This report from the US-Mexico Border on the current immigration struggle was written by Rev. Randy J. Mayer for the American Waldensian Society.
The US/Mexico Borderlands are sweltering in record heat this summer, with temperatures already spiking to 115 Fahrenheit (46 Celsius). As a result, migrant suffering and migrant deaths have also spiked. It is literally impossible for most migrants to carry the 6 to 10 gallons of water, weighing between 48 and 80 pounds, that they will need to survive a three-to-seven-day journey in the scorching heat across the Sonoran Desert.
But the situation is much more serious than just the extremely high temperatures and the difficulty of carrying enough water for three to seven days in the desert. For more than 25 years, many in the political class in the United States have nurtured and cheered on hateful anti-immigrant policies even as they have wasted billions of dollars on walls and a false understanding of security. The only tangible result of all that rhetoric and spending has been a militarized borderland that forces migrants to cross in ever more dangerous and desolate areas which, in turn, causes more suffering and death. Moreover, this anti-migrant policy has resulted in cartels and gangs becoming increasingly stronger and more sophisticated as they fine-tune their coldblooded techniques to smuggle people and drugs across the border.
Practically speaking, the US - Mexico Border has become a gigantic “pressure cooker,” that exponentially intensifies the heat, danger, fear, and terror that must be faced by today’s “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free.”
The Trump administration had four years to put in place a plethora of barbaric polices. Cutting more than $500 million dollars of direct aid to the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, namely Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala caused even more challenges. Creating “Migrant Protection Protocols” forced vulnerable immigrants fleeing from violence to wait for their asylum hearings in dangerous Mexican border towns. And when the Covid 19 Pandemic hit, the Trump Administration found an obscure U.S. public health law, called “Title 42,” that allowed the government to expel or deny entrance to anyone during a public health crisis. For the past year and a half, the US border has effectively been shut down as the pressure cooker has intensified.
Initially, there was a lot of hope that the Biden Administration would rapidly change things for the better, but the new administration has been painfully slow in terminating the nastiest policies of the Trump Administration. Sadly, migrant families don’t have the luxury to wait for a new administration to get settled and for policies to change. Many have had to run for their lives, crossing the border anyway they can, even if it is in 115-degree heat.
Every day, humanitarian groups like the Green Valley/Sahuarita Samaritans, which is sponsored by the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ, witness the human carnage of this “pressure cooker” along the border. Water stations set up along the trails migrants usually follow are having record usage. In the last several months, humanitarian groups working in the desert, including groups from our congregation, have found more migrants in need of emergency help than they did during the entire previous five years. Last week, a group from my congregation stopped to give water to 20 children from Mexico and Guatemala who had been detained by the US Border Patrol along the wall near Sasabe, Arizona. Parents have learned that if they send their children across the border alone, they will be detained for a short time and then released to “tios y tias” (or aunts and uncles) in the United States. And these parents know full well that, if they want to be with their children again, they first will have to survive the “Devil’s Highway”, walking through the desert across the border.
Eventually something will have to give, something will have to happen to release the pressure, the suffering, and the agony along the border. For the sake of the migrants, we hope and pray it will come soon.
The author of this report, Randy Mayer, pictured below, is the lead pastor of the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in Sahuarita, Arizona. He and his congregation have been involved in humanitarian work along the US/Mexico border for more than 20 years. Randy is a member of the board of directors of the American Waldensian Society.