Dear friends,
I have been traveling with my wonderful Seattle Peace Chorus on the SW border for the last week. We are a little over half way through this heart breaking and heart warming experience.
We have witnessed the incredible strength, persistence, and power of our beloved sibling immigrants who have risked their lives fleeing violence and poverty mostly due to years of the capitalist and colonialist foreign policies of our government.
These people are kind, compassionate, incredibly hard working, and intelligent. They, like most immigrants, would add deep richness to our country but in a horribly ironic, tragic travesty of inhumanity that is in fact a violation of international laws, not to mention a sin against our fellow humans, we place more and more barriers in their way as they attempt to navigate our absurd immigration process.
Imagine traveling 8 months from central America while pregnant with 3 young children because you feared for your life. Arriving finally at the border to be stopped by the border patrol before you entered the U.S., told to leave and come back later even to be able to apply for asylum.
Now you are stuck in a dangerous Mexican town with no where to go, wandering the streets with your small children. If you are lucky, a good person finds you and gives you shelter until you’re allowed to finally go through and apply for asylum.
This is only the beginning. With the new policy you are now sent back to Mexico to wait for your Credible Fear Interview (against international law).
Finally you are able to have your interview, an entirely arbitrary decision is made by an ICE administrator. Best case, they are in a good mood and you have managed to learn enough to present your case (it must be in English regardless of your language) and you are given an A number and taken to the hielera (cooler) kept 30 degrees colder than outside, often separate from your children whom you can hear screaming from their cooler nearby. There are no beds, just concrete benches and flimsy aluminum blankets. You may be left there 7-9 days.
Then they move you the the Perrera (dog pound) a caged box in the detention center meant to hold 6 people but filled with as many as 30 other immigrant families again all concrete, to await your immigration trial before a judge.
This can last weeks before you finally have your time before the overworked judges. Again, their ruling is entirely arbitrary – not based on precedent, but on the whim of the judge.
If you are granted asylum (and btw your children are tried separately) you are sent to detention – jailed for no reason, some are separate from your children.
Because these are for profit prisons and are required to keep their 39,000 beds full you may spend months in this prison environment.
When you are released (you must have obtained a sponsor who sends you a ticket) ICE loads you in a bus and drops off at the airport or the bus station. You may have no food, money, or any idea what to do next. In our local Tacoma detention center they just send them out the gate with no transportation!
Again, if you are lucky there are some of the amazing volunteers there that we’ve met who help you find your way, give you food, directions, and a backpack of supplies and toys.
You’re finally in your country with family or friends but you still have to report regularly to ICE and may well (again arbitrarily) be wearing an ankle bracelet tracking device.
Hold this image in your hearts. We are treating these gentle, sweet human family like criminals and in the name of corporate profit treating them like animals against all human compassion.
Here is a poem I found:
This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us. No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks. No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather. No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make. That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake. ~ Gregory Orr ~
