CHAPTER FOUR: An Epiphany of Epiphanies

About the day I looked into the eyes of a refugee child and understood: when trauma cuts deep, childhood is but a mirage

Matamoros, Mexico: Epiphany Sunday, 2020

The Adoration of the Magi, Cristóbal de Villalpando, Mexican Baroque painter, 1683, public domain

In the Christian calendar, January 6th marks the start of the Epiphany celebration, when the Magi, aka Three Wise Men, rocked up into Bethlehem, having been guided there by a star. They came to meet the baby Jesus. They brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the story goes, gifts fit for a king.

On the Sunday before Epiphany in homes all over Latin America, families gather to exchange gifts and share a Sunday feast topped off with King’s Cake, Roscón de Reyes. Each Roscón has three figurines of babies baked in, representing Jesus, the Wise Men, and the Holy Trinity. Whoever bites into one is anointed king or queen for the day and is gifted a gold crown and a chocolate wrapped in gold foil, like a coin.

On this day in Brownsville, Texas, in the year 2020 CE, Dr. Melba Salazar-Lucio pulled into the bus station parking lot with enough Roscón de Reyes to feed a small town — for that is exactly what she intended to do. One of five Team Brownsville leaders, the group of self-organized humanitarians Jim and I worked with the night before, she was heading across the border with a large company of volunteers to bring to a close a project that had been in the works for weeks.

The project started in December with a literacy lesson. Melba, who heads the Team Brownsville Escuelita de la Banqueta (Sidewalk School), had all her teacher-volunteers coach the children of the Matamoros migrant tent city in writing letters to Santo Clós or Los Reyes Magos, following their own family traditions. They asked the kids to express their thanks as well as their dreams of what they might like for Christmas.

Despite all that these children had been through — all the horrors they may have witnessed back home, or at the hands of criminal coyotes, or menacing cartel members, and now from an unwelcoming US president and nation — they gave thanks to God and the camp volunteers in their letters. And their present requests were not for toys or video games, but for basics: warm socks and something soft to cuddle at night.

Melba collected all those lovely notes of thanks and dreams and dispersed them to teachers all over the United States. They, in turn, put together drives to fulfill the wishes of each kid, throwing in a few extra goodies besides.

She was flooded with gift-packs, from New Jersey and Oregon and everywhere in between. She placed their contents, along with a note from each giver, into brand-new child-sized backpacks, and tagged each one with the name of its recipient. She even stuffed a few extra backpacks for the kids of asylum seekers that had arrived at the border and been kicked back to Matamoros after the letter-writing campaign ended.

Team Brownsville & La Escuelita de la Banqueta

It was Jim and my second full day in Brownsville. When we rolled up that morning, we greeted our friends from the previous day — Lindsay the North Carolina librarian and dairy farmer’s wife and the delegation from Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. Then met the group from Austin. They’d been coming south one Sunday every month to help out with Melba’s open-air school since it began in fall 2018. We stacked jumbo boxes of Three Kings Cakes into twice as many wagons as held last night’s dinner, along with legions of tiny packs, lined up in orderly squads of pink and blue, plaid and tie-dye.

The weather was perfect. So was the joyous energy among the volunteers as we made our way back over the bridge. The name tags fluttered in a gentle wind.

School before cake! Melba instructed from behind a small, blue megaphone. Wearing a bright-yellow high-visibility vest, she was easily spotted in the crowd.

Out of the supply tent — aka La Tienda #1 — stocked and managed by Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías and Abuelas, came a stack of folded square plastic tarps. These were unfurled and laid on the asphalt plaza where we’d fed the asylum seekers the night before. Where one tarp ended, another began. They covered the plaza drive from La Tienda to within a few feet of the already congested US-bound traffic lane.

Each tarp constituted a “classroom” big enough for a teacher and 6-8 kids. Teachers each claimed a tarp and pulled out their lesson materials.

In the “classroom” closest to La Tienda, two Latinx 30-something men tag-teamed reading The Cat in the Hat, first in Spanish then in English. One held the book high in his left hand so the children, sitting in a semi-circle around him, could see the pictures. The other sat adjacent, his eyes trained on the book as he read. Parents also wanting to enjoy the read-aloud stood at the edge of the “classroom,” for no footwear were allowed on the tarps.

Dr Melba Salazar-Lucio’s Sunday Sidewalk School

(photos: Sarah Towle 2020)

In another “classroom,” a volunteer from Austin practiced basic numeracy skills with children, using dice and some pre-printed worksheets. A teacher from Brooklyn taught an English lesson through song. And all the way at the end, closest to the traffic, Lindsay introduced her students to the names and sounds and habits of farm animals, using the cardboard goats, cows, sheep, etc., she’d been cutting out when we met her at the bus station the day before.

I claimed a tarp and read aloud a beautiful bilingual book by Irma Uribe Santibáñez, a Mexican author. She’d written it after visiting the Mexico City stadium-turned-shelter for the 7000-strong migrant caravan of mostly Honduran refugees that left crime-ridden San Pedro Sula on October 13, 2018, en route to El Norte. The same caravan Trump famously labelled “an invasion” and used to gin up more fear and loathing in his base, urging them to get out and vote Republican in the 2018 mid-term elections.

Trump alleged that "many gang members and some very bad people” were mixed into the caravan, adding to the rapists-and-murderers-are-coming-for-your-daughters-and-jobs narrative of the 2016 presidential campaign. What Irma found were bruised, battered, and exhausted, yet hopeful, people on the run from the region’s long-term endemic problems: gang violence, drug wars, police corruption, and virtually non-existent economic opportunity.

Because the Northern Triangle is notorious for having one of the highest murder rates in the world, where migrants and the poor are often kidnapped for ransom or people-trafficked by gangs who force them to work as runners for the drug cartels, this group of Hondurans organized to make the 2,700-mile trek to the US together. Before COVID-19, there was safety in numbers.

Trump claimed it was the idea of US Democrats.

