Herida Abierta: Frontera Cerrada
By Jorge Gómez, A first-generation Latinx immigrant who sits on the Board of Directors for Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. He teaches English at El Paso Community College
Cascades of soapy water slide down a dusty windshield, wiped down with a trapo. The driver of the Beemer lowers their window and tips the cleaner a few pesos, fare for la ruta back home and nothing more. Three cars ahead, an SUV slows to collect cacahuates garapiñados wrapped in plastic. A coupe seizes the moment to cut in their lane. Le pitan. For more than 10 years, these were my sights and sounds en route to school, crossing the Bridge of the Americas from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, to El Paso, Texas. But then 9/11 happened. And border crossing changed. On foot or by car, commuters would now be subjected to longer wait times, racial profiling, expanded surveillance, and an increasingly militarised immigration apparatus as part of the so-called War on Terror that curtailed civil liberties. It is in this post 9/11 environs that by 2003 the Dept. of Homeland Security spawned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency that would break up families by conducting raids that terrorised and traumatised already-vulnerable immigrant communities, including those in our borderland, a borderland that is among those chronicled by United Fronteras.
As a digital humanities project, the first phase of United Fronteras curates and compiles works from multiple genres stretching from the Mexico-United States borderland since the pre-colonial era to the 21st century. Among these works are Poets Against Border Walls in the Rio Grande Valley, and Ellas Tienen Nombre, a map that charts the locations of Cd. Juárez femicides that began in 1993 and to this day remain largely unsolved and uninvestigated. As we examine the carceral cartography made possible by Vol. 1 of Torn Apart, a project included in United Fronteras, we see the vast network of ICE detention centers scattered across the country, some of which formed the infrastructure for Trump’s zero tolerance policy that mainstreamed family separation and children in cages. Back in 2018, hundreds of Central Americans who had endured an exodus of thousands of miles as part of the migrant caravan (whose diaspora stems from U.S. interventionist policy in the first place) were released by ICE in El Paso as the agency willfully bypassed any logistical planning with the city and once again revealed its callous disregard for basic needs. If it wasn’t for the coordinated efforts led by Ruben Garcia as director of Annunciation House (and cofounder of Las Americas), la gente de la frontera (and others from all over the country) would not have mobilised to that emergency as they did. Summoned up by my colleagues to volunteer, I will never forget that freezing winter right before Christmas when the gymnasium of Loretto Academy was converted into one of the many pop-up shelters in our community, all of us pitching in however we could: sifting through donated clothes, distributing medical and hygiene supplies, or conducting intakes so that migrants could connect with and be transported to their sponsor. Suffice it to say, this sudden invoking of grassroots organizing would portend the same state and local response required in the face of federal negligence of our ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
By 2019, the administration concocted the even more nefarious Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) better known as the Remain in Mexico program that circumvented international law by forcing asylum seekers to wait in dangerous conditions in a city that already preys upon indigenous populations (the Rarámuri in particular) only for them to be metered (or limited to an arbitrary number of daily applicants) the mere possibility of petitioning for asylum. The border city of El Paso has frequently been ground zero for these grossly inhumane practices that slipped under the radar a few years ago.
Born and raised in Cd. Juárez, I was no stranger to state-sponsored terror. More than a decade go, El Paso’s sister city suffered through rampant cartel violence, opportunistic crime, and government impunity that turned Juárez into one of the most dangerous cities in the world for years to come, not only victimizing bystanders but targeting the innocent (including activists and the LGBTQIA community), compelling me to found Miners Without Borders, a student organization at the University of Texas at El Paso that sought to effect change or at least convey solidarity through peaceful means such as rallies, poetry readings, and conferences. Gradually, my work as a grad student in literary studies aligned with much of my own nascent political activism. I turned my attention to our broken immigration system, watching a speech on immigration reform by then Pres. Obama at El Paso’s Chamizal National Memorial and attending a White House panel on youth civic engagement. But thanks to the work of activists who spotlight injustices perpetrated not just by ICE but by Border Patrol (BP) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the latter of which incorporates BP and actually comprises the largest federal law enforcement agency, I know better now than to solely rely on political rhetoric. I know that immigration enforcement is not limited to the 100-mile power construct that is the boundary of what is deemed CBP jurisdiction. Indeed, as protestors gather all across the country for Black Lives Matter due to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and an ever-growing number of other Black lives, CBP presently aids and abets an already militarised police state with drones and other “assets.”
As long as we keep bankrolling agencies that so empowered are devised to lack or obfuscate any sort of accountability, they will in turn keep consolidating that power and running riot. As citizens with rights not afforded undocumented people, it is incumbent upon us to make use of those rights. My own positionality as scholar-activist enables me to organize events such as Know Your Rights trainings, DACA information sessions, film screenings, and open mics for Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, a nonprofit in El Paso that renders legal aid to immigrants, including asylum seekers. For more than 30 years, Las Americas has represented clients who may be facing removal proceedings and deportation, or who as victims under the now-defunct Violence Against Women Act, might have qualified for immigration relief. Even though the legal minutiae might get lost by news coverage, a project featured in United Fronteras Mexico-USA exhibit such as Humanizing Deportation/Humanizando la deportación buttresses those court decisions with digital testimonios from migrantes made possible via a collaboration between UC Davis, Tec de Monterrey, and other academic institutions.
