Under the Same Stars - Frying Pan into the Fire - by Marjorie Margolis

The Frying Pan, Into the Fire: Asylum Seekers Blocked at the Border

 by Marjorie Margolis, published in  Monadnock area newspapers Nov. 2019

An endless stream of very bad dreams has turned into a violent nightmare for thousands awaiting on our southern border as our government implements its“Remain in Mexico” policy. This is happening in our name and on our watch. 

Last week I went to El Paso with a group from Upstate New York and New Hampshire (which included Rosemary Weidner from Dublin and Bill Whyte and Katie Schwerin from Gilsum) to participate in a fact-finding trip, Annunciation House’s Border Awareness Experience (BAE). This was my second trip to El Paso, having volunteered there with one of Annunciation House’s temporary shelters last January, serving migrants brought there by ICE once they were released from detention centers, known as heleras (ice boxes).  

During the Border Awareness Experience, we crossed the border into Juarez where we visited a shelter and spoke with Mexicans encamped there, as well as immigration attorneys, advocates, public defenders, community organizers and Annunciation House Director Ruben Garcia. As hard as it is to imagine, things are far worse than they were last year. 

The inhumane conditions of detention centers remain, but Annunciation House is almost empty. Detention is no longer the lowest level of hell; its horror has been surpassed by the borderland of Mexico due to the White House policy euphemistically called Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP) or Remain in Mexico. Under this policy, asylum seekers must remain on the Mexican side of the border while waiting for their applications to be processed, which can take years. 

Another new policy called Safe Third Country forces asylum seekers to apply for asylum in the first country they enter. Guatemala is not a safe place, and the Mexican National Guard is now stationed along that border. The conditions from which they are fleeing have not changed, but we don’t know their current situation. 

The Remain in Mexico policy impacts all Spanish speakers except Mexicans because they are seeking asylum from Mexico, the country administering this program. While it is illegal for the US to prevent asylum seekers from entering, it is not illegal to say, "No room, take a number" and block crossing. This practice is known as metering. Asylum seekers under MPP are blocked from entry and instead are put on a waiting list; Mexicans are on a separate list.  

Because they are not given a date by US Customs and Border Patrol, all asylum seekers must wait by the bridges in order to be present when their number is called, and there they remain for months in cities considered by the US State Department as some of the world’s most dangerous.  

Juarez, El Paso’s sister city, is a horror show. Murders are daily occurrences and the city is littered with burnt out vehicles.  The Cartel controls everything; though they have allowed no other immigrant group to live under the bridge, the Mexicans to have tent cities there. 

Most alarming to me this week is that the Central Americans have seemed to have disappeared. 

Kidnapping has become so common that lawyers and advocates we met say Central Americans are not even safe staying in shelters in Juarez. One attorney, Taylor Levy, told us of an incident on the Bridge of the Americas itself.  While consulting with a Honduran couple on opposite sides of the border gate, a Mexican approached the migrants and forced the couple to come away with him.  Taylor told us that the going extortion rate for kidnapped Central Americans is $10,000, negotiable.  

Once forcefully detained, the Cartel video chats with their victims’ families back in Honduras, inflicting whatever level of violence necessary to compel the families to pay up. As the word gets out through apps like What’s App the migrants from the Central America’s Northern Triangle are nowhere to be seen at the border. We wonder where they have gone.

Equally distressing, all of the advocates and lawyers we meet during the BAE — even Ruben Garcia, Annunciation House Director — believe it is safest for parents to send their children over the border unaccompanied. Can you imagine? 

They believe the child detention centers are safer than the Mexican borderlands. Unlike detention centers, children centers are run by Health and Human Services, under the Office of Refugee and Resettlement. They are licensed by each state and must meet the standards of that state. Still, the militaristic protocol with prohibitions against human contact of any kind can only add to the trauma of these children. 

The single adults and families permitted in through metering must go through detention; however, because of the deaths of six children in detention, CPB is releasing anyone who looks sick or obviously pregnant. Families are usually released within 72 hours. We were told that there are single adults who have been kept there for over three years. 

The most recent guests at Annunciation House are mostly Brazilians, not under the auspices of MPP because they don’t speak Spanish, and Mexicans from the three most dangerous states controlled by the Cartel: Guerrero, Zacatecas, and Michoacan. Each day we were there, an ICE bus would drop off around 80 people just released from the heleras.  That left Annunciation House with 420 vacant beds due to this administration’s heartless policies of metering and remain in Mexico. 

So here is my first-hand update from my two weeks at the border:

*the lucky few are families allowed to cross and endure 72 hours of being caged in an helera

* desperate trapped parents are choosing to send their children across the border unaccompanied to the   uncertain cruelty of detention camps rather than risk kidnapping, death and disease in Mexico

*thousands and thousands of Central Americans have disappeared

Marjorie Margolis is a retired Conant High School teacher living in Sharon. After volunteering at Annunciation House last winter, she organized a group to join an 11/9 – 11/22 trip to the border, including a fact-finding Border Awareness Experience facilitated by Annunciation House. To learn more: tune in Nov. 17 National Public Radio interviews with Immigration agents and migrants on This American Life,  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-american-life/id201671138?i=1000457072763

Under the Same Stars: Messaging the Great Beyond
Monadnock Ledger Transcript  Nov 5, 2019 page 9

Messaging the Great Beyond

Here’s what I learned traveling in Guatemala while our son and daughter-in-law lived and worked there: Central Americans prize nothing higher than their tight-knit families, rich history, colorful cultures and beautiful natural settings. It would take extraordinary pressure to choose an arduous, uncertain migration and leave all that behind. This story takes us closer to that truth.