The Blank, Glassy Stare of Trauma

A face of trauma in a Guatemalan refugee (photo: Sarah Towle, 2020)

Michael Benavides, Team Brownsville co-founder (photo: Sarah Towle, 2020)

In October 2018, Trump deployed 5,800 troops to greet the migrant caravan at the US southern border. He had Customs and Border Patrol lace more concertina wire into the border fence from Tijuana to Mexicali.

Meanwhile, sympathetic Mexicans, like Irma, brought mattresses, blankets, food, and water to the stadium shelter, offering the footsore parade of men, women, and children a respite mid-way through their journey. They talked with the migrants. They listened to the stories. They asked them why, knowing what might befall them in Trump’s America, they had given up everything to go to El Norte. The answer was simple and always the same:

They were running for their lives.

The book that resulted from Irma’s experience with the caravan migrants, Bolay, introduces a mythical jaguar who welcomes and aids those seeking a better future by leaving paw prints that mark their way to safety. It’s a freedom-trail story for today’s immigration crisis.

The people we met that Epiphany Sunday were still on their traumatic journey. The children huddled on my tarp ranged in age from about 3 to 12. One little boy shivered with fever. I gave him the sweatshirt I’d removed with the heat that accompanied the rising sun.

A joyful curly-haired 5-year-old jumped up and wrapped her arms around my neck on learning that we shared the same name. I would see Sarita from El Salvador everyday I spent in Matamoros.

My oldest pupil, an unkempt Guatemalan girl, appeared to understand neither Spanish nor English. She stared not at the pictures, but at my mouth as I read aloud in alternating languages. Her long, dark, unbrushed locks surrounded delicate features. But it was her peculiar gaze that pierced my heart. In her light-brown eyes was unfathomable sadness.

“It’s the look of the traumatized,” Team Brownsville co-founder, Mike Benavides, schooled me.

Mike knows. A veteran of Desert Storm, part of a bomb squad, he returned home to Brownsville from the Gulf with greatly reduced hearing and PTSD.

“I was one of the lucky ones,” he says. He had a loving family as well as a medical and psycho-social safety net provided by the US administration of Veterans Affairs. It took a long time, but through counseling and medication he finally overcame the worst of his anxieties and was able to rejoin society again. He’s now a Special Ed teacher in the Brownsville public school system, and loves his work. In fact, all the Team Brownsville co-founders — Mike, Sergio, Melba, her husband Juan David, and Andrea Morris Rudnik — are educators and colleagues.

When he looks in the faces of the asylum seekers stranded in Matamoros, Mike sees deep trauma caused by the wounds of dark experiences. “It’s a blank and fearful expression — the same thing I used to see when I looked in the mirror.”

It’s something he says these people will never overcome without the appropriate help. It’s something that is only exacerbated by the heartlessness of Trump & Co’s Remain in Mexico policy, which leaves them forgotten and in limbo.

A World on the Move

Dr. Melba Salazar-Lucio’s tent city lending library. The books are always returned. (photo: Sarah Towle, 2020)

When our hour of lessons and read-alouds came to a close, the Roscón de Reyes were finally passed out. My quiet little friend gripped her cake with both hands. She savored it, eating slowly, without a word, staring into the middle distance. In fact, except for the chatter of volunteers, the entire camp of 2500 or so people fell silent.

I got up from my classroom tarp. After an hour sitting on the hard pavement, my hips and back were screaming at me. Behind her blue megaphone once again, Melba herded the Sunday Sidewalk School students away from the plaza so we teachers could clean up our “classrooms.” We picked up our tarps, shook off the crumbs, folded them up, and returned them to La Tienda.

I noticed the regular teachers returning their books to a battered metal mobile book cart: Melba’s Library, they told me. She keeps stacks of donated children’s books available at all times for the asylum seekers to borrow. They always get returned.

I added Bolay to the rows and neatened them. That night, I would see that someone had taken care to cover the cart with a tarp to shield the books from the elements.

I joined the remarkably well-behaved scrum of humanity and watched as Melba began reading out names and handing out backpacks, one by one. The children were so patient. But there were so many of them!

The world is currently in the midst of the largest movement of people since World War II. An estimated 258 million people, or one in every 30, are now living outside their country of birth. This includes expatriates, or economic migrants, like me. But an unprecedented 70.8 million of us, from Honduras to Bangladesh, have been forcibly uprooted by conflict, persecution, climate-related disasters, and crushing poverty.

Of the 70+ million displaced people worldwide, roughly 50% are children. This is in stark evidence in Matamoros.

An Epiphany of Epiphanies

The Matamoros migrant tent city, January 2020, before it was swept back up off the plaza to the Rio Bravo levee (photo: Sarah Towle, 2020)

The backpacks once distributed, we were famished. We reconnected with the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue group to pull the now empty wagons back over the bridge. Once wiped clean, folded, and put back in the Team Brownsville storage shed, Jim and I hopped into our rented red Kia Sorento and made a bee-line for El Ultimo Taco, where the $5 plates of four tacos of your choice made it one of our go-to meals along the interstate. Then we rejoined our adopted group of volunteers at the Good Neighborhood Settlement House to spend the afternoon preparing that night’s meal.

Back at the bus station, on our way to transport and serve with the dinner shift, I spied Sergio, our Team Brownsville leader rom the previous evening. He was sitting with a young man in a brand-new, still-stiff baseball cap. An orange mesh string bag slumped on the floor at his feet, the mark of one just released from detention. Headphones passed over the cap to cover his ears. Music blared from them so loud, I could hear it from where I stood several feet away. I tried to catch the young man’s attention, but he avoided my gaze.

He’d just been released from a child detention center run by Southwest Key, Sergio informed me. It was his 18th birthday today, so they could no longer hold him. Sergio was helping to get him on his way.

“Where will he go?” I asked.

Where he should have gone all along: to the sponsor or loved one that had been waiting for him since his arrival in the US over two years before.

“But wait,” I said, doing a quick mental calculation, “Family separation started in April 2018. It was over by June. That’s less than two years ago.”

“Oh, the government was taking children long before that,” Sergio responded.

That comment sent me down a rabbit hole of research, from the plight of children caught in Trump & Co’s web, to the money that it costs to house and feed them with taxpayer dollars, to the profiteers who, rather than welcoming the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, instead feed off their misery.

