Kirk Astroth

Dispatch from the American Southwest

Struggling in the heat, plodding along the rugged, roller coaster road along the US. side of the border with Mexico, they came walking up the steep hill, laboring under the weight of daypacks, heavy clothing to ward off the chill of night, breathing hard and stopping often. We knew they’d be thirsty too. Who wouldn’t be after a trek in 100+ degree heat. I could make out two teenage boys, a younger girl, and a mom—carrying a small baby wrapped in a blanket sling. The merchants of doubt would have you believe they are criminals, less than human, murderers. But they were all too human in the inhumane landscape of southern Arizona.

            Even though it wasn’t yet 7:00 am, it was already quite warm. Cerulean sky, footnoted with a dusty horizon. We knew they had been dropped off by their “coyotes” at the end of the wall in the Coronado National Forest near Sycamore Canyon. Spending the night, exposed, they warded off the chill with the clothes on their backs and with fires built from cholla cactus, mesquite branches and cow pies. Now, they walked—22 miles toward the official port of entry to request asylum. We were there, volunteers with Humane Borders, to provide support, food and water and demand that the Border Patrol come out and pick them up, saving them what could be a deadly trek to seek asylum.

            Several days later, newly arrived in a foreign country, eight years old, she stood there, trembling in front of my table and laptop at Casa Alitas, the migrant resource center in Tucson, AZ. She had beautiful brown eyes, straight brown hair parted in the middle, and a slight smile, perhaps masking the cruel memories that it had taken to get here to the American Southwest with her mom from Guatemala. I smiled back, trying to reassure her that she was finally safe.

            Her name was Marisol. Her mother, Maria, sat next to her, dandling a baby sister on her knee. Mom’s stoic visage belied her fear and tension. Patiently, they waited for me to complete the intake process at the Casa Alitas Migrant Welcome Center in Tucson, AZ so she, her mom, and baby sibling could join the line for a hot meal, rest on one of the many cots donated by Red Cross and start thinking about traveling to Idaho to join family members. Her two young boys had been separated from her and she didn’t have any idea where they were. The most we could do is provide a phone number for her to call to try and locate her teenage boys.

            How much had they had to endure to make it here to Arizona? Would I have been able to do the same at her age? I doubt it. But I won’t forget the day—February 12^th—because according to her nine-digit “alien” registration form provided by the Border Patrol, today was her birthday. The realization hit me like a gut punch. I felt so sad and wished I could say something more than “feliz cumpleaños,” or had something to give her as a present, something that might help her feel safe beyond our words of “Welcome to the USA, you are safe now.”

            Resilience? We hardly know thee.

            I tried to reassure them, trying to help them feel welcomed.

            “Bienvenidos a Los Estados Unidos. Somos sus amigos. Estoy aqui para ayudarte. Por favor, no te preocupes” (Welcome to the U.S. We are your friends. I am here to help you. Please, don’t worry.)

            She and her mother answered my basic questions on the intake form: “Como se llama? ¿Cuántos años tienes? De donde eres?”  (What is your name? How old are you? Where are you from?). All the while, they waited patiently, but with eyes darting around the large hall of the former juvenile justice center, taking it all in and perhaps wondering where all these other people had come from.

            None of us can imagine how bad life must be to walk 2,000 miles with your children to escape the horrors of gang violence, intimidation, or extortion. Where was the dad? Siblings? You don’t ask because you don’t want to resurrect the trauma, the angst, the memories.

            Ten years ago, I started taking water out to the desert because the death toll kept rising as refugees came to “El Norte” seeking a better life because fleeing to safety should not be a death sentence. Then, I started working the intake desk at the migrant support center, assisting people like Marisol and her mom who spent 2-3 weeks in jail while waiting to pass their asylum claim interview. Some days, we would have over 600 people dropped off by Border Patrol from countries all over the globe—Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Azerbaijan, India. Everyone gets entered in our system so that if their paperwork is ever lost, we have information about the relatives with whom they are trying to join, phone numbers and basic demographic data. Our data helps to ensure that no one is “disappeared” or becomes one of the “desconocidos” (unknown). Everyone, even children, is given an “A” number from Border Patrol which replaces any identification documents they once had, largely because Border Patrol throws away their documents along with all their medications and most personal effects. All they have is contained in a one-gallon plastic bag.

            It doesn’t take you long to realize that our national policy of “prevention through deterrence” has created a humanitarian crisis on the southwestern border. Operation Blockade, Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Hold the Line, and other such policies have driven people who are refugees from trauma and violence to seek safety by forcing them to cross through some of the most dangerous, inhospitable terrain in North America. Southern Arizona is ground zero in this humanitarian crisis and has created a vast necropolis.

