we visited a clinic that provided free health care to migrants, took a look through the remains of an encampment, and had street tacos for lunch. Of those three things, I think I learned the most from visiting what was left of the encampment. It was one of the famous encampments that was all over the news a few years ago. Back then it housed around 10,000 people. Now it houses maybe forty. In the ensuing years two things have happened. First, the local NGOs have opened up a number of shelters. People aren’t staying at the encampments while they await asylum processing. They have better places to stay.
Second, migrants have shifted from Matamoros to other ports of entry. And so, there simply aren’t the numbers of people trying to get into the United States from the city that there used to be.
This may change in the future. One thing that was consistently emphasized during the day was the fluidity of the situation. One year, or even one month, migrants might be trying to get into this port of entry. A short while later they might be trying to get into another one.
Walking back into the United States, I was acutely aware of my privilege. We walked past a place where hundreds of people were trying to get visas to enter the United States, another place where probably a hundred people who had been granted asylum hearings were waiting to cross into the United States, and the line of non-US nationals waiting to be admitted into the country. For almost any of those people, crossing the border was something that could take hours, days, even months. For us, it was a matter of minutes.
Our final two stops of the day were to visit organizations that provide aid to migrants once they are in the United States. The first, Team Brownsville, provides them with toiletries and small amounts of other support immediately after they have been given permission to enter the country. The second, the Humanitarian Respite Center, is a short-term shelter. It serves people who have been granted an asylum hearing and have been released into the United States pending their hearing date.
The center, I learned, has provided assistance to over 500,000 people in the last decade. That’s a staggering number to consider–a small city. Most of them leave Texas for places like Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York.
The center was clean and well run. I suspect that for a lot of asylum seekers the interactions that they have at it are probably some of the most humanizing interactions that they have had in months.
On our way to the center, which is located in McAllen, we took the “scenic route.” This had us driving about an hour and a half along the road that parallels the border wall. The absurd thing about this was that driving along the wall you immediately realize how ridiculous it is. In its present state it is not a wall at all. It is a bunch of sections of a wall with wide gaps in between them. We drove past places where there were fifty feet of wall followed by a fifty foot gap followed by another fifty feet of wall followed by another gap. It is hard to imagine how anything like that could possibly be effective or anything other than theater.
And theater, or more accurately, the theater of cruelty, is probably a good description of the whole border situation. The wall is a bit of political theater. But that didn’t make it any less real in some places.
The most chilling story about the wall that I heard all day was from a human rights worker. He pointed out a section of the wall that had been built illegally by the state of Texas as part of the governor’s ill-advised Operation Lone Star. For some reason, a man tried to cross over it. He got stuck on the barbed-wire. And there the Texas National Guardsmen left him for three days until finally a local human rights organization convinced them to rescue him.
Now, I have no way of verifying this story. But it seems believable enough based on the stories that have been reported about Operation Lone Star. What made it especially chilling was being at the site where it would have occurred and realizing that this man would have been stuck in broad view of thousands of people the entire time he suffered. I thought of the old Roman practice of crucifying people along the Appian Way. The effect must have been horrifyingly similar.
Tomorrow, I will post more. And on Sunday I will be sharing a sermon with my congregation about the trip. In the meantime, more updates about my experiences can be found on my Instagram.