My time now run out, that will be the focus of the next installment of my tale. For now, suffice it to say, this was for me an Epiphany of epiphanies.

Sergio Cordova and Michael Benavides, Team Brownsville Co-Founders

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

— Toni Morrison, 1995

CHAPTER THREE: In the Era of Trump & Co, Flying the Tattered Flag of American Values is a Full Time Job

Rio Grande Valley volunteers have fed and supported victims of Remain in Mexico for nearly two years — even COVID-19 won’t stop them

In the Borderlands

The Rio Grande Valley has been inhabited for as long as history remembers. Home to at least eight nations, it has flown seven flags, including its own, as an independent nation that lasted less than a year, in 1840. The indigenous hunter-gatherers of the Coahuiltecan group roamed the area before the Spanish, then French, then Spanish — again — laid claim. And it was part of the vast northern territory of Mexico when the doctrine of Manifest Destiny augured the 19th century westward expansion of the United States.

As the new nation exercised its “God-given right” to push its way into the old, hostilities grew.

First came the Texas Revolution (1835–36), when US settlers to the region, many of them slave-holders, rebelled against Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna’s attempts to outlaw slavery. The settlers won, giving birth to the Republic of Texas, a sovereign nation that bordered Mexico to the west and southwest; and the US and the Gulf of Mexico to the north and east.

Find this and other maps at Mr. Gray’s History Emporium

That led, inevitably, to the annexation of the Republic of Texas to create the 28th US State. The pretext was a 10-year border dispute. Mexico drew its northeastern-most border at the Nueces River. Texans claimed the border was further south, along the Rio Grande. Between the two rivers lay a vast patch of desert filled with wild ponies and pecan trees.

But much more alluring to the US were Mexico’s territorial holdings to the west, particularly California.

When a US brigade crossed the Nueces at Corpus Christi, a Mexican brigade crossed the Rio Grande at Matamoros, giving then-President James K. Polk, an ardent expansionist, exactly what he wanted: an excuse for war. He decried the Mexican advancement into Texas territory as an “invasion,” sparking the Mexican-American War.

The contest that ensued lasted two long, bloody years, ending in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico paid dearly. It agreed to the Rio Grande boundary of Texas, now a state, and ceded to the US ownership of California as well as most of the modern-day Southwest — New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado — for a cool $15 million.

White European settlers flooded into the region then in the second mass migration since the Spanish incursion. They flocked to the safest places: the military forts, like the one set up by Major Jacob Brown at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico.

Charles Stillman, a Matamoros businessman, saw nothing but opportunity when the spoils of war brought Texas right to his doorstep. He bought thousands of acres just north of the Rio Grande, and proceeded to transform the former military outpost, Fort Brown, into a vibrant and strategically important international trading port. He founded the settlement in 1848. He named it Brownsville.

Historic Brownsville

Historic Brownsville Museum housed in the former Southern Pacific Depot, 1928

Immaculate Conception Cathedral, 1850; entered in the National Register of Historic Places, 1980

We learned all this while waiting to hear from Tía Cindy of the Angry Tias and Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley. We’d come to the region to volunteer our time with these grassroots humanitarians, while bearing witness to Trump & Co’s trumped up immigration crisis and crimes against humanity along the Texas/Mexico border.

Our road trip was to take us from Brownsville to El Paso with some “me” time in Big Bend along the way. And today, January 4, 2020, was our first day.

But Tía Cindy had told us only to meet her “at the bridge” and to “bring $2 in quarters.” She hadn’t said which bridge, or what time.

While awaiting further instructions, we schooled up on the history and culture of the RGV at the Historic Brownsville and Stillman House Museums. We wandered the streets of Brownsville’s Historic Downtown, mostly empty on this holiday Saturday, peering beyond boarded up windows and peeling paint to find architectural souvenirs of the town’s more prosperous past. We lingered at the post-Gothic Immaculate Conception Cathedral built by French missionary, Father Pierre Yves Keralum, which welcomed and calmed us with its quiet beauty bathed inside and out in south Texas light.

Las Cazuelitas Café, E. Adams St., historic Brownsville

And when we got hungry, we googled “best Mexican food near me,” which led us to Las Cazuelitas, a nondescript canteen on E. Adams Street, just shy of closing time.

As we tucked into our first — and (spoiler alert!) best — meal of tacos wrapped in homemade cornflour tortillas my phone pinged. It was Cindy.

“Change of plans,” she texted. “Meet me at the bus station instead.”

She’d forgotten to mention the time again. But before I could wipe my fingers clean of taco drippings to text her back, my phone pinged once more:

“4:00.”

All Hands!

Lindsay, North Carolina Librarian and Team Brownsville Volunteer

The Bus Station took me aback: more modern than the Brownsville airport and cleaner than any bus station I’d ever seen, its ceilings soar overhead, supported by brick columns that reach for the sky. Light and airy, painted a cheery yellow, it’s bigger and taller than the actual Cathedral we’d just popped into two blocks away.

We looked around, not completely certain which of the seven women pictured on the Angry Tías’ website was Cindy. We spotted a gringa with dirty-blonde hair pulled back in a messy pony tail sitting on the far side of a tired folding table. She looked official and friendly, just waiting to offer helpful information.

As we approached, the lettering on a small, hand-written sign taped to the left-front corner of the table came into view. “Team Brownsville,” it said — the name of another humanitarian group I’d contacted but had not heard back from.

“Are you Tía Cindy?” I asked.

“No, but she’s here, taking care of a Mexican family that was just released on bond. She’ll be back.”

As we waited, we chatted with our new acquaintance. Also a volunteer, Lindsay hailed from one of the reddest areas of North Carolina. She’s the wife of a dairy farmer, who works as a school librarian to help make ends meet, money always being tight on a farm, especially with the uncertainty brought on by the trade dispute with China.

With her husband’s blessing, Lindsay had taken a few days away from the kids and cows to bear witness to the scenes a few hundred yards away, across the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros. “My mission is to carry back to my friends and neighbors the reality of how the actions of our government — and especially our president — impact the lives of immigrants.” In other words, that their leaders are not welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or giving the thirsty to drink.

