MIGRANTS’ STORIES TOLD IN ITEMS LEFT BEHIND
The diminutive gray-haired woman stood in a Des Moines living room holding up a rope with a noose. Shura Wallin had found it hanging from a tree limb in the Sonoran desert in Arizona. She knew it carried a message for unauthorised border-crossers: If you come here, this could be your fate.
Wallin took the rope, which she said was too short to hang a person but long enough to terrify plenty. She added it to the cache of artifacts she’s picked up over years of crossing the desert in search of migrants needing help. Late last month, she carted a suitcase full of these left-behind items to Des Moines, to share with an audience at Plymouth Congregational Church’s new Welcoming Migrants Committee.
That grim artifact joins the pink baby’s bottle and infant formula, the pair of a maybe 5-year-old’s shoes with worn-out soles, and the grooming supplies: powder, deodorant, rubbing alcohol; a boy’s underwear and empty water carriers. Testaments to rugged endurance, or perhaps its limits.
Wallin, whose name has Russian roots, was born in Rock Island, Illinois, and lived in Berkeley, California, before settling in Green Valley, Arizona, in 2000. The desert-crossings were an awakening, and in 2005, she cofounded the Green Valley/sahuarita Samaritan to provide support to those who undertake them. She lives about a mile from the Sonoran desert, where SHE Goes to ill water tanks AND patrol migrant trails on both sides of the I-19 corridor offering help to anyone who needs it.
And across the Mexican border in Nogales, she works out of the faithbased El Comedor center, serving meals, distributing supplies to people deported from the US and others contemplating the trek north.
She cautions them that crossing the desert from Nogales to Tucson can take seven days or more, and there’s no food or water along the way, except maybe from the water tanks that her group or others have left, if they haven’t been sabotaged. She urges them not to travel alone, and even gives karate lessons, noting 80 to 90 per cent of women get raped in the desert.
So why, given the hazards, do
more Continue to Come? In iscal year 2018 more than 396,000 people were apprehended by border control agents for illegally crossing the southwest US border. That was an increase from THE previous iscal year, when nearly 304,000 were CAUGHT. AND THE irst two months of FY 2019 suggest the total will BE “signiicantly GREATER than 2018,” according to a spokeswoman for US Customs and Border Patrol.
Most likely some combination of hope and despair drives the migrants. Climate change has robbed farmers’ ability to grow food by adding droughts, contends Wallin. The US used to grant seasonal permits for farm workers but that ended.
“What would it be like if you were watching your kids starve to death?” she demands. “Why can’t we see the desperation that is pushing people to leave?”
And what would it demand of us to let more of them in, when some communities are desperate for their labour?
Wallin holds up a Mexican-made brush she found for painting walls, that seems to embody the other emotion: hope. “Here was someone that came with a
dream,” she mused, “and he thought if he brought his own tool, he’d have a better chance of getting a job.”
She brings out a long burlap sack she guesses was used to haul marijuana over the shoulder. I ask if that discovery doesn’ t feed into the narrative advanced by Trump and Rep. Steve King of migrants as drug-smugglers.
“Tell me what you would do if somebody came to you, put a gun to your head and said, ‘We’re taking your family out too,’” she demands. “And who’s using the drugs? Not the people south of the border.”
But is the ordeal worth the risk? Wallin has born witness to times when it wasn’t. She got a call once from a young migrant she had helped feed, asking her to call border patrol agents to come get him. “He was totally worn out,” she said.
Sometimes the smallest objects can tell the most profound stories about what people are forced to do to stay alive and feed their families. These stories have no beginnings or endings. They’re just glimpses of moments from journeys we will never know the outcome of. But once you’ve seen them, it’s hard not to conclude our policies need more heart.