Blog
During my recent activist trip, Dora Rodriguez shared devastating news of a deadly cartel clash claiming asylum seekers' lives between Sasabe and Nogales. Families, including children, are affected.
I heard the children when I was standing outside the Sasabe Border Patrol Center in a remote corner of the Arizona desert at our southern border. The children were behind barbed wire and green tarps tied to metal fences, designed to hide what Border Patrol is doing to them.
I wonder if I can learn something about coping in these times from our relationship and what we’ve been able to accomplish together despite challenges that somewhat mimic the alienation and limitations imposed by this pandemic.
When I think about criminal justice reform, I think about my personal journey through the criminal justice system. With a sentence like that, one might imagine the journey of an accused from arrest through trial through incarceration to advocacy and activism for one's peers ensnared by the system. But that's not my story.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Op-Ed contributor, Mr. Epstein, and the WSJ Opinion editor, Mr. Gigot, recently revealed that they share a virulent sexism and a toddler-esque belief that they are successfully hiding it.
These kids, they don’t deserve what’s been done to them. By helping them, we redeem ourselves.
Today we went to the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, Mexico where we served breakfast to 300 people from a tiny kitchen in a bare-bones shelter. Some had just been deported; the exhaustion, misery and despair on their faces was hard to bear.
Doug Rouple of Humane Borders took us out into the vast desert south of Tucson AZ for a day, teaching us about the nexus between three human desires: the desire to be free from the violence and poverty that drives people to migrate here; the desire to protect fellow humans from needless suffering and death; and the desire to dehumanize those we fear, exploit and exclude.
Yesterday we sat in court listening to opening arguments from the federal government about why an English and Geography professor, Dr. Scott Warren, deserves 10 years in federal prison for providing water, food, medical treatment, used clothes and a bed to migrants who entered the humanitarian aid station in his little town of Ajo where he volunteers in the AZ desert.
With funds stolen from the military, cartel-fighting programs and Treasury Forfeiture, the US government is definitely building a wall through the entire Rio Grande Delta. It will be mostly of steel and it will have a 150 foot wide no-man’s zone on either side with klieg lights blaring 24/7 every fifty meters.
“It’s a process. Not saying it’s a good one,” said the federal defense lawyer riding the elevator with me to the courtroom where Operation Streamline occurred daily in Tucson, Arizona.
Nogales, AZ (pop. 20,000) is the tip of the pepitas seed that is Nogales, MX (pop. 200,000). The two Nogales’ are wedged in a narrow desert valley surrounded by rolling hills and gray, forbidding mountains.