They’re not bad people,” she told us. “They’re just unaware, or maybe in denial, that you can’t ‘make America great again’ while condoning the treatment of others that’s in opposition to Christian principles.”

She’d come to Brownsville to work alongside other volunteers and to bring home photos and first-hand accounts of the inhumanity being perpetrated in the name of all Americans and paid for with their tax dollars. Her mission resonated.

We learned all that within several minutes as Lindsay cut paper cows and goats and sheep out of white cardboard paper (we would find out why the next day). Suddenly, she looked up and pointed with her scissors to a brunette woman carrying an overcharged bag from Subway. Following in her footsteps were a man, woman, and four children, ranging in age from maybe 1 to 13. “That’s Cindy.”

Tía Cindy Candia (Angry Tías & Abuelas of the RGV) with a just released family of asylum seekers bound for North Carolina by bus that day

We introduced ourselves and got pulled into a warm, welcoming hug. “Thank you so much for coming to Brownsville,” Cindy said. “I’ve just bought this family dinner.” She introduced us to them and they hugged us too. They looked exhausted, but relieved.

“Give me a few minutes to get them bus tickets. Then I’ll take you across.”

Just then, a clean-shaven man with closely cropped hair, wearing khaki shorts and an untucked button-down blue-and-white plaid shirt, came bursting through the automatic double doors at the back of the station.

Sergio Cordova, Team Brownsville Co-Founder

“I need hands!” he shouted to no one in particular, then spun around on his heels and disappeared back through the double doors again.

“Go help Sergio,” Cindy said. “I’ll catch up to you at the bridge.” She was off.

Abandoning the info-table and her craft project, Lindsay leapt up, explaining that Sergio was one of the Team Brownsville leaders. We followed her out into the bus station parking lot, trotting to catch up. Sergio led us wordlessly across E. Jefferson Street to a storage shed behind a storefront that formerly housed a taxi dispatch operation.

He keyed open the padlock that secured the metal grill over a wooden door, then started hoisting out a caravan of two-dozen or so canvas folded-up wagons — think Radio Flyers, but from REI. No sooner had we dragged the first round of the empty wagons back to the bus station parking lot, when several SUVs pulled up, disgorging a dozen or so people. They looked oddly familiar.

From the parking lot of the Brownsville Bus Station to Matamoros across the Gateway International Bridge, wagons are loaded and ready to go…

Introductions were made all around as back hatches flung open to reveal hundreds of juice boxes and stacks of aluminum trays, containing freshly quartered oranges, along with still-packaged ground cloths, sleeping bags and pads, fleeces, boxed lanterns, tee-shirts and socks, winter jackets with tags still on, and various and sundry other items, including a large black garbage bag filled with used clothes. All these items were loaded into the now unfolded canvas wagons.

Just when we were ready to go, Cindy appeared carrying a brand-new machete. She hid it under the bag of clothes. “They’ll want us to pay duties on these used things, which should distract them from the contraband beneath,” she winked.

“I’ll take this wagon in case they demand money.” She said, grabbing the handle and patting her fanny pack.

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“Firewood,” she said, matter of factly. I still didn’t get it. But left it at that.

The Gateway International Bridge

At the US/Mexico boundary mid-point on the Gateway International Bridge, descending into Matamoros, Mexico

As we moved off, each of us pulling a heavily burdened wagon, we learned that Team Brownsville had out-of-town groups of volunteers lined up for the next two months. Also, that communication with the Team took place almost exclusively via its Facebook Group Page. I hadn’t been on the hateful platform since it helped Cambridge Analytica hack the 2016 US election. But now I understood why my emails went unanswered.

The battalion of Team Brownsville volunteers helping Sergio that night were from Brooklyn, NY. That’s where Jim and I met, where we were living before moving to China in 1994, and what we still call “home.” Unlike the schizophrenia Lindsay faced back in North Carolina, this group was a single-minded crowd of woke do-gooders from the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. Among them were a lawyer, several teachers, a rabbi, a nurse, an IT guy, and two teenagers skipping school for a few days of “real-world education.” They swept us into their mission.

Our wagon train passed through the bus station, out the front door and to the right; it continued down E. Adams to the municipal car park, hooking left onto E. 14th Street; then headed straight and across the main drag of E. Elizabeth Street to the foot of the Gateway International Bridge. Jim and I scrambled to find the $2 in quarters Cindy had instructed us to bring. Now we understand why: to feed the turnstiles that marked the pedestrian entry to the no-man’s land between nations — a $1-per-person toll, in quarters only, dropped one at a time into the narrow coin slot to unlock the three-armed hip-high barrier.

On this evening, a Border Patrol officer held open the solid metal security gate to the left of the turnstiles, making it easier to enter the border boundary pulling wagons. We handed over our quarters with a dozen or so ‘buenas noches!’ answered with as many ‘Gracias!’ accompanied by the musical clinking of coins as they fell into his pocket.

Just through the turnstiles on the US side of the Gateway International Bridge, on our way to Mexico

Once through, the sound and scenery on the bridge shifted. The swoosh of a car en route to Mexico, accelerating on its ascent up the bridge, contrasted with the hum of standing engines on the side destined for the US. Drug-sniffing dogs handled by high-visibility vest-wearing Customs and Border Patrol officers weaved in and out of the barely moving vehicles. This one or that was waved over to be searched.

Beyond the cars, a long line of people stretched back to the middle of the bridge, perhaps further. They appeared patient, though the line did not move. I reckoned that would be us before the night was over.

As they stood, we rolled, up and over the Rio Grande, single file so as not to block the faster moving foot traffic that passed us on our left. Sometimes we pulled up, waiting for we-knew-not-what obstacle to clear. When we did, it was easier to chat with our neighbors just before and behind us.

At the apex of the bridge, I stopped to catch my breath and peered through the chainlink fencing that had been stretched from end to end. There flowed the infamous river, slow and sickly brown, it resembled more a wide, still creek than the grand waterway of my imagination.

