Greetings to all of you from Brownsville/Matamoros.
The federal courts in Brownsville and McAllen remain
closed to the public; the tent courts and the MPP process has been halted until
June 22nd. The numbers of people released by CBP or ICE to local
shelters (La Posada, Catholic Charities, Good Neighbor Settlement House)
continue to be very few and far between—perhaps one or two or three a week.
The asylum seekers, however, remain in their tents in
Matamoros, hunkered down against the suffocating heat, the heavy rains of May,
and the fear of COVID19 infections. Lizzie Cavazos from the Angry Tias has an interview
in this week’s Texas Observer that gives more detail on the present
circumstances in the camp in Matamoros.
Just recently, the Trump administration implemented a new
evil in its persecution of asylum seekers, of unaccompanied minors, and
immigrants in general. Carelessly borrowing language from the Center for
Disease Control, Border Patrol began the practice known as “expulsion” in which
anyone apprehended along the border is immediately sent back to Mexico (Lucas
Guttentag offers a comprehensive exploration of this here).
I have spoken with families who surrendered to the border patrol, attempted to
ask for asylum, who were ignored, and then were made to cross back into Mexico
at 2a.m. Unsurprisingly, at that hour, they were confronted by cartel members.
While CBP has told advocates that unaccompanied children
under the age of twelve would be turned over to the Office of Refugee
Resettlement, those over the age of
twelve would be sent back to the countries from which they were fleeing--without
so much as a question about why they made that long journey to begin with.
There is no doubt in my mind that families fleeing
violence in their own countries will now try and slip past the border patrol
and into the interior of the country. Some advocates have begun discussing the appalling
possibility of finding children’s bodies in the desert around Falfurrias and
Sarita.
The news from Central America—violence, famine, and
plague—assures that many people will continue to flee north, even despite the
hardened borders along the way. The pandemic has offered the brutal forms of
enforcement activity along the borders of Central America and Mexico a green light
of impunity. Along our own border, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently
found that the Border Patrol was not responsible for the actions of a uniformed
officer who, while
on duty, raped and attempted the murder of three women (while this incident
occurred in 2014, the ruling falls in line with a series of other judgements
that continue to make it so very difficult to hold federal law enforcement
responsible for the actions of their officers).
It remains a grim time for so many of God’s children. It is
hard to see a clear way forward as the precarious processes to seek justice for
immigrants continue to fail and as the nation reels from its own very
close-to-home struggles for peace. Your contributions, be they of material
goods, of solidarity in spirit, or of powerful witness, remain important. I continue to hear from asylum seekers from
across the country, who, in their own way, ask after “those people that helped
us.”
