So, I'm skipping a good half year from the subject of my last post. This is not to discredit any of the JVC experience that happened between, I sincerely hope that I will be able to revisit it within the next couple of weeks, if not I'm certain I'll revisit it in good time. However, I need to try to tell you what happened when we crossed the border to Mexico.
Working in my office you can't help but become familiar with all sorts of immigration difficulties that were barely on my radar last year, much less two years ago when I began my journey as a Jesuit Volunteer. I answer the phones and one of the most common calls I get is one saying that a relative (husband, wife, brother, sister, son, daughter) is in detention and is in danger of being deported. Oftentimes this means that individual has committed some crime, anything from a minor offense to a larger crime, and is now detained by ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) after they've either completed their prison sentence or been acquitted. ICE then detains them in its own jail facilities. Unfortunately, as a very small and very new non-profit, NMILC doesn't have the resources to provide representation or even a consultation in these cases unless the person is able to be let go on bond. So I refer ever single one of those calls on to an agency in El Paso, where New Mexico's Immigration Court is, where they may or may not be able to get assistance. Many individuals in the immigration system aren't even entitled to an attorney as they are in the criminal justice system. So I help them as best I can, wish them luck, wishing with all of my heart that there were words more fit to the occassion, and, usually amid a tearful telephonic farewell of "gracias, muy amable" (thank you, very kind of you) we are disconnected forever.
This past weekend I saw the other side of that story, what happens during and after that deportation.
My three communitymates and I made the trek out to Arizona on Thursday evening after a full day of work. By the time we got in to Tucson at midnight we were all bushed and fell promptly asleep.
The following afternoon, we joined up with the group of Arizona JVs to witness operation streamline, a mass court hearing. Nearly 80 individuals stood before the judge, all in the room with their attorneys, with whom they had met for perhaps 10 - 30 minutes if they were lucky. All the detainees were shackled. All were re-entry cases, which means they had previously been deported and had returned to the United States only to be caught again. All had signed a plea bargain already, agreeing with the state to a specific amount of time in prison. At the beginning of the hearing the judge, one of the more patient ones I've had the pleasure of witnessing, informed them of their rights and how the hearing would proceed. Then she proceeded to call them up in groups of 8 -10, rattling off the same series of questions to verify the facts of their case, that they understood their rights and how they plead. The same questions over and over and, aside from some clarifications for lack of understanding, the same answers "culpable" (guilty). Then the judge would rattle off their individual prison time and would be done with it. Upon one or two occasions, she was petitioned further. One man asked to have his sentence shortened because both he and his son would be serving and his wife had just had her leg amputated. The judge, while she seemed to genuinely sympathize with his situation, was literally unable to do anything; he had already signed his agreement with the government and she could make no amends to it. The most she was able to do was recommend that he and his son serve their time in the same detention facility. And it went on in that manner for an hour and a half . . . 80 people, their lives decided just like that within 14 days of being caught and charged with re-entry.
The following day we crossed the actual border between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora (Mexico). Having crossed into Juarez earlier in the year with Alex I was not as nervous as some of the fellow crossees, but was anxious for another reason. Two days before I had been asked to translate for the group at the women's shelter, since the majority of my companions don't speak Spanish and the only other fluent individuals were to remain at the Comedor (the dining room of the Kino Border Initiative). We crossed (it's truly amazing how little documentation you need to cross into Mexico; we had to present nothing, no passport no id, nada) and took a bus to the organization. On the way there we learned about the work that KBI does, helping deported immigrants who are deciding whether to try to return to the U.S. The two main programs that we saw were the Comedor and the Women's Shelter. We stayed in the Comedor for our orientation and then the group of 7 of us made our way to the Women's Shelter with our guide, a 22 year old native Mexican volunteer working at KBI, Ale. We made our way up so many stairs to the top floor of an apartment building where the shelter was and then met our leader, one of the sisters. She gave us a presentation about the work of the shelter empowering and supporting the 8 women who live there for 7 days at a time through self-esteem classes, meals, education and a variety of other programming. Then the women came in. From the work I do screening phone calls and hearing so many defeated stories I was prepared for the worst. However, when the women entered the room, they seemed anything but defeated. They were friendly right off the bat and even tried to communicate with my non-Spanish speaking friends. We asked them to share their stories and they did, so openly, willingly, and powerfully that I hated to stop them for me to translate what they'd said. We primarily heard from two or three of the women and others chimed in. They had all faced terrible hardships. One woman after previously having been deported was so determined to get to the United States that she scaled the wall not once, but twice once to the United States side and then when "la Migra" (Immigration) spied her and it was clear they were going to get her, she scaled it again, back to the "safety" of Mexico. She is the same woman who said that she looked at the positive side of her experience and didn't let her negative experiences get in the way of what needed to be done. I looked around at the women in that room after the stories were told, stories of trying to get better jobs, of trying to save their children from danger in Mexico and in turn being separated from them, terrible stories of brutality done to them in the detention centers (one woman who didn't speak Spanish or English had her arm broken because she couldn't understand what the guards wanted her to do). As we neared the end of our conversation, I kept thanking them, on behalf of both myself and the other volunteers, but they just kept thanking us in return. They asked us to change the system and joked about smuggling them in our suitcases. But overall, they persistently thanked us for being there. I wanted to tell them that the privilege was ours, that I had been truly humbled by their experience and that they were some of the strongest women that I've ever met and I did, but I didn't have the words in English or in Spanish to express what came to my heart. After that discussion, we retired to the apartment with some of the women we had just met and watched an Avril Lavigne music video. Then we reunited with the rest of our group. One of my communitymates asked me if I'd cried and I didn't answer him, I just put my arm around him, so grateful to have the presence of my Albuquerque "family" whom I love to death.
After a talk from one of the Jesuit priests, we made our way to our last stop before leaving Mexico, a horrible place on a sidewalk right by the wall where a twelve year old boy was gunned down a year and a half ago for allegedly throwing rocks at the wall. The voice of justice that to this day has been left unheard weeps for him there and for the twenty people that border patrol has killed. With him in mind, we crossed back to the United States.
After lunch of delicious Mexican food at a food truck our band of 15 made our way to a desert location 25 miles from the border. This is where migrants have to walk, because they have to get past the border patrol checkpoint nearby. And then they continue walking through the desert. I will tell you this, late June in Nogales, Arizona is not where you want to walk, not even a person who "likes heat" as much as myself. We trudged along this trail with no shade and remnants of human's crossing (a backpack here, a hat there, a water bottle to the left) for under an hour and by the end of it we were all sweating and ready to get back to the air conditioned car.
A group of us went to the nearby mission for Saturday evening Mass where we sat through a hot, musicless service and then returned to the Tucson house. Having all 15 of us together was truly a privilege; Albuquerque is 6 - 7 hours from Tucson, our nearest JV Community, so we enjoy our time with nuestras compañeras when we can.
Sunday night we arrived late in Albuquerque and the next day I told my Program Coordinator that this had been one of my top 5 experiences for the JVC year and that I'd highly recommend it. And yet, I still feel as though I don't have the words to describe it. Maybe it's because I haven't written deeply in a while. Perhaps it's due to some defect in the English or Spanish language, or the default in myself or in society that always wants to say something was good. Perhaps there's just too much emotion there to put a word on it. For now I shall have to resort to a Richard Rohr saying . . . it was broken and blessed.
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