To my right, on the US side, standing tall and rigid and rusted, was the border wall. Not the Wall. This one predated the “big, beautiful” lie Trump is right now defiling sacred lands to extend a 57-mile stretch of replacement barrier and nine miles of new secondary barrier, for which he forced the longest government shutdown in US history (35 days) in 2018-19, and has since secured $9.8 billion to build by pilfering the Pentagon budget.

On the Mexican side, several people had descended the river’s steep bank to bathe and do laundry in water contaminated by human sewage and pesticide run off.

Rolling downhill into Mexico, I nearly lost control of my laden wagon. It nipped at my ankles, prompting the man behind me, one of the Brooklynites, to reach down to slow it. I thanked him and turning to face him asked for the first time, “What’s your name?”

Before he could answer I knew. There was a flash of mutual recognition. Roy and I had played in a rock band together in our early 20s. We dated for a little while, too, probably breaking up the band. I was embarrassed, remembering the shitty way in which I’d broken things off. I wanted to apologize right then and there. But the years between us and the unbelievable circumstance of our reunion robbed me of words.

We made it through the checkpoint, machete and all, passed over the empty Mexican side of the bridge, wove our wagons through the stand-still US-bound traffic, then confronted the sight for which we were unprepared: the tent city hugged right up against the traffic border, spread across the asphalt plaza meant for parking official Federal vehicles, passed through the chain-link and barbed wire fence, and snaked up the embankment and along the tree-lined levee above.

Also right there, standing in a peaceful line that ran perpendicular to the hundreds of humming cars, were the first of many hundreds of people we would feed that night.

More Work than Anyone Ever Bargained For

Matamoros tent city asylum seekers line up for dinner

They waited patiently as we set up tables and delivered the clothes and camping gear to La Tienda #1, one of four “free stores,” housed in a camping tent large enough for four adults to stand in, that are stocked and managed in collaboration with Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías. We emptied the carts of that night’s dinner onto the tables and prepared to serve, school-cafeteria style.

“Ola! Que tal?” We chorused as we spooned rice and beans and meat stew cooked by a local Matamoros canteen onto wobbly paper plates. Someone handed out tortillas, another topped off each plate with the dessert oranges we’d schlepped over, others offered up juice boxes of grape, apple, or punch.

For two hours, folks kept coming. As the sun dropped behind the archway of the Gateway International bridge, connecting Matamoros with Brownsville, I fished out the last spoonful of beans from the second industrial-sized cooking pot I’d handled that night.

“Sergio, no hay mas frijoles,” I announced. No more beans.

“Not surprised,” he yelled over. “We served probably 2000 tonight.” But people were still coming, so he instructed me to drizzle bean juice over the rice, “to give it flavor.”

It was dark by the time we finished. We’d had no time to get a good look at the encampment. That would come the following day.

We cleaned and packed up with the light from the headlamps of cars still lined up to get into the US. Then we followed Sergio and his cadre of Brooklyn volunteers back over the bridge. It cost $0.30 to cross back over, coins we did not have. (Cindy forgot to mention that, too.) So Roy lent us the change.

“Who’s up for breakfast?” Sergio asked as we tromped, exhausted, back to the US and our comfy hotel beds beyond, passing the still-long-line of non-US citizens backed up on the right. It was understood he did not mean who wanted to meet him for breakfast. He was asking who would be there first thing the next morning to repeat the same routine, only this time with eggs and bread. “We meet at 8:00.”

Sergio Cordova, Michael Benavides, and Andrea Morris Rudkin, Team Brownsville co-founders, on one of their first shopping runs to buy food for the Matamoros asylum seekers, Sam’s Club, July 2018 (picture courtesy of Sergio Cordova)

Since June 2018, this has been the life of Team Brownsville, the Angry Tías, and other Brownsville/Matamoros-based good samaritans we would soon meet. In all these months, the only discernible aid the tent-city dwellers had received was from these humanitarian volunteers, who’d been wheeling over breakfast and dinner as well as clothing, camping, and personal hygiene supplies every single day. Just one more result of the Trump administration restricting the justifications for seeking asylum and requiring that asylum seekers — 1/3rd of whom were children — remain in Mexico while their claims wind slowly through the American jurisprudence system.

Where both the feckless US and Mexican governments had failed, and in the curious absence of the United Nations, these heroes had stepped up to see to the common good. And as the encampment continued to grow…and grow…their work just kept getting harder. From the first few dozen victims of metering to today’s 2500 people living in squalor and danger in Matamoros because of MPP, they had not taken a single day off. In more than a year.

It was more work than anyone ever bargained for.

Little wonder that no one had responded to my emails. Fortunately, we just showed up.

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

— Toni Morrison, 1995

Where Trump & Co’s Lies Crash Into Reality, First-Responders Combat Corruption with Compassion

This virtual tour of a Tex/Mex border encampment highlights the campaign to bring dignity and justice — as well as toilets, tents, and tortillas — to asylum seekers forced to remain in Mexico

Over the Wall & Under the Bus

Remember when then-candidate-Trump campaigned on the promise that Mexico would pay for his border wall? Ludicrous, right? Just one in a catalogue of lies that would come out of the Trump White House.

Like this one: That there’s actually an immigration crisis. Sure, the system needs a serious overhaul. But by 2016 the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US was at a decade low.

And this one: That the Migrant Protection Protocol — aka MPP, aka Remain in Mexico program — is a “resounding success.” That’s how Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Patrol, Mark Morgan, characterized it in September 2019, when he bragged to the press that since MPP rolled out the previous January, 42,000 “aliens seeking asylum and admission to the United States from Mexico” had been made to return there “for the duration of their immigration proceedings.”

What he didn’t say was that they’d tossed those 42,000 people — not aliens — back over the “wall” without access to any legal support. Or that over 98% of MPP victims would have to undergo hearings in kangaroo courts without representation, making it virtually impossible to successfully assert and win their asylum claims.

He did say: “The government of Mexico has agreed to provide them, while they’re waiting in Mexico, with appropriate humanitarian protections for the duration of their stay.” But that, too, was a lie.

