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Witness At The Border

@WitnessBorder

May 31, 2021

It is said from time to time that history is written by those who hold power. It is only a small step further to infer that the manipulation of our social memory serves the purposes of the powerful. That the story that is chiseled into posterity supports a social order.1/6

It follows that stories of those without the podia of power are rarely told They can be seen by those who watch closely but all too quickly are obscured by steady flow of time, the greatest wave barely a ripple, mostly gone once eyes that witnessed them close for the last time2/6

The story then goes untold, and we are left to wonder whether those lives and loves and struggles ever happened. Whether most of us ever existed at all. Memorial Day is charged with the duty of reinforcing the historical bias toward the powerful. 3/6

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Witness At The Border

@WitnessBorder

May 21, 2021

Casey Revkin Ryan posts-Learn more about our work reuniting families at everylastone.org/get-them-out

This girl had been approved for release two weeks ago–we had helped her mother submit all the necessary paperwork–but HHS hadn’t gotten around to arranging transportation.
1/4

Her mother offered to go to the facility to pick her up, as is allowed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement handbook, but the unlicensed emergency intake detention facility holding her wouldn’t allow it.
2/4

On Monday (detention day 57), we escalated the report of this egregious delay to the top of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, & the very next day her mother got a call saying her travel was arranged. They reunited late that night.
3/4

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Witness At The Border

@WitnessBorder

Mar 8, 2021

It began as families huddling together at the foot of the bridge across the border river in Matamoros, Mexico. Told at first that they must wait their turn for a chance to plead for asylum, for mercy, they stayed on the plaza, in a pocket of concrete in sight of...1/10

...the uniformed troops that stood guarding the arched path to the other side, a walkway daily slowly traversed by those clutching the documents that allowed their passage. As the tourniquet at the border tightened, the small colony of hope and defiance grew. 2/10

Without a lifeline from groups on the US side, which began as bags of food from McDonalds & later became a well-organized network of organizations providing sustenance & care, the beachhead might have lost its tenuous grip, & dissipated as waves of opposition, criminality 3/10

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Witness At The Border

@WitnessBorder

Feb 7, 2021

More than 4,000 children are known to have been separated from their parents before and during the official start of zero tolerance in spring 2018. Under the policy, border agents charged parents en masse with illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border...1/4

...then placed their children in government facilities. The policy drew condemnation from around the world as stories emerged almost daily about screaming children, some as young as babies, forcibly taken away from parents.
2/4

The U.S. has acknowledged that agents separated families long before they enforced zero tolerance across the entire southern border, its agencies did not properly record separations, and some detention centers were overcrowded and undersupplied, with...3/4

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Witness At The Border

@WitnessBorder

Feb 6, 2021

@ICEgov

Michelle Sal posts-BREAKING NEWS ‼️ Cowlitz County Superior Court has notified @ICEgov of its intention to end the county's contract to hold immigrant youth in detention at Cowlitz County Youth Services Center.
1/4

As of last year, facility in Longview, WA was one of only 3 facilities nationwide to hold young people in detention setting for ICE for extended periods of time. Advocates locally & nationally raised serious concerns about living conditions & legal implications of... 2/4

...prolonged detention for immigrant youth in these facilities. Last year Oregon's NORCOR jail also its contracts with ICE, including its contract to hold juveniles. We will have more analysis & comment on the termination of Cowlitz Cty’s contract with ICE in coming days.3/4

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Witness At The Border

@WitnessBorder

Feb 6, 2021

We have learned that a detention camp for teens is opening again in Carrizo Springs, Texas. It is run by Baptist Child and Family Services, the organization that ran the camp along the river in the Borderlands of west Texas at a Port of Entry. It was called Tornillo.1/9

It became a symbol of all that is wrong about immigration policy. A movement grew as people gathered to witness what they could of the children inside. Without witnesses the children would have been invisible. One child later told us that there were times during his...2/9

...confinement when he could not remember his own name.

The outcry against a child prison in the desert brought down the tents at Tornillo. But the policy, like a metastasized cancer, did not die. It grew in Homestead, Florida, and witnesses took their vigil there, and... 3/9

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