ACTIVISTS TRAVEL LENGTH OF BORDER
‘Journey for Justice’ seeks more humane migration policies
Shortly before sunset on Friday, a group of more than 30 people quietly walked down the sand of Imperial Beach to touch the water of the Pacific Ocean.
Their journey had started two weeks earlier, when the group of activists touched the Gulf of Mexico at sunrise before driving the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. Along the way, they paused to witness U.S. border policies’ effects on migrants and to learn from those who are working to help asylum seekers who have fled their homes.
“We’ve gone and looked into the eyes of people and shared their pain,” said Joshua Rubin, founder of Witness at the Border, the group that organized the trip. “There’s no forgetting that.”
The organization began several years ago when Rubin and others camped outside an immigration detention facility in Texas as a way to protest conditions in which migrant children were being held. They’ve since used the strategy of witnessing as a means of drawing attention to what they see as inhumane practices in U.S. policy. That witnessing includes monitoring flights chartered by the U.S. government to transport people in immigration custody.
Rubin, who is from
Brooklyn, N.Y., said they planned December’s border-long “Journey for Justice” as a way to get back on the ground after the pandemic.
Karla Barber of Dallas helped organize the drive. She estimated that seven people did the entire trip. Many more joined them in the days that followed from across the United States — including California, Alaska and New York — after they set out from Boca Chica Beach in south Texas.
“I’m still processing everything that I saw, but the thing that keeps bubbling up for me is just the complete waste of money being spent to make our border cruel,” Barber said. “I saw so much human suffering that’s just absolutely unnecessary.”
Leslie Mullin of San Francisco said she joined the car caravan in El Paso, Texas. She said she watched the border wall the entire way across.
But what stuck in her
mind the most was what she’d witnessed in Yuma, Ariz. The group had gotten up at 4 a.m. to go to a place where there is a gap in the wall to bring food to migrants who were waiting to be processed by Border Patrol.
When they arrived, she said, there were hundreds standing patiently in line to talk to Border Patrol agents. The air was very cold, she said, and some of the Witness at the Border volunteers took socks off their
own feet to give to the waiting migrants.
She said she met people from India, Colombia, Georgia, Sri Lanka and Peru among those in the line.
Valerie Carlisle of LaGrange, N.Y., said the scene reminded her of historic pictures she’d seen of people arriving on boats to Ellis Island when it was a major entry-point for migrants.
The activists, who traveled in a caravan of cars, initially planned to reach the Pacific by hiking through
Border Field State Park, where the layers of border barrier end. But, recent rains had closed the park, so after regrouping in a parking lot just outside the park’s gate, the line of cars, with yellow “Journey for Justice” flags flapping in the wind, headed to Imperial Beach.
When they reached the water, Rachna Daryanani of Queens, N.Y., said a prayer to her mother, who died a few years ago. She asked her mother to help protect the migrant children she encountered along the border. She said her mother always used to look after children in need when they lived in India.
“She’s not stopped her job. It’s just a chapter over,” Daryanani said. “So I’m telling her to help the children who are unnecessarily being hurt.”
On Saturday, the group held a march near the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Rubin said the group grew to about 60 people, and they walked through the mall near the PedWest border crossing and chanted. On Sunday, the group attended a binational church service near Friendship Park, some attending from the U.S. side in Border Field State Park and some from the Tijuana side in the Playas neighborhood.
“We often find ourselves preaching to the choir. But it’s not so bad — we preach to the choir not to get them to sing but to get them to sing louder,” Rubin said. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”