CHAPTER SIX

Why Landing in Trump’s America May Be a Fate Worse Than Death, Refugees Wonder

Now locked up in the largest immigration-detention system in the world, thousands of innocents rue their status as long-term prisoners.

Front entrance of the Casa Padre child detention center, Brownsville, Texas (photo by Sarah Towle 2020)

What are They Hiding?

We were told that the first-thing a newcomer encounters at Casa Padre, a detention center for migrant kids, is a black and white image of Donald Trump drawn against the backdrop of an American flag. Alongside it, a quote from his 1987 book The Art of the Deal:

“Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.”

Was this for real? Or was it just a bad joke, reflecting the nightmare that is the vast network of clandestine kids’ jails, like Tornillo, that now criss-cross the USA?

Jim and I aimed to find out.

It was easy to find Casa Padre. I typed the name into Google Maps, eh voila! There it was, hiding in plain sight in a Brownsville, TX, strip-mall not far from our home-away-from-home at the Hampton Inn on the I-69E Frontage Road. It occupies a former Walmart and is run by Southwest Key, the highest paid of 61 federal government contractors that struck it rich off the detention and transportation of “unaccompanied alien children” in 2018.

It is said that Casa Padre is the largest “licensed childcare facility” in the US, housing approximately 1,500 boys from 10–17 years old. But Jim and I couldn’t corroborate that for sure, because just like US Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) before us, we were turned away before we could reach the door.

In fact, it appears that no one, other than staff bound by ironclad NDAs — and, of course, the detained — has entered the facility since federal authorities admitted a small group of reporters to tour the secretive shelter after Merkley’s June 2018 rebuff sparked an outcry.

After that, nada. Which begs the question: what are they hiding?

Authorized Personnel Only

As we pulled into the drive, we were met right away by a sentry. She’d stepped out of a little wooden hut and requested with a wave of the hand that we lower the window. We did.

“May I help you,” she asked.

“Isn’t this the Walmart?” we said, feigning ignorance.

“No,” she said, reversing her wave. “You’ll have to back out.”

“Into oncoming traffic?” Jim responded. “Not likely.” He pulled forward and took a wide tour of the parking lot so I could snap some pics. From our rear-view mirror, we could see the sentry talking into her phone, then jotting down our license plate number.

On our way back out, she waved at us again. This time indicating we should stop.

“In future, please know only authorized personnel can come in here,” she said, matter-of-factly. At which point, I just couldn’t help myself.

“This is that kids’ jail, isn’t it?” She pursed her lips.

“How do you feel about working for a company that imprisons kids? Are you able to sleep at night?”

She turned away from us, and marched back into her hut. Jim drove on. But we really, really wanted to know. So I texted Tía Cindy:

Any chance you can get us into a detention center?

She responded within seconds. Sure. I’ll put you in touch Tía Madeleine.

Angry Tía Madeleine Sandefur at the June 14, 2018 Families Belong Together rally (photo credit: Brownsville Herald)

The Unsung Angry Tía

Madeleine Sandefur calls herself “an accidental activist.” Yet, she has been at the forefront of many causes since her arrival in South Texas in 1969. She’s a voting rights advocate with the League of Women Voters; an environmentalist involved in the public protest to save South Padre Island habitats from the liquefied natural gas industry; and a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s research. She helped to organize the Brownsville Women’s March, one of 408 that swept the nation, and 673 that took place on the world’s seven continents, the day Donald Trump crossed his fingers behind his back and pledged to uphold and defend the US Constitution.

On June 14, 2018, Madeleine brought her organizational skills to bear, in league with her birder friend, Joyce Hamilton, to mount Brownsville’s Families Belong Together rally. Before the protest was over that day, she’d become the fifth Angry Tía. And because she lives just miles away from the Port Isabel Detention Center (PIDC), where Customs & Border Patrol (CBP) were then sending migrants, that became her “beat.”

Her role was to provide hope to the anguished mothers whose kids had been seized, and to liaise with lawyers, like Jodi Goodwin and ProBar ’s Kimi Jackson, who were tirelessly — and without pay — trying to track them down. To do that, she had to school up quickly on Trump & Co’s shape-shifting anti-immigrant agenda, making her the Tías’ expert in all detention-related matters today.

By the time Jim and I arrived in the Rio Grande Valley, the PIDC contained only men — 1,500 of them. Tía Madeleine serves the asylum seekers among the detainees, who are distinguishable from the more hardened criminals by their blue coveralls. The others wear red.

She secures them legal counsel, comforts them by phone or email when they lose hope, and is always there to ferry those who get out to bus or plane. She refers to them collectively as “my boys.” They all call her “mama.”

Madeleine presents a surprising package. Her petite, soft-spoken stature masks a fierce devotion and loud determination for justice. A naturalized immigrant from Zurich, Switzerland, married to a Kentucky-born US Airman, she’s now dedicated to fighting the very system that welcomed her.

“What moved you to take on such a Sisyphean challenge?” I asked her.

“Because this wasn’t what I signed on to when I became a US citizen.”

1984, Brazil, or Soylent Green?

The front entrance of the Port Isabel Detention Center with dedication to victims of 9/11 (photo: US Immigration & Customs Enforcement)

January 2020: The year after “the future” envisioned in dystopian movies of my youth — Blade Runner, Akira, Running Man — a few decades past the world of Escape from New York, and just two years from Soylent Green. None of these films portrayed an evil as banal as what Jim and I encountered at PIDC. There, where freedom-seeking refugees are locked up according to the whims of a lawless White House, Orwell’s 1984 comes closer to mind, or Terry Gillian’s Brazil. There is certainly no golden door for the wretched refuse yearning to be free at the PIDC.

Located just a few wing-flaps of a migratory bird away from the tourist beaches of South Padre Island and roughly 30-miles north of the 2000-mile humanitarian crisis stretching from Matamoros to Tijuana, PIDC provided us the key to our expanding witness. We understood instantly that Trump & Co’s manufactured immigration crisis was not limited to the Mexican side of the US border, where they simply washed their hands of any responsibility for the huddled masses and tempest-tost [sic] homeless. The crisis, it turns out, is a growing cancer inside US borders, too, where people of all ages who are innocent of any real crime are locked up in cells and cages, and tucked away from prying eyes.

Having already been denied entry to Casa Padre, we weren’t expecting much as we wound our way up the long, landscaped driveway toward the low-slung brick structures and barbed-wire topped chainlink fences raised within a federal nature preserve. We parked the Kia and walked by the stone monument dedicating the site to the victims of 9/11. We passed through metal detectors after emptying our pockets of all but the car keys, receiving nothing but polite interaction from our khaki-clad minders. I noted they were not the old, fat, white men of my expectation, but resembled more their prisoners. I marveled at the significance of this just as I reeled at my own internalized bias. We signed in and gave up the Alien Identification Numbers of the inmates we’d come to visit.

And there we were, in the waiting room of an antiseptic institution where rows of straight-backed, scoop-seated metal chairs are bolted into a cold, painted gray cement floor. A reverse ATM machine — allowing visitors to deposit money into detainee accounts for commissary purchases, like soap — nestled up against a vending machine offering bottled water, sodas, and junk food. Above them, a single soundless television monitor projected The Hunger Games — a coincidence, surely, but also a way too obvious metaphor to resist mentioning for the bizarre world we’d entered.

Locked Up & Forgotten

Detainees walking at PIDC (photo: US Immigration & Customs Enforcement)

The rule, if you’re not a lawyer, is one inmate per visit. So, Tía Madeleine gave us the AI#s of two men, one from Guinea, the other The Gambia, and both in dire need of human contact, even if through plexiglass and a 20th-century-style telephone with a crackling receiver speaker. “But just in case the guards are feeling generous,” she said, “I’ll give you a third AI# for a man from Cameroon.” He was doing better than the other two emotionally, but was lonely and bursting to tell his story.

