NOGALES, MEXICO: "Seventeen bodies were recovered this month....."

[CPTer John Heid (Luck, WI) has spent June working with No More Deaths and the Samaritans in southern Arizona, providing humanitarian assistance to migrants. In July, he will be joined by CPTers Sarah Shirk (Chicago, IL), Haven Whiteside (Palm Harbor, FL), and Brian Young (Richmond, IN) as they engage in CPT's July month-long Borderlands Witness Drive.]

Lace-less shoes on weary feet identify these hundreds as migrants, dumped back across the US/Mexico border each day at Nogales. Each face reveals a story. Each story is punctuated by hunger, loss and determination. Their bodies are usually weary, blistered and dehydrated. The spirits are often resilient despite these facts. So, the migrants keep coming, and the buses keep deporting. Survival is higher than any wall.

Temperatures in southern Arizona have exceeded 100 degrees every day since June 13th. There is no end in sight. Seventeen bodies were recovered in the Tucson sector this month. These neighbors died of dehydration, but the political analysis autopsy reads "failed immigration policy."

The headline in last Sunday's Arizona Daily Star read "Efforts to cut summer deaths along the border aren't working." While the US Border Patrol scours the desert for laborers, fathers, mothers and increasing numbers of children, there is scant public understanding of the reasons our neighbors risk life and limb simply to work.

The politically constructed border is a flash point. It is a locus of life and death. Yet the crises neither begins nor ends in the Sonoran desert. Economic policies created this crisis. Federal and state policies exacerbate it long after a migrant finds work in a labor camp, truck farm, construction sight or poultry plant.

CPT Borderlands Witness Drive begins this week in the literally blistering Arizona heat and culminates in late July, 3,000 miles away in the air conditioned hall of Congress. The team will follow a migrant trail of sorts -- from the fences, walls and watch towers of the border, through the south and southeast gathering testimonies, joining solidarity vigils, and praying. We will look squarely into the faces of immigrants with a vision that authentic human spirit, theirs and ours, can be breathed into the currently comatose debate on immigration policy.

New Blog on Raymondville, TX Detention Center

Elizabeth Garcia, border activist, resident of Brownsville, TX, and CPTer, has started a new blog to provide details on the gargantuan Raymondville, TX Detention Center that has been set up to warehouse detained migrants. You can find it at:

http://tentcityinraymondville.blogspot.com/

We'll also put a link in the sidebar.

"How far would you walk to feed your family?"

"How far would you walk to feed your family?" Six migrants walked to their deaths in as many days in the Arizona desert this week, bringing the year's total to 88 fatalities in the Tucson Sector alone.

The query "How far..." punctuated a June 6th press conference held by No More Deaths, CPT's local coalition partner, as human rights workers shared first-hand accounts of the courage and compassion of migrants they have encountered in the desert. No More Deaths reopens summer camps and mobile stations in the Sonoran desert this weekend as temperatures climb into 100's.

For those migrants who survive the desert crossing incarceration awaits. A record 26,000 migrants are currently imprisoned in the burgeoning network of private and state detention centers across the United States.

Meanwhile the immigration reform bill debate drones on in congress.

CPT's Borderlands Witness Drive is scheduled to begin in Tucson on July 2nd. The team will travel along the US/Mexican border meeting with the myriad groups engaged in migrant aid/advocacy work,visiting and vigiling at detention centers and collecting information/stories in an effort to bring the human face of migration to Capital Hill in early August at the culmination of the Drive.

The perils of migration are lethal in the deserts of the southwest, but violations of human rights dog every step of a migrant sister or brother's journey north. Borderlands Witness Drive will follow this trail through the southeast with meetings, vigils and solidarity gatherings in Louisana, Georgia and North Carolina and ultimatly, Washington DC.

ARIZONA/SONORA BORDERLANDS REFLECTION: Two Psalms

ARIZONA/SONORA BORDERLANDS REFLECTION: Two Psalms
CPTnet, 8 June 2007

After completing her all-night shift at the Migrant Resource Center,
19-year-old Rachel Liberto returned to her fellow Christian Peacemaker Teams delegates bearing a precious gift. Located on the Mexican side of the Douglas/Agua Prieta border crossing, the Migrant Resource Center daily receives over a hundred newly deported Mexican and Central American migrants, offering them food and drink, basic care for their blistered feet, an orientation to services available to them in Agua Prieta, a kind word, and a listening ear.

Late that night, one migrant sat beside Rachel and asked if she would read Psalm 22 aloud to him

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint--Thou dost lay me in the dust of death--"

The Psalm captured so much of what Rachel and her fellow delegates had heard about the treacherous journey from Southern Mexico to Arizona. This journey, taken every day by thousands of men, women and children, claims the lives of hundreds every year, and the hopes of an inestimable number. But in the face of this kindly man from Oaxaca, and in the impassioned, raw words of the Psalmist, the reality of the crossing struck Rachel with a new power.

Some hours later, Rachel greeted one last weary migrant, Margo, a young woman from Chiapas. As Rachel tended to her horribly blistered feet, she motioned to the Bible in Margo's hands. Did she, Rachel asked, have a favorite Psalm? "Yes," she said, "Psalm 23."

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green meadows--"

Rachel listened to Margo as she shared some of her story. In tears, she recounted small pieces of her journey and the sacrifices it required. Her mother had died five years before and left her ill father to take care of Margo and her younger sister. Margo told Rachel that her family has gone days without food. Rachel glanced up at Margo's face twisted in sadness. She did not know if there were consoling words to say so she slowly stroked Margo's swollen shins and stared blankly into the pink tub of antiseptic water. In time, Rachel finished bandaging her blisters and stretched clean socks over her feet. As they parted the two new friends embraced one another.

The next morning Rachel told briefly of her night at the Center, of her new friends, and of the two Psalms they set before her. She read the Psalms aloud and invited the others to join her in silent prayer.

Rachel and her fellow delegates pondered the realities of the migrants' experience with grief and amazement. What conditions would lead a mother to leave behind her family, including her one and only child, a four year-old daughter, to risk her life for a dreadfully unreliable promise on the other side of an invisible line? Who is this strange God who lays migrants "in the dust of death" and "in green meadows"?

[Participants in CPT's May 24-June 4 Borderlands delegation were Carin Anderson, Christopher Moore-Backman and their baby Isa (Tucson, AZ), Rachel Brocker (Beaverton, OR), Erin Cox, (Chicago, IL), Martha Hayward (Negaunee, MI), Rachel Liberto (Seattle, WA), Lois Mastrangelo (Watertown, MA), Kyle Navis (Spokane, WA), Tyler Schroeder (Centennial CO), Martin Smedjeback (Sundbyberg, Sweden) Rick Ufford-Chase (Tucson, AZ) and John Williamson
(Spokane, WA).]