The US/Mexico border is one the most dangerous places on Earth. And Mexico’s efforts on behalf of US asylum seekers have been woefully inadequate, if they’ve come at all. In Matamoros, for example, governmental intervention preceded my first tour of the refugee camp by exactly one month.

Join me as I recreate that day, first impressions and all. Then decide for yourself if MPP is a success, throws the notion of protection under the bus.

Matamoros Tent City: January 5, 2020

At the Matamoros, Mexico border-crossing-turned-refugee-camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Jim and my second full day in Brownsville/Matamoros was alive with celebration for it was Epiphany Sunday. We aided Team Brownsville’s weekly Escuelita de la Banqueta (Sidewalk School) and helped distribute a kingly breakfast of Roscón des Reyes. When it came the time to pass out children’s gifts that had been sent by well-wishers from all over the US, I decided to pull away. With 700 or so kids in the camp at the time — roughly one-third of the total population of 2,500 asylum seekers — it was going to take a while.

I picked my way around the myriad bodies hemmed in by the city of domed camping tents pitched at the base of the Gateway International Bridge since metering began there in July 2018. When MPP officially arrived a full year later, the number of tents — 200 at the time — logarithmically expanded, crawling across the town plaza, then up the embankment, and along the levee park above. 

I found the best route up at the northern-most end of the plaza, just to the right of two battered dumpsters overflowing with trash that, even in January, was swarmed with flies. At the sign denoting Mexico’s 0-Km mark, a flight of stairs built into the slope provided passage from the hot plaza asphalt to the cool, tree-lined levee running parallel to the Rio Bravo, as the Rio Grande is known in Mexico.

At the Matamoros, Mexico border-crossing-turned-refugee-camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)

I mounted the stairs and passed through an opening in the 8-foot-high chainlink and barbed wire barrier that in normal times would keep people safely away from the snarl of border traffic. It was festooned with freshly laundered clothing. Men’s ripped jeans, women’s floral print blouses, and children’s brightly-colored sweaters, tee-shirts, and leggings hung from the metal like holiday decorations. Above that, the detritus of single-use plastic shopping bags, snagged by the barbed wire, struggled to be free.

With the children hovering around Melba, and the adults hovering around them — for no one leaves a child unattended in Matamoros where kidnapping is the Gulf Cartel’s second-most lucrative enterprise — the camp that stretched along the levee was nearly empty. It was quiet, peaceful even, the hum of waiting traffic replaced by the sound of someone chopping wood.

No Average Camping Trip

Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp: the real result of Trump & Co’s Migrant Protection Protocol (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp: the real result of Trump & Co’s Migrant Protection Protocol (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)

In contrast to the mosaic of tents pitched on the plaza, here under trees denuded of their lowest branches, clutches of shelters made of tents and tarpaulins sewn together and strung up with ropes formed multi-family compounds. They took me back to the week-long camping trips my father and his brothers used to take me, my siblings, and cousins on when we were kids. We called it “roughing it,” when each family pitched a tent big enough for six or seven around a campfire with nothing but logs to sit on. There, we spent evenings under the stars, cooking fresh catch from the nearby lake, playing kick-the-can in the twilight, singing songs in the dark, and charring marshmallows for ‘smores.

But this was no average camping trip. This was homelessness. And based on the condition of some of the dwellings, these people had been living like this for months.

Cooking stove made from a propane tank: Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Central to each compound was an outdoor kitchen, a cocina, that served many. Make-shift stoves were constructed out of dried mud, adobe-style, or from old propane tanks cut through to make space for kindling and wood. A rigged grill perched on top.

I approached a woman stirring rice in a deep metal pot stained black with soot. I asked where she got water to cook with, hopeful she wasn’t tapping the fetid Rio Bravo. She pointed to a tall, thermos-like structure. It sat precariously at the edge of the steep river bank, pumping up water with the help of a generator, then pushing it through a filtration system.

“They say it’s clean enough to drink,” she said, sounding skeptical.

“Who are ‘they’?” I asked.

“Tucker and GRM.” She lifted her eyes to the heavens and made a swift sign of the cross. Then, bowing her head, she held her clasped fingers to her lips, kissed them, and throwing her hand open, she tossed both kiss and prayer to the wind.

“We’re tending to Maslow’s basic needs.” - Tía Lizee

AquaBlock Emergency Water Kiosk: Matamoros, Mexico refugee camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Water. Sunlight glinted off the polished chrome siding of the AquaBlock potable water station as an industrial-sized construction bucket sat under an open faucet, catching the water that fell out in an anemic trickle. It was, indeed, as clear as anything you’d see running from a kitchen tap. Faucets extruded from each of its four sides. More empty buckets — some stacked, some strewn — stood in the dirt beside it, available for community use.

I wondered out loud, and perhaps a little too critically, how long that would take to fill. My friend corrected me: Before the water station was installed, she said, there had been no potable water in the camp. Residents had to wait for the Tías or Team Brownsville to bring bottles in. In addition to producing a lot of waste, it meant the she couldn’t cook: bottled water was only for drinking and cleaning teeth. So, yes, the bucket would take time to fill, and one station wasn’t enough to serve 2,500 people. But access to potable water made it possible to feed her family again.

“When was it installed?” I asked.

“About a month ago.”

And, no. Neither Tucker nor GRM was with the Mexican government.

One of four “free” stores stocked by the Angry Tías & Abuelas of the RGV and managed by asylum seekers living in the Matamoros refugee camp (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Food and shelter. “Where do you get your oil and rice and corn meal and beans?”

She described the camp’s “free” store system, run by resident asylum seekers called “store managers.” Cooking utensils and food stuffs; tents, sleeping bags, jackets, and mats; diapers, feminine hygiene products, and toilet paper — all these things can be obtained at the tiendas, kept stocked by Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías.

Before the tienda system, necessities were distributed from the backs of trucks. But when the camp population exploded with the onset of MPP, lines became too long, it was impossible to know who got what, and frustration mounted when needs could not be met. A Team Brownsville volunteer came up with the idea of buying a large tent and some storage containers and identifying a resident couple to keep track of what came and went. Yami and Josue, who then lived on the plaza, were the first “store managers.” Their tent became Tienda #1.