We waited an hour. Having been stripped of our phones and notebooks, we had nothing to pass the time but each other and the muted transmission of the Mockingjay’s struggle against The Capitol. Finally, a door opened and a guard beckoned us. We were ushered down a long, institutional hall with two-toned grey-on-grey walls, through another door leading into a large room of darker gray carved up by cubicles. Inside each open-backed, gray-walled cubicle, white formica-topped facing tables, 3-ft wide by 1-ft deep, were split in two by plexiglass barriers that reached to the ceiling. And just as pictured in every prison movie or sitcom you’ve ever seen, a grey phone sat perched on the facing wall to the right. There, in this room of repeating white and grey and no natural light, we met M and K, both French-speaking African men for whom, here in South Texas, it was rare to receive mother-tongue visitors, and V, an English speaker from the mostly French-speaking nation of Cameroon.

One by one, we heard their stories, both harrowing and heroic, of fleeing certain death back home and enduring a months-long pursuit of freedom only to be shackled, clad in a blue jumpsuit with PIDC emblazoned across the back, and imprisoned. They should all have been awarded asylum for simply having survived the overland trek from Ecuador — the gateway for African migrants because it requires no visa — through Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica to Nicaragua where smugglers passed them from cars to buses to trains all the way through Mexico, everyone getting their palms greased along the way. Jim and I were already well aware of the long, painful, arduous, and dangerous journey to the US, on foot or hanging from La Bestia, that Northern Triangle asylum seekers were taking. But we’d never before conceived of the added hardship of crossing three additional countries worth of mountains, rivers, and jungles without adequate food or water or footwear. The African migration trail to the US, V informed us, is littered with dead bodies.

To endure a voyage like that, you really would have to be running from a life most terrible. And these three were among the few lucky survivors. But some days, they all confessed, they felt that dying on the trail might have been preferable to landing in Trump’s America.

None of the three could go home again. They were well and truly stuck. M became a marked man when the opposition candidate he’d worked for lost a corrupt election. He’ll be taken from the airport on arrival and executed if made to go back. Without books to read and paper to write on, he passes the long days making wallets out of trash.

K, a homosexual in a country that considers such identities punishable by death, ran when his lover was outed and murdered by neighbors. They were coming for K next. He, too, could only survive in hiding back home, if he made it out of the airport alive.

V had managed to get on the wrong side of both sides in a vicious civil war. He named names under torture by the government and was freed. But then the rebels went after him. If he ever returns, there’s no telling which side will tear him apart first.

V, a fairly recent arrival to PIDC, had been there mere months at the time of our visit. M’s imprisonment in the US, however, had surpassed three years. PIDC was his seventh detention center. K had been at PIDC nearly two years, and he was distraught. The appeal of his previously rejected asylum claim had been denied the previous day for lack of hard evidence. Keep in mind it’s impossible to stop collect, and pack evidence of your lovers’ murder when you’re forced to drop everything and run. His pro-bono lawyer felt his case was worth appealing, meaning he’d remain in prison in the US for many months more unless he signed his own deportation papers. That was his choice: indefinite detention with no clear outcome or death. He spent the entirety of our interview shrieking, “Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!” into the crackling phone.

The World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System

Graph by Freedom for Immigrants shows number of immigrants detained per country in 2019. The next highest country was Saudi Arabia at 250,000.

To understand why M, K, and V were trapped at PIDC, rather than at home with their sponsors — for they all have sponsors — you have to understand that under Trump & Co, immigrants are not people but product. They are pivotal to the profitability of a private prison industry that has made detaining immigrants key to their business model.

Take the Geo Group Inc, the wealthiest for-profit prison contractor worldwide. One out of five of its 850,000 US beds are in ICE detention centers. It and CoreCivic, the next-richest private prison operator in the US, faced a serious existential threat when, in 2016, Obama green-lighted the beginning of the end of privately run prisons.

But the industry’s investment in the Trump campaign — a combined $500,000 — paid off. The morning after Trump’s election, the stock values of GEO Group and CoreCivic rose 18% and 34%. respectively. In April 2017, then-Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, revoked the Obama administration’s prison-reform initiative and began requesting bids private prison operators again. That same month, the GEO Group won a $110 million contract to build the first ICE detention center under the new administration.

Then, Trump & Co allowed ICE to deftly exploit a gap in legislation that fails to limit detention duration. By 2019, 52,000 immigrants were being detained in ICE facilities — 70% operated by private contractors. The average stay in a for-profit prison is 87 days, as against the 33.3 day average in publicly run facilities.

The Price of Hate

Graph by Freedom for Immigrants shows number of immigrants detained in US by age in 2019.

M, K, and V are among 37,000 adult immigrants detained within the largest immigrant detention system in the world, one that in 2019 held more migrant children away from their parents than in any other country in the world: 69,550. That’s enough infants, toddlers, kids, and teens to overflow an NFL stadium. That’s despite the overwhelming evidence that prolonged detention is traumatic for children, causing long-term and irreparable physical and emotional harm.

These people are innocent of any real crime. All they seek is life. The only plausible reason for keeping them under lock and key — particularly in the midst of a lethal global pandemic — is the price Trump & Co have put on hate.

Take Southwest Key, the for-profit operator of the impenetrable Casa Padre: It raked in nearly $1.5 billion in government contracts in 2018 for the detention and transportation of “unaccompanied alien children.” The second-highest paid player in the kid imprisonment business that year was BCFS Health and Human Services of Tornillo fame. It pulled in almost $7 million in government business in 2018. The third-highest vendor, Comprehensive Health Services, Inc, made nearly $3 million in 2018. It’s Homestead, Florida operation housed 3,000 teens in tents at its height, and charged $775 per detainee, per day.

And here’s a Homestead “fun” fact: Prior to becoming Trump’s first Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly sat on the board of and worked as a lobbyist for a company called DC Capital Partners. DCCP created the private prison firm, Caliburn International. Owned by Comprehensive Health Services, Caliburn ran Homestead. Shortly after leaving his job as White House Chief of Staff in 2018, Kelly joined Caliburn’s Board of Directors.

You’ll recall that John Kelly was the first member of Trump & Co to go on the record, early in 2017, saying that the government was considering separating migrant families, “as a way to deter immigration.”

1984, Brazil, or a cancer eating out the insides of Trump’s America? You decide.

“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 FIVE: Free Them! How One Man with a Bold Sign and a Commitment to Witness Fought the Power

Joshua Rubin didn’t just kick-start a movement to spring refugee kids from jail, he woke us up to the meaning of humanity 

Cruelty Remains the Point

Joshua Rubin protest the mass incarceration of immigrant children, Tornillo, Texas, Oct 2018-Jan 2019 (photo courtesy of Joshua Rubin)

I was compelled to write The First Solution as part of the crusade against the institutionalized cruelty of Trump & Co’s immigration agenda. But when images of kids being ripped from the arms of their parents pinged around the world, I didn’t drop everything and go protest — indefinitely and alone — in the middle of nowhere.

Joshua Rubin did that.

Joshua’s outrage, like mine, began when Trump & Co announced, on April 6, 2018, that they would henceforth have “zero tolerance” for anyone trying to enter the US at the southern border. Whether sneaking in via river or desert  or requesting asylum at an established port of entry — a human right recognized by international law — everyone would now be charged with “illegal entry” and processed as a criminal.

Then, exploiting a US Department of Justice loophole that prohibits children from remaining in the care of a parent accused of a crime, Trump & Co just took them. 

The scenes of inhumanity shook us to the core. A mother shackled for protesting her suckling infant being pulled off her breast. A man dead from suicide on being denied information regarding the whereabouts his wife and three-year-old son. Distraught siblings punished for trying to comfort each other.

Religious groups decried family separations as “deeply immoral.” Amnesty International said it was “tantamount to torture.” The American Academy of Pediatrics warned it would trigger “toxic stress,” disrupting and potentially arresting brain development. Physicians for Human Rights predicted — and have since proven — that the mental, emotional, and physical toll the the experience will last a lifetime.

Families Belong Together

Criticism of the policy sparked a movement: Families Belong Together. Some 250 organizations coalesced to fight for the immediate reunification of families separated at the border, and the compassionate treatment of immigrants going forward. From their home in Brooklyn, NY, Joshua Rubin and his wife, Melissa, joined the nationwide protests that erupted that spring. Melissa made them a sign. Big bold letters painted in black on white foam core read: FREE THEM.

