This group was established to be a forum, a community, and a clearinghouse for those who feel called to be witnesses to what most of us perceive to be abusive and racist policies toward migrants. These repulsive policies are going on right now.1/5
They include the practice of imprisoning migrants, often euphemistically called detention, damaging families, life-threatening deportation & what is called expulsion, built on false narrative that migrants are more of a threat to your health than Super Bowl party next door.2/5
The denial of human rights to migrants did not begin under Trump & it will not end under Biden. We look forward to whatever improvements may come under the new administration. But like all struggles that address the question of human rights, it will take a paradigm shift...3/5
...far more thunderous than a change of mainstream parties in power.

It will take generations. Please stick around if you are in it for the long haul. It is about much more than whether Biden is a nice old guy with good intentions. I don’t care about intentions.4/5
I care about migrants. I care about families.

I care about fighting for the rights of people to migrate in order to survive, and to a live a life of dignity. I care about children.

Rights, dammit.5/5

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More from @WitnessBorder

25 Jul 20
Some details on the @ICEgov hotel detention in McAllen, El Paso, and Arizona. @TXCivilRights discovered children held at Hampton Inn in McAllen. Quoted from Flores report: ICE utilizes contracts with MVM, Inc. (MVM) through Juvenile & Family Residential Management Unit... 1/10
... (JFRMU) to transport & temporarily house unaccompanied minors & family units pending removal under Title 42. This program is an extension of regular transportation services for aliens between custodial settings instituted in 2014.2/10
Initially, the program required only brief stays in hotels prior to deportation flights & prolonged stays in temporary housing were rare occurrences before the implementation of the Title 42 expulsion protocols. However, since implementation of the @CBP-issued expulsion...3/10
Read 10 tweets
18 Jun 20
On the subject of the comments period open for response to newly proposed asylum rules...

The Trump administration has taken steps that have choked natural flow of migration at the southern border. Before the #COVID19 pandemic, the mechanism they chose was... 1/10
... distortion of a concept known as asylum which set rules by which a person is judged eligible for entry by demonstrating that their reasons for leaving their homes were dire. That they suffered. Asylum is a policy, a principle in int’l law that arose from the shame felt...2/10
...when people fleeing Nazi persecution were turned away by other countries. So rules were set up to evaluate persecution. Even this feint at good intentions has since been perverted by the xenophobic impulses of our & other countries. 3/10
Read 11 tweets
22 May 20
We notice when things change. The last 2 weeks as we watched the flights of #ICEAir, we noticed something different happening. New flights from near the border, to Mexico City.
1/7
What are these flights? They are expulsions of Mexican nationals. Not deportations. A deportation requires a procedure that involves @ICEgov custody. But these folks are never in ICE custody. 2/7
They are just like immediate expulsions at border that are being carried out under orders of the @CDCgov that pretend that we are being invaded by carriers of #COVIDー19. I say pretend because our gov has been wanting to do this all along-... 3/7
Read 7 tweets
14 May 20
I wish, sometimes, now especially, that I could offer some comfort. But since I have somehow gotten a job as a witness to the treatment of people who come to the borders of the country I live in, I cannot comfort anyone. Not myself or anyone else. Not today.
1/8
It would be impossible to take any comfort from the decrease in numbers of refugees in ICE prisons, because it reflects two vectors of inhumanity. First, the wholesale deportation of refugees to the countries they fled.2/8
Second, pitiless rejection & expulsion of people who come to us, begging for a chance to live. With the excuse of #COVID19, we ignore standards of decency that might stay our cruelty, dropping even the pathetic pretense of months ago. Go back, there is nothing here for you.3/8
Read 8 tweets
29 Jan 20
Although it made 1 DHS agent pretty angry, 3 of us were there to watch as 5 buses, likely full of deportees, got onto a @FlySwiftAir jet at Brownsville Airport, and likely were transported to somewhere in Central America.1/5
This is the promised ramp up of the PACR (Prompt Asylum Claim Review) program, designed to send asylum seekers as far away as possible without giving them time or the means to make their case.
2/5
We are watching to see if this is the beginning of the end for MPP, or just supplementary cruelty to handle the new caravans, or poor people’s marches, as I like to think of them, coming up from the ravaged countries south of Mexico. 3/5
Read 5 tweets
18 Jan 20
A reprint from November, asking for your support-I am writing today to ask for your support for our action at the border to oppose the murderous policy of MPP, or Remain in Mexico.
1/
We have scheduled our Witness action to begin on 1/12. We plan a sustained effort which will protest the tent courts in Brownsville, TX, where injustice is handed out every day, dashing the hopes of desperate, vulnerable people encamped across the international bridge...2/
...in the city of Matamoros, in Mexico. The willing, with passports, will also be able to cross during our vigil, to see firsthand the cruelty inflicted in our name. This is not voyeurism. You will be expected to report to everyone you know about what you see.3/
Read 8 tweets

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