Voices from the Border: How Immigration Policies Affect Your Community

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 (BP) is doing to them. I was with a group of forty activists, humanitarians and journalists. We were witnessing, protesting, delivering humanitarian aid and sharing information about what the Biden Administration is doing to migrants and US citizens in these borderlands. Soon a prison bus emerged from the gates. Through its blocked-out windows, we could faintly see children waving to us as we waved to them.

Neither we nor the children know where they were going: Further incarceration in for-profit prisons notorious for abuse and neglect of children, some of whom die in US custody? Illegal deportation back to dangerous homelands - with or without family? Dumped with families on our streets, far from their sponsors, with no way to reach them, because BP and ICE threw out their belongings, often money and important documents? Yes, this is under Biden.

To “secure our borders”, citizens within two hours of our southern border must daily pass through armed checkpoints; endure ubiquitous surveillance with visual, auditory and heat-seeking technology; find humans dead, dying or injured in their yards and parks. Kind citizens are threatened with criminal charges when providing water or medical aid. When calling 911 or BP for assistance, they’re threatened and pleas are ignored. What does any of this have to do with you who are far from our southern border or with our upcoming elections? If trumpGOP takes power in 2024, what I described will be your neighborhood; trump says he’ll deploy BP, ICE and our military to hunt and deport migrants everywhere, including naturalized citizens. And just like that, you're living in a military police state without civil and human rights.

What you do for the next 9 months will impact the rest of your and your children’s lives. Silence and passivity help trump. Instead, please help activists like me save democracy. Share this post. Invite me via DM to speak, in person or Zoom, with family, friends, neighbors, community organizations about immigration, what’s at stake and GOTV efforts.