But Joshua didn’t end his protest there. He packed his sign and flew to McAllen, TX, ground zero of family separations at the time. He went to the Ursula Processing Center, aka La Hielera (the icebox), the largest Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) location, and the first place immigrants crossing the border into that area of south Texas landed — a 72-hour a way-station in a 77,000 sq. ft. warehouse retrofitted to hold 1,000 children…

…in cages.

Joshua stood vigil outside Ursula for days, a lone protester whose poster shouted FREE THEM to all who went in and came out.

While he was there, the cries of inconsolable children inside Ursula reverberated around the world. Recorded by someone on staff, then passed to Jennifer Harbury of the newly-formed Angry Tías, it put McAllen on everyone’s map. 

But then the rains came, and McAllen’s streets turn into rivers. Joshua couldn’t get out for several days. 

The clouds parted to reveal a second protester: a young Democratic politician from Maine, then running for US Senate against the Independent incumbent, Angus King. Zak Ringlestein was his name and he’d shown up with a pick-up truck full of water and toys and bedding — gifts from his constituents — which he parked in front of the entrance to the facility and refused to move. A campaign stunt, perhaps. But his presence brought reporters. 

On the record, he said he wouldn’t remove his truck until he was allowed inside. Under his breath, he told Joshua it was either that or get arrested.

Joshua offered to join him. The FREE THEM message rang a littler louder.

Detained!

Zak and Joshua were indeed arrested, carried off to spend the night in the Hidalgo county jail. “It was shockingly cold,” Joshua remembers.

There was nowhere to sleep but the floor. The lights were never turned off. Joshua couldn’t catch a wink, and empathized more than ever with the plight of all detainees, having become one himself, if only for one night.

Meanwhile, lawyers working round the clock to locate the children of parents and guardians held in Rio Grande Valley detention centers were beginning to understand the method to Trump & Co’s madness: From CBP, they were channeling adults and children into different bureaucratic purgatories.

Adults were labeled “illegal aliens” and passed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), then detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

Kids and youth were labeled “unaccompanied alien children” (UACs) — as if they’d crossed the border alone — then passed to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a branch of the US Department Health and Human Services (HHS), for “sheltering.”

“Shelters” started popping up all over the country: in empty office buildings, abandoned Big Box Stores. ORR wasn’t forthcoming about the location of these shelters or who was running them. Not even the minors’ attorneys were allowed to know. Many were clandestine.

The Protest Grows

Click on the image to access Carbon Trace Productions.


Once sprung, Ringlestein returned to Maine and Joshua resumed his vigil, but with new company:  A friend, Doug Roller, brought along a documentary film crew called Carbon Trace Productions. Andy Cline and Shane Franklin arrived, toting a video camera.

The four drove east, 45 minutes, to attend the Families Belong Together rally in Brownsville, organized by Angry Tías, Madeline Sandefur and Joyce Hamilton. 

Then they hit the road west, 1000 miles, to join the national mobilization of Families Belong Together in El Paso on June 30th.

From there, they traveled another 40 miles east of El Paso to see a tent city encircled in barbed-wire topped chain-link fence. It had been raised from the desert floor in the border town of Tornillo. A new detention center exclusively for kids. 

Tornillo had opened that Father’s Day with 100 inmates and amidst protests so vehement its existence made the national headlines. When Joshua, Doug, Andy, and Shane arrived, it held 400 teens, all victims of family separation. 

The thought of imprisoning kids nagged at Joshua, the father of a son. But he had to get home. Besides, Trump rescinded the policy of family separation 10 days before by executive order. Popular protest had won. No?

Lost Count

No.

Family separations did not stop. They just went underground. And court orders to reunite families did not happen either.

Trump & Co missed their July 20th deadline to reunite families of children 4 years old and younger. They missed their July 27th deadline to reunite children aged 5–17. Finally, CPB Commissioner Kevin McAleenan confirmed: they weren’t able to reunite families because data necessary to track down either children or parents had not been collected.

Rio Grande Valley attorneys scrambled to try to find the stolen children themselves. But in the alphabet soup of departments and offices of an already inept administration, no one really knew who was taken from whom, or where exactly they’d gone.

Some were detained. Others had been deported. Even today the numbers vary as to how many families Trump & Co lost track of within the multi-layered system of intersecting agencies. 

Can’t Count

In early June 2018, DHS stated that 1,995 minors were separated from 1,940 adults from April 19 through May 31. As of June 26, that number was revised to 2,047 kids. But this still did not include the kids taken before ‘zero tolerance’ became public. 

When news came out that family separations had been piloted in El Paso from October 2017, affecting another 281 “family units,” the official tally of stolen children jumped to nearly 4,000. 

Then reports emerged that DHH had “lost” another 1,475 children in 2017.

On June 27, ProPublica reported that a network of approximately 100 shelters and foster homes in 14 states run by ORR and an assortment of nonprofits were already housing 8,886 children who’d crossed the border before April.

DHH revised its numbers again, admitting that following the roll-out of Trump & Co’s zero-tolerance, it had 10,773 youth in custody. It also said that because its shelters were at 95% capacity, it was exploring the idea of setting up kids’ detention centers on underutilized military bases.

But by now, both science and legal precedent had established that children should be with loved ones until their parents or guardians could be found. It was more humane, less toxic, and far less costly for taxpayers. And it would be easier to track down their parents on a case by case basis.

The nation, and Joshua, were left wondering: why are these children being detained when they should be going to relatives or sponsors already in the US?



The Vigil Resumes

Photo courtesy of Joshua Rubin

September 2018 found Joshua Rubin back in El Paso for a national interfaith gathering called El Grito de la Frontera (Cry from the Border), convened by Faith in Public Life and Hope Border Institute. There, another attendee said something that might have caused others offense, but Joshua took it to heart. She said she was tired of people coming to the border for a few days and thinking they’d “done” something.

Back in Brooklyn again, a New York Times article further captured Joshua’s attention: teenaged boys in detention centers all over the country were being rounded up and sent to Tornillo. The population was now 1000.

Then Amnesty International calculated that at least another 6,022 children had been separated between April 19 and August 15, 2018, indicating that Trump & Co had gone right on stealing children from their parents even after the executive order that ended the policy.

Joshua decided to go see for himself what was happening at Tornillo. He devised a plan that met with the approval of Hope Border Institute: Claiming to be part of the Carbon Trace film crew, he would hire an RV and park it at the shuttered Tornillo-Guadalupe Toll Plaza just across from the gateway into the ever-expanding tent city. The toll plaza sat inside the El Paso county line, while the detention center stood on the border on federal land. So, authorities could not force Joshua to leave.

He packed up Melissa’s FREE THEM sign once more, as well as a new one. It read: WITNESS TORNILLO. He kissed her goodbye and promised to be back within three months. That was mid-October 2018.

The Subversive Act of Seeing

En route to Texas, Joshua thought a lot about the responsibility of bearing witness. “I didn’t expect to accomplish anything. I still don’t know if I did. But I was seeing. And I was recording what I saw in writing, which I’d never done before.”

The writing was therapeutic for Joshua who was alone for the first month and a half, “It was like my 40 days in the desert.” 

He joined Facebook and started sharing his daily reports with the outside world. His ‘seeing’ became subversive. When friends shared his observations, a movement began to coalesce around his one-man action. His following began to grow.

“And what did you witness?” 

Modern Mass Internment

An aerial photo shows the Tornillo tent city, Friday, November 9, 2018 (photo by Tom Fox / Staff Photographer, Dallas Morning News)

Joshua saw a compound of pristine white tents lined up in neat rows surrounded by an impenetrable fortress of barbed-wire topped silver chain-link fence. A concentration camp for children. El Paso journalist Robert Moore described it, “The largest mass incarceration in the US of children not charged with a crime since the Japanese internment during the Second World War.”

Joshua saw trucks going in, carrying more generators, tents, beds, and port-a-pots, followed by buses carrying more youth, ages 13–17, both boys and girls. More teens went in than came out.

Joshua saw trucks carrying potable water in at the rate of 70,000 gallons a day, and trucks carrying equal amounts of grey and black water going out. In the middle of the desert, Tornillo was well and truly off the grid. Generators, hummed round the clock, powering lights and, Joshua assumed, air conditioners.

