Children caught up in an Unresponsive Laws

Stepping through the door of this nondescript building which houses young immigrant children awaiting their court dates, I am struck by its diametrically different feel. Whereas the purpose of adult detention centers (euphemistically called “processing centers”) is to keep those inside from getting out, the intent of these children’s homes is to protect children and keep people from getting in. Some of these children are government informants against human traffickers, and others owe thousands of dollars to smugglers who exploited them and their families. Additionally, these children are the most vulnerable people within our borders today – it is good to see the government realize that and do their best to ensure their safety.

Only 5 children were present at the Lutheran Social Services (LSS) children’s home when we arrived at 10:00. These children were going through picture dictionaries, the staff offering them one-on-one assistance as they try to teach some basic literacy during their short stays (averaging 36 days). The other children were on a tour of the Immigration Court in the El Paso Federal Building downtown. LSS makes it a point to introduce the kids to the court room and Judge Hough, so they’re not terrified when they are called to respond to the government’s pleadings against them.

Most of these 5-12 year-old kids leave LSS after 36 days, usually because they are reunified with some family or sponsor. Some are deported prior to that, however. All these kids are placed in temporary foster homes, where they are welcomed into loving Spanish-speaking homes. The foster parents even go so far as to stop serving the traditional Chihuahua fare of tortillas de harina for corn tortillas.

Even after kids are reunified, however, they can still be deported. It is hard to think of children like this being sent back to Guatemala or El Salvador. It is even harder to think of them coming up by themselves, with an aunt, with a younger brother.

LSS does a good job by these kids, and they are excitedly awaiting the time in a few weeks when they can finally move into a bigger facility. There are no signs on the outside of this small building, but they do manage to evaluate children’s academic levels and send progress reports home. The children don’t seem to mind the cramped quarters at all. When we say Adios to the children at LSS, all of us wish them this in its truest sense.

Since children were banned from being detained with adults and their care was transferred from DHS (which contains ICE, the department which has enthusiastically raided workplaces, patrolled streets, and hunted immigrants down the last few years) to human services, these children’s care has improved tremendously. Rather than the drab walls of a prison cell, they are allowed to decorate the walls with their schoolwork and drawings. Instead of waiting impatiently, educational services have been provided to these children so that their detainment time isn’t totally wasted.

After visiting LSS on Friday, Sister Phyllis then took us to Canutillo to visit the Southwest Key children’s home there. This facility got its name because it attempts to be a key in the Southwest to a better life for immigrant children. The Canutillo establishment is much bigger, with capacity for 94, and their children are from 13-17. One of the saddest days in the home is an 18^th birthday; on that day, the child is transferred from this warm welcoming environment to the adult detention center down the road.

Since Reno v. Flores established some basic guidelines for the detainment of children (such as their right not just to liberty but also custody), facilities like Southwest Keys have risen to the challenge to nurture the lives of these children for as long as they’re in the United States. The site offers English literacy and math classes, but it also offers some highly-popular vocational classes. I have never seen a cake decorated as nice as the penguin cake the kids decorated just last month, and the murals on every wall in the building showcase that these kids have true talent.

Additionally, this facility has on-site counselors and social workers, to ensure that all their needs are met. Some children come in with chemical dependency, or horror stories from their home country or their long journey north. The staff was incredible at welcoming the children and helping them begin to heal. Looking at them, I am reminded of my own high-school students. Only a paper distinguishes these kids from any others.

Louie, the executive director, finished our tour by reminding us that with the increased militarization of the US border policy, along with the violence of the escalating drug wars in Latin America, more and more kids are stranded in Juarez without access to such facilities as LSS and Southwest Keys. My heart goes out, realizing that a half-mile away kids are wandering the streets wondering about their family back home (if they have any) and hoping for a new life just on the other side of the river. I pray they may find a home somewhere.

Something there is that doesn’t love a Wall, Part 6

           Belfast once vied with Dublin for the heart of Ireland.  It was there the Titanic was constructed; it was here C.S. Lewis, the famous Christian apologist and novelist of the Chronicles of Narnia came into the world. 

            After the Troubles started in the 1960s, however, this important port in Northern Ireland took a drastic turn.  The already tense situation of British control of a predominantly Irish city burst into violence by terrorist groups of both sides, the IRA and the UVF.  Beginning in the early 1970s, the first “peace lines” or intra-city barriers were erected in Belfast.

            These walls have increased to more than 40 today, covering over 13 miles and segregating much of this once-thriving city.  Alternately built of steel, iron, and brick, these walls stretch up to 25-feet high and prohibit the movement of people from the Irish-Catholic parts of town to the British-Protestant sections.  Some are open during the day and closed at night; some are manned by police; all were intended to bring “peace” by segregating sectarian groups.  The most famous of these walls runs parallel to Shankill Road, a site of several terrorist attacks.  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_Peace_Lines)

            Today, some of the tension has lessened since the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement.  The walls still stand, though, and they draw thousands of tourists a year.  The “peace lines” are still eerie and haunting, stark in the way they divvy up houses and roads, slicing their way through what must have once been a beautiful city.  Unlike the walls of houses, and even unlike the colorful propagandist murals peppering the city, these walls stand ominous and dark against the city skyline.

 

            While some may argue the walls saved a few lives over the years by separating the citizenry of Belfast and Northern Ireland, in reality it was always the cooperation of the people that staved off violence and determined such compromises and peace accords such as the Good Friday Agreement.  The walls had nothing to do with peace, serving instead to segregate people further, reinforce rifts between families, and replace real negotiations and co-habitation talks with solid, uncompromising walls.  It was only when the Irish and the British met without walls and were able to dialogue that any real progress was made in the line of peace.