The system worked so well, three more tiendas had been added by the time of my visit. The managers worked so hard, the Tías and Team Brownsville raised money to pay them. This kicked off a culture of building capacity within the camp.

Team Brownsville and the Tías store donations and purchased items in the tiendas, which managers distribute on demand. All residents have to do is ask. When an item is given out, it’s added to a list and replenished. That way, when a new family shows up, the store managers are ready and equipped to support them.

Victims of MPP trapped in the Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Safety. My friend was very pretty. Evidently, so were her daughters, especially her eldest. When I asked why they’d fled home, she said gang pressure to “rent” their 15-year-old had become too threatening. They were already being extorted for “protection” money on their pupuseria, but that insurance, it turned out, didn’t extend to the safety of their kids.

“It would kill us if they touched her,” she said.

“Do you feel safe here?”

“We never let the children out of our sight.”

One of several “private showers” installed by Resource Center Matamoros after one resident nearly drowned while bathing in the Rio Bravo: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Cleanliness. Between tent compounds, rudimentary shower stalls had been erected here and there. Tarps wrapped tightly around trees served as walls; an untied corner made a moveable door; carefully laid stones or boards created floors that lifted ones feet out of the mud. In one, a bucket could be rigged in the trees. A tug on the rope extending from the handle would bring water down over your head.

A skinny older man passed by just then. He wore baggy blue jeans held up with a string and carried a load of split branches slung under one arm. I asked where the wash water came from. He pointed to a large tank nestled among the tents and trees. It bore the name ROTOPLAS on its side.

“How are they filled?” I asked.

“Trucks,” he said, flashing a gap-toothed grin.

“From the government?”

“No. Gaby,” he said, “at the Resource Center.” She and Tucker brought in after a young girl nearly drowned while bathing in the river. 

Waging War with Mud 

Clotheslines: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Boundaries between tent compounds were marked by “fences” of drying laundry, hanging from rope lines strung tree to tree. An upside down SpongeBob smiled at me from a dark-blue, long-sleeved tee that waved gently in the breeze.

I pushed him aside and, ducking under the line, I barged into another multi-tent compound with a cocina and dining area. A table top of scrap lumber rested on legs resembling gnarly, twisting tree branches whittled to a sort of smoothness. Similarly constructed benches joined overturned buckets, like those at the water station, to provide seats and stools.

Outdoor dining room: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

A young woman gripped the wood of several tree branches in both hands and used the top leaves to sweep the dirt “floor.” All compounds were this tidy and rubbish-free. They were also all encircled by little trenches dug into the dirt, 6–8 inches deep and equally wide. Some were lined with pebbles. Each circular canal met a straight one at the lowest point in the landscape, then ran in the direction of the river, petering out along the way.

“What are these for?” I asked. They helped to move rain water away from the tents, she said. Then she went to state how lucky I was to be visiting in the dry season. Most of the time, it was either too wet or too hot here on the Rio Bravo. And when the rains come, the entire embankment turns to mud.

“It becomes too slippery to walk.”

Water trenches: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

She pointed out how her two-person tent had been raised up on fork-lift palettes. Others sat upon man-made mounds of built-up earth. 

“Who dug the canals and built the mounds?”

“Tucker and the men.”

Squalid, but without Squalor

Protest signs from the #EndMPP #RetoreAsylumNow Vigil, January 12, 2020, Brownsville, TX (photos by Sarah Towle, 2020)

My friend fled home when her husband, a Guatemalan border patrol cop, was murdered by the gang he’d been investigating. She took off with three small children and all the evidence he’d collected. She had presented it to CBP authorities not once, but three times, and in three places. Matamoros was the third port of entry she’d tried. In each place, she requested asylum. In each place, she’d been kicked back to Mexico. This was her last stop. There was nowhere else to go.

“At least this camp isn’t in chaos. Matamoros isn’t safe. But as long as we stay up here on the hill, it’s better than some of the other places we’ve been.”

There was truth to what she said. Of all the refugee camps I’ve seen, Matamoros is unique. While squalid, there was little squalor. The encampment was tidy. Floors were swept, even if they were dirt. Children and adults were washed, their clothes clean, their hair combed and plaited. And they were free to come and go.

My mind wandered back to my years in El Salvador, specifically to the community that had grown out of the refugee camp in Colomoncagua, Honduras. There, 10,000 people lived for a decade (1980–1991) surrounded by barbed wire and gun-totting soldiers. They’d fled the US-backed Salvadoran military’s scorched-earth campaigns only to be imprisoned at gun-point, cut off from the land — the only life they’d ever known. 

But with materials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the support of international NGOs, they developed social, occupational, and leadership skills they previously had not known.

Before anyone knew it, the refugees of Colomoncagua were negotiating their own repatriation — not as individuals, but as a community. There was no dignity living behind bars in a hostile land, they maintained. They preferred to go home, even as Civil War still raged. In 1991, they packed everything — including the boards and nails of their dwellings — and carried it over the border to war-torn Morazán, where they recreated the community they’d established in refuge.

In Matamoros, where both governmental — as well as UN — oversight were absent, a similar force was at play: a community sown from shared need and common understanding was sprouting from the earth. There was a beating heart within the patchwork of tents and tarps, and its life-blood was the network of grassroots humanitarians — folks like the Tías and Team Brownsville as well as this Tucker and Gaby, GRM and the Resource Center, whom I had yet to meet. Clearly, they placed a premium on dignity, doing what they could to make squalid conditions livable for the victims of MPP.

A Community Grows in Matamoros

The Global Management Response clinic compound: Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

The thrum of a generator drew me into a U-shaped compound of “Better Shelters” linked to a mobile clinic. A carpet, rolled out on the dirt in between, gave the compound a homey, welcoming feel. A large logo in red tipped me off instantly as to what “GRM” meant: Global Response Management, the camp’s health and wellness provider.