“It’s no accident that this is in Tornillo,” remarked then-Congressman Beto O’Rourke at the Father’s Day protest. “It’s in a remote location on purpose so the American people don’t know what’s happening here.”

Joshua witnessed the camp expand into the biggest federal prison in the country. “If there were 1000 kids there when I arrived,” he told me, “There were at least 3000 in the end.”

Hope Border Institute calculates that, all told, 6,000 boys and girls passed through Tornillo’s patrolled gateway from June-December 2018. Moore pegged it at closer to 6,200.

The Tornillo youth were brought into the camp’s yard in formation each day, “marched, single file, like prisoners.”

Once in the yard, they were “at ease,” but remained under constant surveillance. They played soccer and milled about in groups. But they were never permitted to touch. They could never hug or console each other. Only a fist bump was allowed.

One soccer pitch ran alongside the Tex/Mex border wall. There was enough space between the chain-link and bollard fences that Josh could walk that side of the fortress compound without being accused of “trespassing.” He could sometimes get close enough to talk with the kids, but they were reluctant to chat if the guards were near.

One day he found out that an El Salvadoran boy had been inside for three months. Another boy shouted “four months,” and another said, “Six, since the opening of the camp,” before a guard hurried over and shut down their conversation. The next day, tarps lined the inside of the fence to keep the kids from Joshua’s view, and vice-versa.

“No estan solos,” he would reassure them when he could (you’re not alone).

“Estamos de tu lado,” he’d tell them (we’re on your side).

We Aren’t in Brooklyn Anymore

Migratory birds sometimes landed at Tornillo to watch the kids. Then flew off again, an irony never lost on Joshua (photo courtesy of Joshua Rubin)

Nighttimes were peaceful, and beautiful, if cold. The sky was awash in galaxies and stars — something you could never see from Brooklyn. Mornings brought distant mountains into view, as well as the sound of the wind rustling the fields of scrub, cotton, and alfalfa. And, of course, the generators. Daytimes, Joshua waved to the busloads of new arrivals, his heart breaking for them. 

“They had no idea what was in store,” he said.

He would chat with the occasional passer-by who rolled to a stop and through an open window asked about the compound; about what he was doing there; about the meaning of his sign: FREE THEM.

Sometimes Joshua chatted with the truck drivers as they waited, engines thrumming, for the gates to open wide enough to let them in. “What are you hauling?” he would ask. “Do you know what you’re supporting?” And if they didn’t, “That’s a jail,” he’d tell them. “For kids.”

Eventually, Joshua’s Facebook following grew to 3000. Shane returned to Tornillo with another cinematographer, Taye Taye, to continue documenting Joshua’s action. They, too, would call their project: Witness at Tornillo.

More Dirty Tricks

Most of the kids at Tornillo were waiting to be reunited with parents or sent to the guardians who’d agreed to sponsor them while their immigration cases were processed. They’d feed and clothe them and send them to school. And following the mandates of the 1997 Flores Agreement, written to protect all children from prolonged detention, none should have been held for more than 20 days.

But Trump & Co found and exploited another loophole: The Flores Agreement stipulates that children be in the care of “State Licensed Programs.” Because they placed the Tornillo detention center on federal, not state, land, they claimed exemption from Flores Agreement rules.

They hung onto their young inmates for as long as they needed them. Time served stretched to a new average of 90 days, owning to additional Trump & Co regulations that obligated all members of a sponsor’s household to be fingerprinted and undergo background checks. The data derived from the vetting of sponsors and their families were then shared with ICE, which used it to ferret out and deport undocumented immigrants living in the US, including upstanding community members that had been in and contributed to the country for decades.

When it became clear that Trump & Co were using the Tornillo kids as bait, many sponsors ceased to cooperate, trapping kids in Tornillo even longer. It also brought Trump & Co’s methods under further scrutiny.

News surfaced that HHS allocated $367.9 million in the last quarter of 2018 to operate Tornillo, which now held 3,000 boys and girls, or more. But the Washington Post reported on December 18, that about 14,600 children were then in the custody of HHS — the highest number in the agency’s history. While Trump touted Tornillo as a model to be replicated, talk of creating additional facilities like it sparked outrage.

Then, CNN revealed that the more than 2,000 Tornillo employees had never undergone FBI background checks, in violation of HHS’s own guidelines. This further highlighted that it was in no way a shelter “licensed” to hold and care for the unique needs of kids. It was, in fact, exactly what Joshua witnessed: a prison.

What’s more, feedback from chaplains given access to the Tornillo inmates painted a picture of psychological duress due to their indefinite confinement, duress that was not being met with adequate psycho-social support. The kids of Tornillo were by all indications suffering.

Christmas at Tornillo

Meantime, the movement that sprung from Joshua’s Facebook following was taking on a life of its own. Shane teased the outside world with images of Joshua and the Tornillo kids on YouTube. Protesters from El Paso and the surrounding area joined them on weekends. Some even stayed a night or two, sleeping in their own vehicles.

If Tornillo opened to local criticism, it was now a national flashpoint.

In mid-November, 70 faith leaders, many of them Jewish congregants and their rabbis, joined Joshua to protest the kids’ jail, sparking the Shut Down Tornillo Coalition. Actress and activist Alyssa Milano came to interview Joshua outside the detention site. And appealing to Joshua’s followers, Ashley Heidebrecht, an El Paso social worker, organized a rally to coincide with a December 15th visit of congressional delegates, including Beto.

Then, activists celebrated Christmas at Tornillo. They sung and chanted as loudly as they could, lifting their voices up and over the chain-link and barbed wire fence to let the children know people were thinking of them that holiday season. The caroling began on Sunday, December 23rd, and continued through January 1st. It was the biggest press pull yet.

Finally, the shelter operator, BCFS Health and Human Services — the second-highest grossing kids’ jail contractor after Southwest Key — gave into the mounting negative PR. It announced the camp would close at the end of January, 2019, paving the way for Trump & Co to rescind the background check requirement for all members of a sponsor’s household. Suddenly, 2,500 young people were released to loved ones, illuminating that the cruel and prolonged detention at Tornillo had always been at the discretion of administration.

No Rest for the Weary

For more information about how to schedule a viewing of Witness at Tornillo, contact Carbon Trace Productions.

Joshua’s vigil at Tornillo was over. He returned home to Melissa within the promised three months. It was good to be home with his community of friends. It was great to be sleeping again in his own bed. He deserved a good rest.

But before February was over, the phone rang. It was Amy Cohen, Founder of Every. Last. One., an organization dedicated to reuniting all separated children with their families.

“When can you get to Homestead?” Amy asked,

The Tornillo camp was closed. All fencing, tents, toilets, soccer goals, everything had been carted away. The sand had been swept to remove any traces that the camp ever existed. But immigrant boys and girls were still being held captive, all over the USA.

Trump and Co were playing a game of Whack-a-mole with protesters and humanitarians. And now Homestead, Florida, was it.

“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 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

CHAPTER TWO: When Aunties and Grannies Turn Into Activists for Dignity and Justice...

Even Trump & Co’s cold, hard, cruelty cannot crush hope

Elizabeth “Lizee” Cavazos, Cindy Candia, Susan Law, and Joyce Hamilton of Angry Tias & Abuelas

Hello? Is There Anybody Out There?

We landed in Brownsville on January 3, 2020, with a car reservation, three nights pre-booked into a hotel, and a single contact. This was not the plan.

The plan was to have folks waiting for us all along the Tex/Mex border. From Labor Day to Thanksgiving, I emailed every organization I could find from Brownsville to El Paso. By Christmas, I’d heard back from none.

Jim was growing skeptical. “We’ll just show up. It’ll work out. You’ll see,” I told him.

“And if it doesn’t, we’ll have more time to spend in Big Bend.”

Finally, the day before our departure from London, on December 27, 2019, I heard back from Susan Law of the Angry Tías & Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley. I’d contacted them at the suggestion of RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, which — along with the Interfaith Welcome Coalition — had been the first to respond when US Immigration and Border Enforcement (ICE) employees started dumping asylum seekers, mostly dazed and confused women and children, at the San Antonio bus station in April 2018.

