Last night we went to the alvergue [shelter] just outside of the main road in Nogales Sonora to offer free phone calls to family members and medical aid, etc. The alvergue is on a small backroad up the hill from the center of the frontera town, past a mural of reaching, muscled hands, cacti, and steeled, calm faces lit up by taxi headlights and neon signs.
The shelter can sleep 56 or so in bunks, and more on the floor. They cook up a big pot of soup when a lot of people come in. However, last night, and the nights before, have been nearly empty. There are two main rooms (for men and women), a kitchen area, and a common space. The common area has a TV that runs telenovelas near the altar, which is filled with candles and prayers and is guarded by a 6-foot Jesús figure whose arms are laden with migrants’ ID bracelets from detention/deportation centers. Only six or seven people were in last night. Yesterday was empty at transportes and at the shelter. There are less deportations to Nogales SON this time of year because of the extreme heat; the number of crossings through the desert decreases, yet the risk and fatality of crossing increases dramatically.
One of the men who was staying the night had just come into Nogales that day from another border town. He looked like a regular ranching Westerner; a salt-and-pepper groomed mustache, sun-bleached 10-gallon hat, worn bluejeans, boots, and laugh-lines branching out over cheeks that have seen years and years of sun. He’s lived in the U.S. for 19 years – all his children and grandchildren live in the US. He has no family left in Mexico, but the family still has a house in Chihuahua that he’s trying to get back to. I have no idea his immigration status, but it’s likely he won’t see his grandchildren for years.
Today at Transportes I met a man who has been living in the U.S. for 10 years or so. He has a wife and a young daughter and considers himself American – he told me being in Mexico is strange and uncomfortable. It’s not his country, not his home or his culture. At work, at home, with friends, he speaks English. He only speaks Spanish when calling home to his mother in Mexico. He had papers to work in the U.S., but didn’t have full citizenship to be living there/here. He went to an immigration center to try to petition for citizenship and was incarcerated and deported. His wife, an American citizen, has cancer (which has come back after a remission) and is trying to care for herself and their daughter, who begs for her papa constantly. His wife, he said, is barely coping and is trying to make ends meet while on welfare and becoming more ill. Through the legal process, he expects it will be 10 years before he can return to the U.S., should his papers go through. But by then, who knows how his wife’s cancer and mental state will have progressed, and his daughter will have grown up without a father, with an ill mother in a state of moderate poverty.
Everyone I have spoken with that has been deported has family on the other side of the border; a three-year-old daughter in California, a wife in Oklahoma, a husband in Tucson, a twelve-year-old son in Phoenix.
Transportes Reforma is, like the rest of Nogales SON for most migrants, a waiting room, a space for recovery and transition. And it can be flat out boring. They sit, wait for phone calls, go to the comedor twice a day, play with the grungy puppies, and smack flies with empty water bottles. (So. many. flies.) Yesterday we brought a soccer ball, and we’re hoping to start a small library so people can read while waiting. Today I brought my ukulele, and when the rain hit we all scooted into the back of the shelter and I sang while we waited out the storm. I was able to give a little first aid, which is a comfort, and advice on where to find meals and a shelter to stay in.
Tonight a group of Hondureños may be crossing tonight, and I’m scared for them. One of them is only fifteen years old. Another is seventeen. I don’t know what has pushed them this far north, likely hopping trains to reach the border, and I don’t know if they understand how lethal the desert is. They may have sixty, eighty miles to walk in 90-100°F, from the frontera to the nearest town.
This all feels so absurd. The wall, the border patrol, is like a theater, a militarized front of intimidation that, no matter the millions of dollars that are funneled into increased border security and higher-technology surveillance, will never prevent people from crossing al norte. People in Mexico and Central America are without jobs, without resources, and are suffering (whether physically through starvation or malnutrition, economically, socially, etc.). People (any sentient being, really) will naturally move from a place of little-no resources and suffering to a place of greater resources and the potential for alleviation of suffering, no matter the journey.
Thousands of people die along the border each year, many of injuries and dehydration in the desert, some from violence and exploitation of a migrant’s vulnerability. Thousands of people cross each day. Over 30,000 people are sleeping in US detention centers every night en route to deportation.
Oof, so much more to write of but so little time to be sleeping – more on this soon.
hasta pronto,
madelyn
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