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.