“Sarah, I’m so sorry about the delay in responding to you! We are looking forward to your visit and are grateful for yours and your husband’s offer to help. Our Tia Cindy, copied here, has offered to meet with you on January 4 and can accompany you across the border to give you an orientation.

We don’t have a really organized set of tasks for volunteers to do. The refugees living at the camp are grateful for people who come to visit with them, showing them they are not forgotten.”

— Tía Susan

This is What Democracy Looks Like

Jennifer Harbury

In spring 2018, Jennifer Harbury had been keeping her eye on the Rio Grande Valley bridges. A long-time civil rights attorney and dedicated refugee advocate who’d lived in the RGV for four decades, she knew that any shift in border activity to the west portended something was on its way east. And by all reports — increased CBP intimidation and ICE abuses, the government’s suspension of the Legal Orientation Program as well as parole for pregnant women — whatever was coming wasn’t good.

Sure enough, it would flow to the Reynosa-McAllen bridge in the final days of May.

Jennifer messaged her colleague Kimi Jackson, Director of The South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project (ProBAR). Urgent help needed! she stated.

Forty people had been stranded on the bridge for five days. They had no food, no water, they were completely exposed to the elements. Some were barefoot, their shoes having fallen apart on the journey across Mexico. All were desperate.

Cindy Candia

Kimi lost no time. She contacted her trusted comrade in LGBTQ-rights activism, Cindy Candia, as well as her neighbor, a retired adult literacy educator and Presbyterian Elder, Joyce Hamilton. The three sprung into action, calling on others to help them form a caravan to deliver to the bridge as many sandwiches as they could make as well as snacks, diapers, pedialyte, whatever they could pull together on a dime.

Cindy, an ex-correctional officer and the daughter of migrant farmworkers, emptied her cupboards into a large picnic cooler, “Because my husband and I were between paychecks at the time.”

On the hour-long drive from Harlingen, TX, she and the others couldn’t stop asking, Why isn’t Customs and Border Patrol letting them in?

Joyce Hamilton

What the three women found at the bridge on June 3, 2018, defied explanation and challenged the imagination: A scrum of men, women, babies, and children pressed up against the US border control office at the bridge’s north end. They’d been sleeping on bits of found cardboard, washing in a nearby water fountain, and taking turns to use the bathroom at the UETA duty-free shop in Mexico.

“They were literally stuck there,” Joyce recounted.

The triple-digit Texas sun scorched the asphalt, burning their feet. There was nowhere to sit. Babies needed new diapers, women needed clean underwear. Everyone needed a change of clothes and a bath. Some needed medical attention. Freelance writer and then-McAllen resident, Daniel Blue Tyx, called it, “a refugee camp on the bridge."

Seeing to the Common Good

Kimi Jackson

Back at home that night, Kimi tapped out a call to action on her Facebook page, describing what she’d seen and asking for volunteers and/or money to help support the needs of the trapped asylum seekers. She included a shopping list.

Nayelly Barrios was among the first RGV residents to receive Kimi’s message. A Mexican immigrant, poet and University of Texas-RGV professor, she lived close to the bridge, in Edinburg, and was then on summer break. She dashed right over with supplies from Kimi’s list, but not without first sharing the call for help with her Facebook friends. She received $200 in donations overnight.

When Joyce and Cindy met Nayelly face-to-face for the first time four days later, the refugee camp on the bridge had grown from 40 to 70. CBP was still processing asylum claims, but slowly — around 10 per day — meaning more people were joining the queue than leaving it. By day, they were forced up against the outside, metal barrier of the walkway to allow the thousands of pedestrian border-crossers to pass on the left. Their long, single-file line extended from the mostly empty, air-conditioned CBP office big enough for 100 to the bronze plaque at the middle of the bridge that marked the official US/Mexico boundary.

Nayelly Barrios

On June 11, Nayelly sent a frantic group message to Kimi, Cindy, Jennifer, and Joyce: she’d arrived at the bridge to see CBP officials pushing the entire line of asylum seekers back to the international mid-point. Also that day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration had rolled back asylum protections for victims of domestic and gang violence. The decision would affect nearly every individual and family running from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, as well as Nicaragua, where decades-long corruption and US-backed military training, along with a surfeit of weapons, had bred cultures of impunity.

Throughout Central America, where gangs rule, even the worst crimes go unpunished. Few are safe. Small business owners face extortion; murder if they don’t pay up. Women and girls face the threat of rape and/or kidnapping for ransom and/or sex slavery. Families face the threat of gangs pressing their boys into work as drug runners for the cartels. Everyone faces violence everyday as the dead and mutilated are left where all are reminded who’s really in charge.

So, yes, those who’ve chosen to pull up stakes and make the long, dangerous trek to the US border on foot, because they cannot afford to fly, are literally running for their lives.

Yet from that moment forward, those fleeing persecution to seek safe haven in the US, as is their right under international law, would face the same hostility as those trying to sneak in. Now, upon reaching US ports of entry, asylum seekers would have to add their names to an official CBP list, then wait in Mexico to be called.

Only an audience with CBP officials would kick-start the asylum process, and you never knew when you’d be called. Meantime, Trump’s own State Department had placed Mexico under a level-4 travel advisory, along with Syria, Iran, and Iraq, especially at the border.

“Metering” Asylum

Jodi Goodwin educates asylum seekers on their rights

McAllen was no longer just ground zero for Trump & Co’s family separation debacle. It was now a place where the right to asylum was eroding as well. The border was closing: a wall had indeed gone up, although one more metaphorical than physical. The practice of “metering” had begun. Seeking asylum would now function much like the Department of Motor Vehicles: take a number and wait your turn. Though in this case, the wait could go on for months. The most desperate chose the river, risking death or criminal arrest, which meant prolonged detention and the removal of their children — a new face of family separation.

What Cindy, Nayelly, and Joyce saw in June 2018 was injustice, plain and simple. They were angry. Jennifer saw torture and crimes against humanity. She was angry, too. So angry, she asked Kimi to invite everyone to her house to brainstorm a coordinated response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding before their eyes: not only at the bridges, but at courthouses, detention centers, bus stations, and processing centers all across the Rio Grande Valley.

Kimi’s hands were plenty full. She was already working around the clock, as was another area lawyer, Jodi Goodwin, to defend immigrants’ right and provide pro-bono counsel to detained women who’d been robbed of their kids. She passed the task of coordinating everyone’s schedules to Joyce, who set the date — June 13 — then called her sister, Linda, in San Antonio.

Linda had been volunteering with Sister Denise LaRock and Lena Baxter, co-directors of San Antonio’s Interfaith Welcome Coalition (IWC), to support the asylum seekers ICE had been dumping at bus stations up north. As luck — or serendipity — would have it, Sister Denise and Lena were, at that very moment, on their way to McAllen. They’d heard that Trump & Co had turned up the hate again, and they wanted to see for themselves what was going on. Joyce extended them an invitation to the meeting as well.

Meanwhile, Cindy brought along a couple of activists from NETA-RGV, an independent media platform founded upon Trump’s election to support and amplify the voices of Rio Grande Valley residents. She thought it wise to have members of the press involved., but their presence turned even more critical: when Jennifer suggested they mount a fundraiser, the NETA crew agreed to take that on. They brought in $72,000 the first month. Donations only went up from there.

NETA-RGV had the organizational infrastructure. The angry women who’d gathered that evening had neither formal organization nor name. But that wouldn’t last long.

At one point during the meeting, Jennifer remarked, “You all sound like a bunch of angry tías.” In fact, they were all aunties. The comment lightened the mood a bit. It made them all laugh. But it got them thinking, too.

The Angry Tías & Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley

Madeleine Sandefur at June 2018 Families Belong Together Rally Brownsville, Tx

The very next day, June 14, 2018, Joyce was at the Brownsville Courthouse with her birder friend, Swiss-born, US-naturalized Madeleine Sandefur, the wife of a US Airman from San Antonio she’d met in Paris in the 1970s. In addition to both being Texas Master Naturalists, and on the front lines of a public protest to save South Padre Island habitats from the development of liquefied natural gas export terminals, the two had helped to organize Brownsville’s Women’s March on January 21, 2017.