 

            We in the United States have much to learn from the island of Eire across the Atlantic.  For as much as we hope to bring about “peace” and homeland security by erecting a 700-mile border wall on our southern border as per the Secure Fence Act of 2006, it will never be more than a negative peace. This negative peace, defined by Dr. King as an “absence of tension,” is also an absence of progress, a stultifying of cooperative relationships.  If we further open up the lines of communication with Canada and Mexico rather than erecting walls and militarizing our borders, perhaps the symptoms of extralegal immigration and terrorism will be able to be mutually solved in the Americas rather than in a bubble between Ottawa and Oaxaca.  God forbid that tourists should one day board Black Taxis in Texas, listening as the tour guide speaks about the failed “peace line” of yet another border wall of segregation.  

           

Something there is that doesn’t Love a Wall- Part 2

Walking along this wall, I am a ghost among ruins. It lacks a roof on the other side, to shelter a family or a friend. It is only one long wall, which doesn’t serve to protect those enclosed inside. Though it only continues a couple hundred yards, it is easy to imagine it going on forever, past light posts and stop signs, past bakeries and magic shops, past bookstores and groceries, past schools and prisons. How strange it is to come across a wall which does not contribute to a home.

Between East and West Berlin, the Wall ran 26 miles with 302 watchtowers and 20 bunkers. It was almost 12 feet high and made primarily of concrete. It was constructed by the Russian forces occupying Berlin after the end of World War II. More than 2.6 million people had fled Communist East Berlin in the 12 years leading up to 1961, a number which represented close to 15% of the total German population. Its purpose, then, was unlike almost any other walls. Its sole purpose was to keep its citizens locked in, rather than outsiders without. It was the walls of a prison more than a buffer of defense.

The 700-mile, 18-foot border wall currently mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006 would lock some 12 million extralegal residents inside our nation’s borders. Citizens like Selena, who came here at 15 as a house-maid but has also managed to graduate high-school, are trapped in the United States, without a legal means of advancement but also scared enough not to return to Guadalajara for her grandma’s funeral.

Typically viewed as a solution to our nation’s immigration issues, the wall has some damaging side-effects. Compounded on the environmental devastation and economic backlash of such a wall, the immigrants here in the U.S., both legal and illegal, will be adversely affected by such a wall. For legal residents, who successfully won what can be a ten-year lottery system or who fast-tracked in on a highly-skilled workers’ visa, the border wall is an affront to their homeland and a clear nativistic symbol. For extralegal residents, the border wall means that they are stuck here in a nation which does not afford them basic human rights and protections. As Douglas Massey wrote in the New York Times on April 4 this year,

America’s tougher line roughly tripled the average cost of getting across the border illegally; thus Mexicans who had run the gantlet at the border were more likely to hunker down and stay in the United States. My study has shown that in the early 1980’s, about half of all undocumented Mexicans returned home within 12 months of entry, but by 2000 the rate of return migration stood at just 25 percent.

Despite the fact that from 1980 to 2000 the chances of getting caught decreased from 33% to 10% because border-crossings were funneled through barren, under-patrolled areas, the wall is still touted as a way to cut down on the number of illegal entries while doing absolutely nothing positive for the assimilation of these immigrants or compassionate return of extralegal residents to their native countries.

192 people died, and over 200 were injured through this militarization of the border between these two Berlins. The wall separated families from families, neighbors from neighbors, fathers from children and wives from husbands. First erected overnight on August 13, 1961, some West Germans went out for a loaf of bread and didn’t return home for 30 years. Children sleeping over at a friend’s house were separated from their mothers for 3 decades, coming back to them with Rip Van Winkle beards and bass voices changed through the passing of life. The saddest thing about the Berlin Wall is that it obviously did not separate one people “group” from another. The inescapable network of mutuality, that interconnectedness of people that Dr. King referred to as the Beloved Community, was clearly there in the living, breathing city of Berlin.

To this day, countless Valley residents will say that the border crossed them. When Rio Grande replaced the Nueces River as the newest border between the Texas and Mexico, hundreds of families instantly became unwanted American citizens. Being land-rich but money-poor, many of them lost land to big ranchers, Texas Rangers, or mob persecution. The remaining Mexican-Americans were treated as subhuman for many years, with the first Mexican-American government official being sworn in almost 100 years after this change in nationality.

Watching boys and girls swim in the muddy Rio Grande, it is impossible to tell from which side of the river they leaped. Pesos and dollars are accepted on both sides. Spanish, English, and Spanglish are used interchangeably in stores, churches, city hall meetings, and television shows. Many of my students commute from Matamoros, Mexico, everyday, further blurring the lines between either side of la frontera. A wall would not only be a militarization of a border; it would be the rigid enforcement of a line that exists only on paper, not in hearts, culture, language, or souls. In his New York Times Op-Ed piece, Douglas Massey writes,

The number of Border Patrol officers increased from around 2,500 in the early 1980’s to around 12,000 today, and the agency’s annual budget rose to $1.6 billion from $200 million. The boundary between Mexico and the United States has become perhaps the most militarized frontier between two nations at peace anywhere in the world.

The “peace” introduced by a border wall would be a negative peace, an absence of tension in a few scattered square miles, whereas the Secure Fence would be replacing a positive peace where two cultures have been able to coexist and mutually benefit each other.

Digging in the summer grass, I look for a shard of evil. In the zealot’s fervor and the tourists’ hurry, I hope to find a forgotten piece of this long wall of shame. Berlin’s new motto – “Never Again” – is both a call to memory and a cry for forgiveness. When I finally clutch a broken piece of wall, no bigger than the palm of my hand, I hold it tight. It is cold. It is harmless. I can almost imagine it belongs to a home’s foundation rather than an internationally despised symbol of division. I fly it back across innumerable national borders, vowing “Never Again.”