On November 1, Dia de los Muertos (AKA Day of the Dead, Dia de Todos los Santos or All Saints Day, you can choose), Guatemalans of Mayan descent fly vibrant paper kites to honor and communicate with their dead. 

Over the five years our “kids” lived in Antigua our (husband and friends) visits twice coincided with the colorful “barilletas gigantes” festivals in nearby Sacatepéquez villages of Santiago and Sumpango. These celebrations have been around for 3,000 years and are recognized by various religious sects.  The giant kites are a blend of art, tradition and color, sending messages of unity, love, respect and faith to dead ancestors and to Mother Earth. 

 

Our son drove us to Santiago where we parked for a small fee in someone's yard, a little like we used to for Big Ten football games in Iowa City. Later we paid to use the family's toilet, a simple no-flush cement throne in an out-building near our car.  

                   
                                        

First we wound through streets crowded with local families, 

past fair vendors offering street food,

 

roasted pork right off the hog on a spit,

exotic (to us, anyway) flowers and souvenirs. 

Think county fair with princess pageants and kite competitions,

 

combined with Memorial-Day-times-ten; 

families in their Sunday best picnicking,

 flying and displaying kites some 40 to more than 70 feet across as they maintain family tombs 

and decorate the cleaned graves of loved ones with flowers.

Traditionally it takes 40 days to build the kites, the first day marked by the village's unmarried men heading out to the coast at 4:00 am to laboriously collect bamboo for the frames.                                      

Community and family groups work for weeks cutting and pasting. The glue is a mixture of yucca flower, lemon peel, and water, ropes are made of the maguey plant (the plant that also brings us tequila), and the tails are made from woven cloth.

The kites have portraits of deceased loved ones and messages ("there is no other love on earth as great as that of a mother"), 



religious or folklore themes, tributes to the environment and occasional political messages eschewing government corruption. 



                    
My favorite symbol is the dazzling quetzal,

 Guatemala’s stunning national bird. The Quetzal’s iridescent green tail feathers were esteemed as symbols of spring plant growth by ancient Aztecs and Maya and as a symbol of goodness, light and liberty: the quetzal is said to die of sadness if it is caged.

Families and children run between graves with smaller kites all day. 




Bigger kites fly in the late afternoon, but the largest kites assembled in the morning are propped and strung on poles, too heavy to fly at all.

We watched one crash down on the builders. Luckily no one was badly injured. 








Locals compete to see who has the most beautiful kite and which flies the longest, but at the end of the day there is a feeling of peace and unity as the fabled “wind against the paper takes away bad spirits to restore harmony and calm.” Far from a sad remembrance, Dia de los Muers is a joyful connection with those who have gone before. 

Julie Zimmer, a retired educator and journalist, is grandma to two dual U.S./Guatemalan citizens also living in Peterborough.

Under the Same Stars: Uncaged Art
Monadnock Ledger Transcript Oct 17, 2019 page 8

Raising Our Voices - Eva Castillo - Under the Same Stars

Under the Same Stars: Raising Our Voices - Eva Castillo
Monadnock Ledger Transcript, Oct. 17, page 8

Eva Castillo

Although I have lived through several waves of anti-immigrant sentiment over the years I have been in this country, nothing I have seen prepared me for the present climate of xenophobia and nationalism. We are bombarded with messages that portray immigrants as criminals, referring to their flight for their lives as an invasion. We have children in cages, their parents jailed away from them without a court hearing, and new restrictive measures put in place every week.

The white supremacist agenda keeps stretching its paws under the guise of protecting our country. Immigrants have been stripped of their humanity by calling them “illegal.” It is much easier to dismiss those that are not like us after all. People are demonized for speaking their language or worshipping a different God. Communities are divided. Immigrants are afraid and feel vulnerable.

Not all is bad though. More people are paying attention to this issue and are willing to speak up now. The moral outrage over the treatment of immigrants has galvanized people of faith and other supporters and has given the impetus to react against so much injustice and cruelty. 

In late August [500 activists] people from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont, walked or biked to Dover to express our solidarity with immigrants. We carried a message of love and asked legislators to commit to ending detentions and deportations and change the present immigration laws. We converged at the Strafford County House of Corrections where people  detained by ICE are held while they await their fate, usually deportation.

In a powerful display of unity we showed the detainees that we feel their pain and let them know that we  will keep on fighting for their freedom and dignity. During the vigil we could see them crammed against the windows of their cells as they banged on the glass to call our attention. We felt connected to them and they felt our love and support. 

I spent most of the four days of the walk with an 11 year old girl from Central America. I will call her Margarita. She and her parents fled their county to save the girl’s life that was threatened by the gangs. She came with her father, hiding for hours in the luggage compartment of buses, unable to move or speak and later walking in the desert, scorching hot during the day and freezing cold at night. 

The trip took 19 terrifying days. I can sense the scars that the whole ordeal left in her young soul, she cries when she hears her mother recount the crossing. Margarita was only nine years old when she came but she has already faced more fear and violence than most of us will ever face in our lives. Her parents did what they had to do to save her life; what parent would not do the same for their child?

Margarita’s story is only one of the many stories we hear. People come from every corner of the world looking for a chance to give their children a better life. Just like your ancestors did. Some fleeing violence and persecution, some fleeing hunger, all looking for safety and a chance to succeed. 

By coming together and speaking up, religious and civic leaders have sent a loud message that hatred has no home in our land. We will continue to speak up until our nation’s values of liberty and justice become a reality for all. 

Eva Castillo, born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, is Director of NH Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees. She has been advocating for immigrants for 30 years. Eva lives in Manchester with her husband and sons.