This day, they brandished placards, decrying the separation of migrant families at the border.

They had been very busy, as you can imagine. Madeleine was instrumental in getting the protest off the ground. And Joyce, alongside Cindy, had not stopped her continued round trips from Harlingen to the Reynosa-McAllen bridge, with massive shopping sprees in between. So when a reporter asked them, on mic, what they thought of US Attorney General Jeff Sessions using the Bible to defend family separations, they responded with mouths agape and blank stares. “We were like deer in headlights,” Joyce said.

Pointing the mic to himself, the reporter paraphrased what Sessions had said: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

Well! A woman of faith, Joyce had a few choice spontaneous words to say about that! She grabbed the mic and, though typically reserved, began railing against the gall of the man invoking the same biblical passage that had been used to justify slavery to defend ripping children out of the arms of loving parents. How dare he!

Madeleine & Joyce at Families Belong Together March, June 14, 2018

Jennifer, who stood right next to Joyce on the courthouse steps, commented that she sounded more like a rampaging abuela than an angry tía. And the name of the group was born:

The Angry Tías & Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley.

Before the march was over that day, Madeleine, also a grandmother, had joined their ranks as well. “Because this was not what I signed on to when I became a US citizen,” she told me. A former office manager, she took on the responsibility of handling the group’s finances and scheduling.

The Cries that Woke a Nation

Cindy Candia & Elizabeth “Lizee” Cavazos

Shortly thereafter, another friend of Madeleine and Joyce’s, naturalist, bird-enthusiast, and mental-health professional, Elizabeth “Lizee” Cavazos, waded into the effort. She agreed, at first, to help orient released refugees at the McAllen bus station one day each week. But on hearing the heartbreaking cries of children separated from their parents at the Ursula Processing Center — aka La Hielera (the icebox), so named for its extremely frigid temperature — she was moved to full-time activism. “I realized then, if I don’t act to stop Trump’s crimes against humanity, then I’m complicit in committing them.”

That now-famous recording had been leaked to a reporter at ProPublica by none other than Jennifer. She had obtained it from an unnamed whistle-blower inside Ursula, and passed it on to a trusted member of the press. It would sweep across a shocked nation and promptly bring Trump & Co’s family separation policy to its knees.

By July, families were being allowed to go to their sponsors in the US again. And they were coming to the border in droves. Anywhere from 200 to 900 refugees landed at the McAllen bus station every day between July 2018 and July 2019. They had no money, little if any English, and no idea how to get where they were going.

Before she knew it, Lizee was working full time at the McAllen bus station alongside Jennifer’s long-time friend and colleague Susan Law, retired Human Resources Director for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. On behalf of the Tías, the two joined forces with Sister Norma Pimentel of the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center to assist refugees who, like those helped by RAICES and IWC in San Antonio, were being dumped, stunned and resourceless, by ICE and CBP.

Susan Law advising asylum seekers at the McAllen, TX bus station

Susan, Lizee, and their small army of volunteers were there every day, seven days a week, for a year, to help these folks prepare for bus trips that might go on for two or three days. The Tias provided them with food; travel money; maps of the US marked with their individual itineraries; a list of key English phrases and practice in how to pronounce them; and backpacks that had been stuffed with essentials by a fast-growing team of volunteers, mostly from Harlingen, working from the fellowship hall at Joyce’s church, when it was available, or her house, when it was not.

“It was a HUGE operation,” she remembers. “We needed a lot of space.”

Evil Continued East with the River

Elisa Filippone (photo: Texas Monthly, Sept 2019)

The chaos did not stop at McAllen. It soon flowed east to the Rio Grande’s last stop before spilling into the Gulf of Mexico: Brownsville. There, on Friday, July 27, 2018, just as she was climbing into bed, Elisa Filippone received a call. She had been monitoring the bus station, and had previously scratched out her number on a Post-it note, leaving it at the Greyhound ticket counter. Though from an unknown number, something told her to answer the phone. On the other end of the line was a Greyhound employee. A woman, newly released from ICE detention, had been dropped off at the bus station. It would be closing in 10 minutes at 11pm. Could Elisa help her out, so she wouldn’t have to sleep outside?

Elisa pulled on some jeans and a tee-shirt, and holstered her gun, “this being Texas,” and hurried to the station a half-block from her house. With Madeleine’s “okay,” she checked the 30-year-old mother from Honduras, Jessica, into a hotel. She was back the next day to set Jessica on her way to South Carolina where she was to be reunited with her small daughter. The two had crossed the Rio Grande with a coyote and turned themselves into Border Patrol when ‘zero tolerance’ was roiling. They were taken to La Hielara in McAllen, wet and cold, with nothing but a mylar blanket and each other for warmth. The next morning, a CBP employee said he’d take the little girl to “get cleaned up.” He assured Jessica that they’d be back in 30 minutes. She hadn’t seen or heard from her daughter since.

Many more distraught mothers and fathers as well as aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins, would follow in Jessica’s footsteps, from CBP processing or ICE detention to the Brownsville bus station. So, Elisa formed part of the Tías effort to coordinate with area homeless shelters, in this case the Good Neighbor Settlement House, to provide refuge for newly released refugees.

And when asylum seekers began to form on the Matamoros side of the two Brownsville bridges, Elisa, like her counterparts in McAllen, began the daily treks to Mexico to deliver much appreciated necessities. Supplies included water, socks, and specifics, like diapers or menstrual pads, purchased online by Madeleine, or by Cindy and Nayelly, who made regular multi-cart shopping trips en route back and forth to help asylum seekers still encamped and spilling off the international bridges into Mexico. Jennifer aided the bridge brigade and managed efforts to support the migrant shelters in Reynosa, now bursting at the seams. She communicated tirelessly with national immigrant rights organizations, the ACLU, and congressional representatives in Washington, keeping all updated and aware of what was happening in the RGV. And Madeleine, who lived just miles from where women detainees were being held — the Port Isabel Detention Center (PIDC) — spent countless hours comforting distraught mothers, offering them hope that they would see their children again — no small task given the government kept scant records.

The Angry Tías & Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley, pictured with Kerry Kennedy, daughter of RFK, and Labor leader and Civil Rights activist Dolores Huerta, are recognized as Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Laureates 2019

These eight heroic women — Jennifer, Joyce, Cindy, Nayelly, Madeleine, Lizee, and Susan — all angry tías or abuelas, mobilized around the mission of bringing dignity and justice to human beings that America-Made-“Great”-Again had kicked back to a place so dangerous, they were afraid to leave the bridges.

All through the long, hot summer of 2018, the Angry Tías and Abuelas saw to the needs of men, women, and children caught in the crosshairs of a cruel, complicated, and constantly shape-shifting immigration policies. They believed then that the policy of “metering” was too mean to last; that it would end before the summer was over. But when Jim and I showed up to volunteer with them 19 months later, in January 2020, the first 40 souls they’d discovered on the Reynosa-McAllen bridge had swelled to 2500, now living in tents and under constant danger in cartel-controlled Matamoros, just across the river from Brownsville.

And that was just one bridge along a 2000-mile border.

By the end of 2018, “Metering” had evolved to become Trump & Co’s Migrant “Protection” Protocol, otherwise known as Remain in Mexico because it didn’t provide any protection at all. MPP kicked asylum seekers back into Mexico even after their names had been called and their asylum claims started. It forced them to represent their asylum claims by themselves in kangaroo courts held under US-based big top tents where “justice” was just another circus. And it would render more than 60,000 innocent and traumatized people, right now living in tent cities all along the border — many without access to soap and running water — sitting ducks to the COVID-19 virus: a 2000-mile humanitarian crisis teetering on the edge of genocide.

I’m a tía, I thought. And I’m angry. Very angry. I wrote Susan right back, telling her I should fit right in.

. . .

Click here to learn more about the Angry Tías y Abuelas of the RGV. Consider donating to help bring dignity and justice to asylum seekers stranded in Mexico. The Tías are still working on their behalf. Thank you!

