1. I just got back from a trip to the Tijuana/San Diego border with @UnionSeminary students, which also straddles the gap between desolation and hope.
We witnessed the stark cruelty of how we treat our neighbors, but also how God moves amidst unimaginable tragedy.
We witnessed the stark cruelty of how we treat our neighbors, but also how God moves amidst unimaginable tragedy.
2. The situation in Tijuana is incredibly dire. When we arrived, an immigration attorney with @AlOtroLado_Org told us, "Welcome to the apocalypse." They did not lie; if apocalypse is an unveiling/uncovering, this crisis lays naked the our immigration policy's inhumanity.
3. Between 5k and 6k people presently wait to file their asylum claims. Our first day there, our government decided to hear just 30 of them. They heard 40 our second day. At this rate, it would take >140 days just to hear folks there now; more arrive each day.
4. Meanwhile, thousands of refugees huddle together in an abandoned nightclub. It's hard to describe just how bad things are. The air inside the building used to house family units is fetid; each breath feels thick. We saw dozens of people in clear respiratory distress.
5. There are children everywhere; kids who have walked thousands of miles only to now face an interminable wait in appalling conditions. Their strength of will trumps anything I've seen, but you can see just how weary they are, how deeply they yearn for a home.
6. Yet our government expresses only bigoted disdain for their plight; content to let them suffer and name this abuse "good." To walk around the camp and speak with folks—to hear the dangers they're fleeing and the hope they carry—is to be filled with blinding rage.
7. Yet, despite all of this, love breaks through in a million, myriad ways. Folks laughing, playing soccer; a young boy sharing his only bowl of food with his infant brother, a girl making an immigration lawyer a play-doh heart as she helped her mom.
8. The incredible team of @AlOtroLado_Org lawyers, and volunteer attorneys coming from around the country, who run a makeshift pro-bono clinic out of the 3rd and 4th floors of a bare concrete warehouse—while hundreds are fed and clothed on the levels below.
9. Their clinic has also become known as the spot where people can go to be married. We performed 5 ceremonies in 2 days—watching people pledge their lives to one another, even as they endure our country's horrific attempts to quash that life. Against hate, love breaks through.
10. On our last day, we gathered with 200+ faith leaders in San Diego, and countless other activists, marching to a militarized border that shouldn't exist. Attempting to bless migrants through the fence, clergy were arrested by border patrol.
11. Evidently, freedom of religion covers people who break the law to discriminate against LGBTQ+ folks but not faith leaders who want to walk across a beach to pray with people through the fence.
Our government sent guns to greet them.
Our government sent guns to greet them.
12. And yet, even as the government's reception embodied national inhumanity, I watched as people sang together, prayed together, stood together, and were arrested side by side. No policy can extinguish this love; God cannot be contained by fences, guards or concertina wire.
13. It's time for people of faith and conscience to embody this Love, to lay it at the feet of those who legislate hatred. Drive your love between the spokes of that unjust wheel, that our border may be rewritten as "Welcome" to thousands who desperately need it.