I pulled up an available camp chair and learned from a volunteer doctor that GRM shared no affiliation with either the Mexican government or the UN. The group had arrived in Matamoros in September, setting up shop under a white canopy on the plaza. There, it provided for basic health needs. But on seeing the camp’s rapid expansion, GRM director Helen Parry brought in the mobile unit. Legend has it that she just drove it onto the levee and parked it, ready to ask for forgiveness, rather than bothering for permission. She’d been in Matamoros ever since, overseeing a constantly evolving team of volunteer doctors and nurses.

The Venezuelan “colonia” at the Matamoros refugee camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

South of GRM, I found game courts enclosed in laundry-decorated chainlink fence. They’d been there long before MPP transformed the levee park into a refugee camp. Basketball hoops with ripped and/or missing nets towered over the tents splattered across the painted asphalt like friendly, if slightly rusted, sentries.

There, I met a Venezuelan family. The Epiphany party had ended and the camp was coming to life with the squeals of children. A group of barefoot boys kicked a soccer ball around in the dusty levee lane. As they watched their boys play, Mami and Papi explained how the community was organized: 

The Mexicans had congregated furthest north, closest to the bridge. Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans lived in the middle area, where I’d been wandering. The basketball courts were occupied by Venezuelans. And under the “domes” — at this point everyone turned to look south — were the newcomers, representing a mix of nationalities,“now that the Mexican government was involved.”

That’s when I learned that INM, Instituto Nacional de Migración, had shown up exactly one month before, on December 5, 2019, to commence construction on the “domes.” The date was well remembered in both camp and town because work began, inexplicably, in the middle of the night, waking everyone in Matamoros.

The Government Wades In

The newest refugees under the latest shelter, the “domes,” constructed by the INM (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

I left the Venezuelans and continued on, passing a lonely big top on wobbly legs that as yet served no discernible purpose. Suddenly, I felt a shift in the culture of the encampment.

The prim structure of twin white canvas domes contrasted comically with the hodgepodge of tent and tarp compounds on the levee to the north and the individual dwellings below on the plaza. The same synthetic camping tents had been pitched under the canopy, lined up in tidy rows, like city blocks, separated by straight passageways. The only things out of place were the shoes kicked off in the walkways between zippered “doors.”

Eighteen months since metering began in Matamoros and six months after MPP exploded the population of refugees, the government of Mexico had built a tent to cover tents. Like those supplied by the Tías and Team Brownsville, these tents sat upon the same Mexican dirt. Only white plastic ground cloths separated tent bottoms from the mud to come. The wall-less structure promised little protection from wind or cold or slanting rain. The domes were pretty, for now. But pretty didn’t make tent living any more safe or comfortable or dignified.

The area under the domes was only about 1/3 full, suggesting the expectation of future arrivals. This made sense since MPP did nothing to stop people from coming to the US border. It only blocked their ability to cross. With the expectation of an ever-increasing population, I would have thought the government capable of more: Better Shelters or tents one can stand in, would betray greater humanity.

One-month-old Showers Stalls: Matamoros Refugee Camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

The encampment ended just beyond the “domes” with a block of 20 gender-neutral, cement-walled shower stalls. They, too, had been constructed just before our arrival. Another belated gift from the Mexican government, they were hardly sufficient to support 2,500 souls. No one was using them on that day either, perhaps because of the mud-caked floor dappled with trash trapped within?

One-month-old laundry station: Matamoros Refugee Camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

To the west of the showers stood an outdoor laundry station. It comprised 10 sloped wash boards set side-by-side. PVC piping connected them to a municipal water source that supplied the showers as well. 

They should have been a welcome alternative to tripping down the steep bank of the Rio Bravo to scrub your laundry on the rocks. But on this day, the water pressure was low. A half-dozen frustrated people struggled angrily to rinse soap out of their clothing. The dirt beneath the station had become a pool of cloudy mud from the wash-water runoff. Strewn with rubbish, it was unsightly , and  a likely breeding grown for insects.

One-month-old bank of temporary toilets: Matamoros Refugee Camp (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

Stretching north, perpendicular to the laundry station was a row of 30 Porta-Pots. Remarkably, they did not smell. Someone stood by, handing out toilet paper and cleaning them after each user.

“When did these arrive?” I asked.

“Last month.”

Introducing the Dignity Village Coalition

The Matamoros, Mexico border crossing plaza turned refugee camps, January 2020 (photo by Sarah Towle, 2020)

I would come to learn that getting enough toilets to serve the Matamoros tent city population had been an on-going struggle. Many refugees simply squatted under the shadow of the bridge, leaving toilet paper and other unpleasant things behind. And the stench!

When that became too much, the Tías and Team Brownsville arranged to have a dozen Porta-Pots installed on the plaza. This enraged local residents and may have contributed to the company’s refusal to clean them with any regularity. Finally, the Mexican government brought the span of 30 reinforcements on the levee, thanks in large part to the grassroots humanitarians and volunteers who’d coalesced in the last quarter of 2019 to form a powerful lobbying entity on behalf of the asylum seekers.

Whether as individuals or groups, these humanitarians had arrived at different times in response to different needs: from feeding people, to sheltering and clothing them, to seeing to their basic health, to providing them with legal resources. But they all shared a common mission: to bring dignity and justice to the people — not aliens — that Trump & Co, through MPP, had washed their hands of and trapped in dangerous, squalid conditions.

By the start of my Texas road trip in January 2020, MPP’s victims numbered roughly 60,000. Having fled persecution, gang violence, domestic abuse, and crippling poverty, they could not now turn back. They were scattered all along the 2000-mile US border with Mexico, vulnerable and traumatized: a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, even before the arrival of COVID-19.

In complete disregard for international law and human rights conventions, Trump & Co created MPP not to offer people protection, that was another lie, but to end the right to asylum in the US. Through MPP, they made real people invisible to the majority of Americans. Fortunately, they remain visible to the heroes and humanitarians of the Rio Grande Valley.

Refusing to look away, they eventually joined hands, as the Dignity Village Coalition, to ensure Mexico doesn’t look away either.

Prepare to meet them. Prepare to be amazed.

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

— Toni Morrison, 1995