Although the current regime pushes construction of a border wall as its ultimate goal (a dark reality that further constricts the already treacherous terrain migrants traverse along with disrupting rich and biodiverse ecosystems such as those in Big Bend National Park as evidenced by the documentary The River and the Wall or projects such as, Borderlands: International League of Conservation Photographersand Borderlands Project, that through the power of the visual illustrates that very disruption), the fine print of immigration policy is far more deleterious, especially during this pandemic. For one, the news has reported on a COVID-19 outbreak at ICE’s El Paso Processing Center. Conditions at detention centers (as with prisons across the country) are altogether unsanitary and Las Americas called on ICE to parole refugees and migrants instead of leaving them exposed to the virus. As a matter of fact, these conditions have led to six detained women to sue ICE for their release due to testing positive to the coronavirus. Most recently, migrants (led by Black immigrants) detained at the Mesa Verde detention center in Bakersfield initiated a hunger strike demanding justice for Black lives murdered by police. Previously, Mesa Verde detainees had begun a hunger strike because of the pandemic, and in April a judge ordered a review of detainees who could be released and issued a restraining order as part of what the judge deemed “ICE’s failure thus far to respond meaningfully to the crisis despite the wave of court rulings from around the country documenting the agency’s inaction.”
With COVID-19 as pretext, the Trump administration also prolonged two of its policies: a moratorium on nonessential commuting that translates to a travel ban for possessors of non-immigrant tourist visas, and the expulsion of asylum seekers via Title 42 of U.S. Code Section 265 resulting in an estimated 20,000 asylum seekers returned and denied the opportunity to petition the U.S. government at a port of entry. As with the partial ban on Chinese travel into the U.S., instead of serving public health by building upon the gold standard of epidemiology that are testing, contact tracing, and isolation, these policies only expose their white supremacist provenance and the structural injustices inherent in our immigration and healthcare systems.
Aside from the above two policies, COVID-19 has likewise frozen litigation: both MPP courts and non-detained courts are closed until at least the end of June. Late last year, Las Americas together with other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against this administration due to the “deportation machine” it has designed.
As we witness the machinations of the carceral state that criminalizes humanitarian needs, we can easily succumb to despair and suffer trauma (directly or vicariously). But we cannot remain idle. This election year, we must claim our right to vote, resisting efforts by the state to further disenfranchise us (the Texas Supreme Court deciding via teleconference that fear of COVID-19 is not an excuse to vote-by-mail one such example). Through the work of Vol. II of Torn Apart, we take a birds-eye view of how ICE has lobbied Congress over the years, including more than half a billion since 2014 directed at the eastern edge of El Paso that is the 23rd district of Texas represented by the now-retiring Will Hurd. The more informed we are about the extent to which dark money influences our elected officials, the better we will be when we cast a decisive ballot in the fall (either in person or by mail). And when scholarly work disclosing salient findings is delivered via channels inaccessible to the general public, the open-access resources from United Fronteras become all the more indispensable for voters to scrutinize how public policy chisels at and delimits the very way we conceive of a border region, in this case the Mexico-United States border: as gerrymandered, fictive, socially constructed, and yet a continuous “herida abierta” where contact zones intersect and collide to privilege some populations while violently marginalising others.
Though policy might adjust at the behest of those we vote into office, the stakes are too high to be left up to a vote. We must advocate. We must demonstrate. We must keep marching. We must keep rallying. We must keep protesting. We must keep confronting and leveraging our privilege, listening as well as amplifying the voices of undocumented, Black, indigenous, Muslim, LGBTQIA, and disabled communities.
How we reconceive of a system that inherently polices migrants within that artificially circumscribed border is part and parcel not of policy-based tailoring but systemic transformations we need. And more than ever I am buoyed by what I have seen. As a result of sustained pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement, the City Council of Minneapolis announced they would disband their police department. Indebted to the work of Black feminists such as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the growing abolitionist movement (concisely encapsulated in the infographic from #8ToAbolition below) opens the door to reconstructing a society inflamed with socioeconomic justice, racial justice, political justice, and environmental justice, where we not only end incarceration but abolish ICE, CBP, and the police (which enables and colludes with immigration authorities via 287(g)), reifying the “justice for all” that Christian socialist Francis Bellamy penned into the pledge of allegiance for a country that never dispensed it evenly but instead applied it prejudicially. Justice, after all, to echo philosopher-activist Cornel West, “is what love looks like in public.”
Locally, I encourage readers to back the Fronterizx Fianza Fund, which can not only bail detained migrants but El Pasoans arrested for protesting in defense of Black Lives Matter. At a national level, here is a comprehensive list of organizations and bail funds to support the fight for racial justice, among them The Okra Project, and the Black Visions Collective. There are many others with differing needs, including the Minnesota Sanctuary Hotel (now a community resource center), and Al-Maa’uun, a grassroots nonprofit that serves basic needs (including food and medication). For migrants across the border, there’s Seguimos Adelante, a nonprofit from El Paso formed in 2019 which provides basic medical, sanitary, and nutritional aid to asylum seekers housed in Juárez migrant shelters.
When we might otherwise feel powerless, we find ways to fight back. We persist. We resist. Disrupt. Disturb. Dismantle. And build anew.