“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 ONE: A 2000-mile-long Humanitarian Crisis

Welcome to Brownsville

Brownsville airport is a throwback. There are no indoor bridges or jetways connecting terminal to plane. Old-fashioned hydraulic stairs lead passengers to the tarmac where painted lines mark the way to the no-frills glass-and-concrete terminal building. Inside, there is no shopping mall with IKEA-style winding traffic patterns, steering you from duty-free smokes to liquor to perfume. Just a straight shot to a single baggage carousel serving all.

It’s old-school. It’s refreshing.

Signage at the Brownsville airport is bilingual. But the language you mostly hear, from the minute you step through the automatic sliding doors, is Spanish.

The scene, sounds, and sudden feeling of heat that January 3rd, 2020, all conspired to transport me to the 1980s, when my idealism was at its peak. I spent a lot of time back then traveling in and out of the Guatemala City, San Salvador, and Managua airports. It was the age of Ronald Reagan, the last time Norte-Americanos seemed to be paying attention to the goings-on south of the border. I went to bear witness to my country’s involvement in the Guatemalan genocide, the Salvadoran Civil War, and the covert — and ruthless — destabilization of Nicaragua’s democratically elected Sandinista government, staged from Honduras.

My trips lasted anywhere from 3 to 6 months. I tried, always, to be of use. There was lots to do: support the care of war orphans; accompany repatriating refugees; observe elections. I spent most of my time working with the few brave teachers still giving lessons in the zonas conflictivas of El Salvador, specifically Morazán, where basic services, like education, had been disappeared by the government of José Napoleón Duarte.

Solidarity in the Age of Ronald Ray-gun

Ronald Reagan holding a T-shirt “Stop Communism in Central America”, with Nancy Reagan, March 7, 1986 (Photo: Levan Ramishvili/flickr)

I was a small player in the International Solidarity Movement. We Internationalistas (or sandalistas as cynics liked to call us) stepped in where governments abdicated responsibility, usually in collaboration with NGOs or the UN. As we worked, we listened and we watched; we brought our observations back to religious, scholarly, and media communities at home. We sided with no army, no guerrilla faction, but operated in the spirit of democracy and Vatican II: for liberty and justice for all, especially the poor and downtrodden.

We stood out like sore thumbs, deliberately, believing that no armada or death squad wanted Yanqui blood on their hands, especially if they were armed, trained, and funded by the U.S. government — which they mostly were. Unfortunately, some of us were not so lucky.

In the vintage Brownsville airport, with its linoleum floors and windows yellowed from airplane exhaust, surrounded by more Spanish than English and more brown skin than white, something in me stirred. I was waking back up to my activist days, before I married Jim and life swept me up in career- and home-building, alongside an on-going health issue, in China and Hong Kong, New York, Paris, and London.

Since 1994, Jim and I have lived abroad for more years than we haven’t. We reside in an ephemeral borderlands — one that cannot be mapped — buffeted and buoyed by diversity of languages, cultures, colors, and creeds. Now in the dusk of our lives as working stiffs, we're in the UK, where darkness descends by 4pm in winter, and where — lucky us — our privilege extends to getting five weeks off each year. When our only child launched in 2014, releasing us from the bonds of the school calendar, we started using that time to escape the short, cold days of January in northern Europe.

This year we decided to also be of use.

Most sane people arriving in Brownsville in midwinter exit the airport and turn right, toward the beaches of South Padre Island. But we went left. For this year’s trip was to the Tex/Mex border.

Because Outrage isn’t Enough

We were among millions who were shocked and horrified when it became clear, back in the spring of 2018, that the US government had condoned ripping terrified children out of the arms of anguished parents. Under their zero-tolerance policy, announced on April 6, Trump & Co resolved to deter immigration by resorting a tactic most vile: separating families.

Our horror metastasized into outrage with each subsequent development:

April 11 — Under oath, erstwhile Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen testifies to Congress that the administration has no family separation policy. It’s a lie.

April 27 — The Washington Post outs her with a White House memo, proving family separations had been piloted in El Paso from July-November 2017. More than 700 children (the exact count remains unknown) were being warehoused in detention centers when the story broke, at least 100 under the age of four.

May 10 — Mariee Juárez, a 19-month-old Guatemalan child, dies from a preventable illness, while in a frigid ICE detention center.

June 14 — Attorney General Jeff Sessions justifies separating children and parents. He uses the same Bible passage used to defend slavery (Paul: Romans 13).

June 15 — Trump & Co admit that 2,000 immigrant children separated from their parents in just six weeks, between April 19 and May 31, amid reports that they lost track of 1,475 minors who arrived unaccompanied.

June 18 — Now, that was a busy day…

First, White House Chief-of-Staff, John Kelly pretends family separation wasn’t his idea. But a 2017 interview, when he was Secretary of Homeland Security, has him on record saying, “separating families could help curtail immigration."

Then, Amnesty International issues a global statement, condemning Trump & Co’s policy of separating children from parents as “nothing short of torture.” Torture, the statement reminds us, is illegal under international law.

Finally, the sound of said torture reverberates around the world when ProPublica leaks a recording, taken from inside the Ursula Processing Center in McAllen, TX, of ten inconsolable children begging to be reunited with their parents. One demands that her aunt be called. She’s memorized the phone number. The audio is accompanied by photos of kids in cages huddling under mylar “foil” blankets for warmth. The facility’s nickname, La Hielera (the icebox), is not for nothing.

On June 20, Trump rescinded the family separation policy by executive order. At that point, the number of children stolen on his orders was up to 2,300. Six days later, US District Judge for the Southern California, Dana Makoto Sabraw, prohibits any further separations and orders all children reunified with their families.

Popular protest had won. The horror was over. On June 30, we marched under the banner: Families Belong Together.

Then, life being busy, we got back to it.

Take a Ticket. Get in Line.

But it turns out that beneath the furor over family separations, Trump & Co were rolling out an even more sinister plan. That month, while no one was looking, Sessions yanked both domestic and gang violence as credible fears, thereby criminalizing asylum. Trump declared Mexico a “safe third country” — even though the US State Department had it under a level-4 travel advisory — and instituted a new take-a-ticket-and-get-in-line case review strategy called “metering.”

As they jerked us from one manufactured crisis to another…and another…few beyond the border noticed that the number of refugees from Northern Triangle countries getting through to their sponsors in the US had dropped by 70%. Interesting parallel: DHS officials have since stated that more than 71% of those apprehended at the southern border in the 2019 fiscal year were from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.

What was happening to them? News was hard to come by — you had to want to find it. And when you did, it wasn’t good:

There were bottlenecks at all ports of entry. Folks were pooling up all along the border, stranded in some of the most dangerous places on earth. Others were being shackled, children included, and sent to detention centers popping up all over the U.S., most famously within defunct office complexes and big box stores. Many more were being hunted and deported under cover of night, even if they’d been living in and contributing to the country for decades.

Suddenly, outrage was not enough. Jim and I were compelled to go see what was happening ourselves. This was the plan:

• Spend a week driving along the Tex/Mex border, bearing witness at every international bridge from Brownsville to Del Rio.

• Feed our long-standing mission to explore all the great US national parks with a little “we” time in Big Bend.

• Hit the art outpost in Marfa on our way to El Paso.

• Wrap up with a few more days’ witness in Ciudad Juárez.

The Road Trip Begins

We took off from Boston at 5am on January 3, 2020, after ringing in the new year with friends and family along the east-coast corridor. Since that required a 3am wake-up call, we were famished and in dire need of caffeine by the time we landed at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

Stumbling through the terminal en route to our connecting gate, we had to blink several times before we could believe what our eyes were telling us: Every seat at every table at every airport dining establishment was kitted out with a flashing iPad.

This bizarre sight of airport-turned-video-arcade, served as a reminder that when you live in the ephemeral borderlands as we do, gradual changes in the greater culture—like the steady invasion of screens into public spaces—can feel like an abrupt slap. They’re inescapable today: talking heads in NYC taxis; CNN at passport control; Fox at the pump; a college or pro (or, in Texas, high school) sports event on each of three screens in view from every seat at any local restaurant. You can’t go anywhere in the US anymore without being bombarded by someone else’s notion of what you should be consuming.