            The US border wall—just a collection of unconnected barricades—was built first in areas that were easiest to cross. That didn’t dissuade people from coming; it only pushed them into harsher, more deadly terrain. None of the obstacles—walls, surveillance, prolonged and inhumane detention, family separation, laws criminalizing migration and human smuggling—deterred people from crossing into the U.S. The official thinking was that the more deadly the crossing, and the more hostile the treatment upon being detained, then the fewer people would try to come, having heard what horrors awaited them. It didn’t and still doesn’t work. You leave home because home is the mouth of a shark. But people have kept coming. Even now despite Trump’s claims that the border has been sealed shut.

            Meanwhile, more than 4,400 people have perished in Arizona’s deserts since 2000 (on average, human remains are found every two days). Those are just the ones we know about. Many more die from exposure and dehydration, but their remains are never found. The lucky ones make it, like Marisol and her mother and baby sister, but they are scarred for life by the experience. But there’s also something that statistics can’t capture: the ache in the desert air, in the earth, in the whole ecosystem when someone dies alone, thirsty, and afraid—just miles from help that never arrives.

            For those who don’t make it, their deaths are horrific, a torture appalling yet all too commonplace. Even more gruesome is their dismemberment and decomposition after death. In just a few hours in the desert sun, the corpse swells and bloats, and the body’s skin blackens like over cooked meat on a barbeque grill. The soft tissues and eyes are the first to go. Coyotes, foxes, and eagles rend skin, rip clothes, tear at intestines, and scatter bones. Quickly, the flies, beetles and maggots go to work. Scavengers like vultures descend on the rest. In only 24 hours, eight vultures can completely skeletonize a human body. All that remains are some strips of clothing, maybe the carpet shoes worn to elude government trackers, a day pack with a flip phone, toothbrush, a comb, photos of loved ones, an identification card.

            Those like Maria, Marisol and her baby sister who make it are lucky given the odds against them. Yet they carry on and keep trying during their long migration ordeal, hoping to eventually join family and friends in new towns, only to work at jobs most of us wouldn’t consider for wages far below the minimum wage, building a new life, returning to school, redefining their existence in a foreign culture that vilifies them as criminals, lazy, and very bad people who eat your pets.

            Marisol will have to start school, learn a new language, endure discrimination, and taunts, trying to make friends wherever she ends up. And trying to forget watching her mother being raped by “coyotes” and cartel gangs, stealing her baby formula, taking her last pesos, seizing her rosary and jewelry. Many women get “the pill” before heading north to avoid unwanted pregnancies. We cannot even begin to imagine the horrors of migration.

            Why does the Trump administration make it so hard to be a fulfilled, rights-bearing human being? The travesties, the insults, the assaults on the institutions of the country appall me. Legal residents of the country sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained or arrested after voicing their opposition to U.S. policies and then sent to prisons in Louisiana. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against Trump’s violations of the constitution and due process. Government civil servants fired without cause after years of service. People gunned down in our streets by hooded ICE troops. Military leadership eviscerated and replaced with greenhorn lackeys. Deportations, blatant racism, humiliation of foreign leaders, kidnappings, workplace raids, intimidation of the media, defunding the safety net of programs for the poor and chronically ill, increased funding for the military and immigration police. Voices of compassion are being drowned out by the voices of hate.

            As humanitarian volunteers, we refuse to be silenced or intimidated. So, we go to Federal court to stand in silent protest as “witnesses” to the deportations. We demonstrate against opening new detention prisons in our communities. We organize community rapid response teams to confront masked men trying to arrest our neighbors. We monitor ICE agents patrolling schools and churches. We erect crosses at death sites to pay tribute to those who died enroute. We maintain our Humane Borders website’s “death map” to hammer home the appalling reality that Arizona is a land of open graves.

            For me, and all the other humanitarian volunteers on the border, our work is not drudgery. We keep delivering water to the desert based on a simple belief that food and water are a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. Instead, we ask how much water and food you need. The border is “una herida abierta” (an open wound) where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. In truth, no matter what we do as humanitarians, the desert will never be safe. The borderlands of Arizona are a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary that is in a constant state of transition. It is inhabited by the prohibited and the forbidden.

            But today what I really wonder about is Marisol, her mother and baby sister.  How didthey fare after they left Casa Alitas? Resilience, we hardly know thee.

 

Bio:

Kirk Astroth is a committed desert rat, a science nomad, a Seven Day Recreationalist, and worships at the Cathedral of the Infinite Blue Dome. As a registered archaeologist, he frequents desert spaces and places with evidence of ancient peoples and cultures. Much of his time, Kirk haunts the mountains and bajadas of the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range in western Arizona where traces of ancient people modern refugees co-mingle with the detritus of the military industrial complex. Kirk is from Tucson, AZ and volunteers with Humane Borders and Casa Alitas, two groups providing assistance to migrants along the border to reduce the numbers of deaths in this unforgiving landscape.