Robbed

There was a steady breeze at camp last Saturday, no clouds, only sun, raising temperatures up towards 95 degrees.

In the early afternoon a group of six men walked in.  They had been in the desert for eight or nine days and were now on their way south.  They had turned around the day before, thinking they couldn't make it.
Two days before they arrived in camp they had been robbed by bandits, south, in the mountains.  Some members of the groups still had a few possessions on them, but most were without their bags, without any water or food for two days.
Of the six, one man, Joseph, had been beaten by the group of bandits.  He had a golf ball sized welt on his forehead, pale purple, and a bruised rib, tender to the touch.  He claimed to have no trouble breathing, so we wrapped it together, iced his head and he took some pain medication.  He repeatedly made hand gestures that he had been beaten with the butt of a gun.
The morning before, Friday, a man stumbled into camp just after sunrise.  He had been shot in the foot two days before while being robbed and now had his t-shirt wrapped around the wound, soaked in blood.  After having the wound cleaned and wrapped the man was evacuated in an ambulance to Tucson.

It isn't only the environment that people must face to come here.  It is not uncommon to hear stories and signs of groups being robbed on their way north, of women being raped, of complete lawlessness, despite increasing numbers of Border Patrol agents, mobile surveillance units, sheriffs operating under the authority of the federally funded Operation Stone Garden--giving them immigration enforcement powers (even before SB1070 was on the Senate floor)--and soon, another shot by the National Guard.

Conditions don't relent: temperatures will be above one-hundred degrees for much of this week.  The number of recovered human remains in the Tucson sector is up 18% from this time last year--from 92 bodies in 2009 to 108 so far this year, and this is only the beginning of the summer crossing season.

Flight

On a flight from Phoenix to Philadelphia recently I sat next to a woman who had just come through the desert.  She took interest in the Spanish phrases I was studying—‘when was the last time you vomited’, ‘is there anything that makes the pain better’, etc—and after I explained the type of work I was studying for, told me that she was a migrant.  She showed me the scratches on her arms and the abrasions on her face from the brush in the desert.  She said she had blisters.  She agreed that the desert was a dangerous place.

She had an arm band on, neon yellow, with her name printed in pencil around it, and was seated with a man (white) that didn’t say, literally, more than two words the entire flight.

Across the aisle was her daughter, by the window.  She looked no older than six.  The woman told me she had come through the desert as well.  With her daughter was a woman (also white).  They didn’t seem to speak either.

I didn’t understand the situation—how, having just come through the desert days before, these two were on an airplane to the East Coast.  I asked the woman if she was going to live in Philadelphia.  She shook her head and replied with a word I didn’t understand.

I didn’t want to get into the details of her desert time, nor, because of my lack of Spanish, could I get into the details of how she was on a plane, or what the situation was with her daughter, and the couple accompanying them.

We sat mostly in silence, she correcting my verb tenses every now and then, in between glances across the aisle to her daughter who sat with a hoodie, backwards over her head.  The woman said her head hurt too much to try learning a little English.

During landing, the girl made funny faces across the aisle at us, seeming to enjoy the situation.

At the gate, the man handed the woman a plastic bag containing her belongings from the overhead compartment and the four of them were of the first off the plane. I thought I had missed something in the system that made it so easy for this woman and her daughter to make it to Philadelphia after just coming through the desert.

I hadn’t missed anything though.  As I came into the terminal, the man and woman accompanying the mother and daughter were shaking hands with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent; and they all moved down through the terminal and into a side room.  I overheard briefly the agent refer to the mother and daughter as numbers, as in ‘are these the 7904?’.

It is easy to focus solely on the work in the desert, or the work in Nogales, Sonora, because there is so much to be done.  But the immigration system is vast.  It’s not just people coming through the desert, or being detained for days and dropped at the border with no resources. It is a national issue, it’s people working in every state, being arrested in raids, taken from their homes and schools and separated from their families.  There is a large ICE detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and dozens of others throughout the country.

There are more and more people showing up in Nogales, Sonora after having lived in the U.S. for years—often being pulled over for minor traffic violations, or stopped for other minor things, and being deported, being separated from children and spouses, jobs, homes, everything in their lives.

Arizona passed a law last month, SB1070, that has gotten a lot of national attention.  Despite the majority of that attention being condemnation, it still stands to go into affect later this summer and will likely increase these types of separations and deportations dramatically.  This law, and others surrounding it deserve their own post here, but all are examples of a focus that is misplaced, that doesn't take up the reasons for immigration, and alienates, rather than works with the large population it is attempting to address.

There is no telling what happened to this woman and her daughter--if they are still together, why they were brought to the Northeast, if they were deported, or if they will try to cross again. It's difficult to imagine too, what situation these two were coming from, dire enough for this woman to risk her daughter for days in the desert