And so, with the touch of a finger, we chose breakfast tacos with salsa verde, kicking off our two-week hunt for the best Tex/Mex meal on the border. Then pulled the cords from the boisterous iPads and lay them facedown one table over.

We landed in Brownsville just a few hours later with one contact, three nights pre-booked in a hotel, and a car reservation, which right away went awry. The Dollar rent-a-car website had stated that, “yes,” we could take their rentals into Mexico — all we had to do was buy the right insurance. The nice lady at the counter said otherwise.

"So we won’t be able to weave back and forth across the border?" we asked, disappointed.

That’s when I remembered the most important rule of thumb for traveling in Latin America: things never happen on time, or go precisely to plan.

We agreed we’d just have to roll with it. And as it turns out, we wouldn’t roll far, for the next slap was lurking just on the other side of the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros: a humanitarian crisis worse than we could have ever imagined.

And this was just one bridge along a 2000-mile border.

We were immediately put to use. There was so much to do, and so few people beyond the border knew. Because not only had Trump & Co succeeded in stopping people at the border, they’d stopped their stories, too. And not just the stories of those running from persecution, gang violence, murderous husbands, threats of kidnapping, rape, or crushing poverty: The stories of the everyday heroes helping to bring dignity to the 60,000 — and growing — men, women, and children caught in the crosshairs of Trump & Co’s policy of deterrence by chaos and cruelty had been blocked from crossing the border too.

“We can’t get our stories beyond the checkpoint,” folks told us, again and again, and in so many words, on learning we were writers. “Please, listen. Record them. Share them. Amplify them. Help us get the word out about what’s going on here.” 

So that’s what we resolved to do. Big Bend and Marfa would have to wait.

“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

An Unlikely Witness to Trump's Kangaroo Court

Kafka in Real Life

I now know what a “kangaroo court” is, for I've been to one.

Surrounded by a razor-wire topped chain-link fence, this one sits under a series of circus-style big-top tents, covering a warren of rooms constructed from converted shipping containers. A constant thrumming of portable air-conditioners pumps frigid gusts into both courtrooms and waiting areas. Those who’d been there before wore jackets, despite the balmy 70°F temperatures outside. Unfortunately, I was not in the know, so my time on the inside was spent shivering and blowing warmth into my cold, cupped hands.

"Tent courts” such as this one have been shrouded in secrecy since they opened for business in September 2019. Press and public are largely barred by contracted security guards employed to keep prying eyes (like mine) out. Internal proceedings are shielded from scrutiny. Picture-snapping drones patrol the perimeter, ensuring there’s a record of all those who protest.

I got in by attaching myself to an Iranian-born political refugee turned immigration lawyer, who’d flown in from Washington, DC, the day before. She agreed to present me as her “translator.” By the time we’d passed through metal detectors; waited for a fat-fingered guard to approve us for admission; surrendered our passports; and been “invited” to leave our phones, cameras, notebooks, and pens in a lock-box; we had less than 30 minutes to consult with “our" client. That was just enough time for her to express, through tears, the threats she and her baby sons faced everyday in Matamoros, Mexico, where she’d been forced to remain for the last two months.

Marisol (not her real name) was afraid to return, she said. It was no better than the situation she’d fled back home in Honduras.

International Asylum

A credible fear of persecution because of one’s race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion is reason enough to be granted asylum under international law, and Marisol and her children should have been paroled and released to their sponsor long before now. But we were in Trump’s America where justice has become a crap shoot. What would happen to Marisol and the boys today was anybody’s guess.

When she arrived at the US border in early November 2019, Marisol followed internationally recognized procedures for requesting refuge in El Norte: she presented herself to US Customs and Border Patrol and asked for asylum. But she was sent back to Mexico with her children and a court date. Since then, she’s been stuck in a place closer to hell than purgatory — a limbo that straddles international law and the Trump administration’s shape-shifting immigration policy.

By the time I met her, Marisol and her little ones had been on their feet for hours, waiting to get to the Brownsville, Texas side of the Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint on the Gateway International Bridge. When she and her attorney were finally introduced, her 1-year-old was draped heavily over her left shoulder, fast asleep. She gripped her 3-year-old tightly in her right hand. His complaints of hunger and exhaustion threatened to hijack the meeting. The only “food” between us was a Milky Way bar the attorney found buried in her briefcase.

Despite the fact that Marisol and her sons had been living for two months in a tent, the boys were smartly dressed in clean, pressed white button down shirts, blue slacks, and tiny little man-like loafers. Marisol was freshly coiffed and remarkably well pulled together. We complimented her outfit. She said she’d splurged on it out of respect for the process she was about to enter into.

This was Marisol’s first tent-court hearing. She was hopeful that on this day she’d be paroled and released, at long last, and on her way, far away from the primitive encampment she shared with 2500 other asylum seekers also awaiting their moment for justice. Marisol’s case should have been a slam dunk. Her husband was already in the US. It was he who had hired the attorney to clear the way for the rest of his family.

But things didn’t go as planned for tent-court hearings are unique in many ways…

“Beam ‘Em In, Scotty”

For starters, the “Judges” aren't even there. They’re beamed in via videoconferencing. They’re swamped, processing 40-50 people per session, or “docket.” And they operate under strict quotas regarding how many asylum seekers they are allowed to let in per year. In 2019, that number amounted to 0.1%, meaning for every 10,000 asylum requests, only 11 were granted. And even these lottery winners suffered through an average of five tent-court hearings spaced over the course of many months.

Nor are tent court “judges" independent. They are Department of Justice employees ordered to consider asylum seekers guilty of trying to game the system and worthy of deportation before their hearings even begin.

Among the 50-or-so claimants in our courtroom that day, Marisol was only one of two to have legal representation. Most Central American migrants stranded in Mexico under Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocol, or Remain in Mexico, policy — roughly 96% — are forced to negotiate the confusing and ever-changing immigration system on their own, and in a language few speak. Without knowledgeable support in completing the myriad legal forms they must produce on arrival in tent court, many are bullied by uniformed border patrol officials into signing here and initialing there, often condemning themselves to their own detention or deportation.

Even with representation, however, Marisol was going nowhere this day but back to Matamoros. She’ll likely remain there several months more, unless her attorney can perform magic — or if she doesn’t give up and go back to Honduras first. Indeed, that is exactly the point: to hold out hope of a pathway to entry, to suggest there is a system, while wearing asylum seekers’ patience so thin, they’ll just give up and go home. If they can afford to. If they aren't kidnapped and held for ransom, or pressed into work as cartel runners — or worse — first.

Becoming fluent in such legal structures as non-refoulement — a principle of international law that forbids any country from returning asylum seekers to any place they fear the danger of persecution — was the furthest thing from my mind when I arrived in Brownsville, Texas with my husband, Jim, as 2020 dawned. It certainly wasn’t on Marisol’s mind when she picked up in the middle of the night and fled with her boys after gang members killed her husband’s brother and said they’d be back for her next.

When our turn finally came, Marisol’s attorney requested her client be given a non-refoulement interview, hoping this judge would see both the danger of sending her back to Matamoros and the logic of reuniting with her husband, allowing her asylum claim to be adjudicated in the US. That’s how the immigration system should work. That was standard practice before Trump.

The “judge” granted the interview request, then had Marisol’s attorney and me promptly removed from the tented facility to wait on the other side of the inhospitable razor-wire topped barrier. The advocate was not allowed to prepare her client for a critical procedure to come. There was not even an attempt at transparency.

Kafka’s Trail, Large as Life

What I witnessed at US immigration tent court that morning was not just. It was not legal. It was a sham, a dystopian, Kafka-esque travesty of jurisprudence that hops — like a kangaroo — right over legal due process.

What none of us foresaw that late January day, 2020, was the coming of something still further outside the boundaries of human decency and international law. Not even members of Congress knew, for that’s how Trump and company operate. The Migrant Protection Protocol policy which had ensnared Marisol and 60,000 others, and out of which the border tent cities and kangaroo tent courts sprung, was in the process of being replaced by something more insidious.

And it was about to land just a 30-minute drive away, at the Brownsville-South Padre International Airport.

“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