Join the Choir in 2023!

Sing it to the rooftops: We condemn cruelty! We choose humanity!

Happy New Year, Dear Readers,

I hope this message finds you healthy, rested, and ready for a new year of advocacy and activism on behalf of kindness, versus cruelty, toward our friends trapped in the worldwide borderlands, where the divide between those living in relative safety and those running from peril appears to grow wider every year.

I am just back from the US-Mexico borderlands, having joined Witness at the Border's Journey for Justice while also conducting final interviews and field research for CROSSING THE LINE: FINDING AMERICA IN THE BORDERLANDS (November 2023). What I saw confirms that people are traveling north in unprecedented numbers. But they are not an invading force, nor a threat to US security.

The only crisis we face as a people is the hardening of the heart — the abject failure of human empathy, creativity, and compassion.

We are locked in divisive positions driven by US politics when what we need, as with climate change, is a new paradigm through which to view this now global conundrum. And Wednesday's news from Washington — that SCOTUS has prevented the Biden administration from finally ending Title 42 — sadly continues the tragic pattern of "deterrence through cruelty" that has never worked and implicates presidents on both sides of the aisle going back to the founding of the US nation.

So, rest up this week, friends! Because we are going to need all voices dedicated to humanity versus "cruelty for cruelty's sake" to ring ever louder and in full harmony in the coming year.

Immigration is a federal, not state, issue. Yet, 19 Red-state governors stand in the way of the executive branch lifting the pandemic-era misappropriation of an arcane public health policy cynically harnessed to cobble and further cripple the beleaguered refugee protection regime. The SCOTUS hearing anticipated for February 2023 will focus on whether states even have that legal right. Meanwhile, Title 42 stays in place.

More lives will be lost; more families destroyed; more vulnerable people returned (refouled) to the harms they fled.

Many believe SCOTUS should not have taken the challenge, including ultra-conservative Trump appointee, Neil Gorsuch. Revealing his understanding that Title 42 is a public health measure, not a border management tool, Gorsuch states in his dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, that the "current border crisis is not a COVID crisis."

With its 11th-hour intervention, the US Supreme Court crossed a line it is not at liberty to cross, states Gorsuch, writing "...courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort."

It would have been possible for Biden to rescind Trump & Co’s misappropriation of Title 42 on his first day in office, January 21, 2021. But he didn't. Whether by design or by unintended consequence, his administration's prolonged inaction has allowed Fox News, Breitbart, and other anti-immigrant blowhards to continue their fear-mongering campaign at the behest of such serial dehumanizers as Greg "it's an invasion" Abbott, Doug "Let's stop them with a container wall" Ducey, and Ron "or traffic humans to Martha's Vineyard for shits" DeSantis — all purportedly vying for the 2024 MAGA nomination.

This holiday season, from Matamoros to El Paso to Yuma to Tijuana, we Journey for Justice caravaners witnessed people queueing up in an orderly fashion for their turn to ford the Rio Grande in sub-freezing temperatures, holding babies and belongings overhead. Then lining up, shivering and wet, to turn themselves over to US Border Patrol.

You don't put yourself in that kind of misery and danger unless it is more dangerous to stay. I saw it with my own eyes: This is not an invasion. It is desperation.

In Yuma, AZ, even before dawn, some 600 migrants had accumulated at a break in Trump's 30-foot boondoggle wall, again, to turn themselves into Border Patrol. Though Congress can raise millions in a heartbeat for more boots on the ground, more people-hunting surveillance gadgets, more tent sites on military bases to warehouse migrant youth — in short, more deterrence measures — there was nowhere for these freezing, starving, exhausted people to even sit, much less lie down and find a bit of warmth.

Can we not offer at least that?

They were forced to forage the desert floor for fallen wood to build their own bonfires as Border Patrol agents cranked Jethro Tull's Aqualung at high volume from inside their heated vehicles, engines running. They opened their patrol-car doors occasionally to spit into the sand as local humanitarians, with our help, passed out baby blankets, water bottles, and granola bars purchased by us as we cleared the shelves of myriad local stores.

Why are we not asking: Why are folks running?

Mere miles away, Ducey's first "wall" of containers remains stacked on an arbitrary line that separates lush, million-dollar US industrialized lettuce fields from the parched, unirrigated Northern Mexico desert. The role of concertino wire stapled to the top of the "wall" offers an imposing and impenetrable feature from propagandistic close-up photos of what turns out to be a stage set. For, viewed up close, this "wall" is no longer than a soccer pitch and can be walked around on both sides.

The barbs, like much of the apparatus of "deterrence through cruelty" itself, are literally just for show.

Meanwhile in Arizona's Coronado National Forest, a four-mile monstrosity of 914 rusted shipping containers, costing $95 million to have stacked in pairs by a state governor who claims there isn't enough money in the budget to lift up his failing educational system, now snakes through a unique biosphere where four deserts meet and numerous species roam and human migrants almost never cross. Though Ducey dumped this eyesore of metal litter on federally owned and managed lands, it took local activists standing in front of bulldozers and tractor-trailers of a private contractor to stop the madness, rather than a mandate from the US government.

Fortunately, the mandate did follow. But their action proves the power of people to redirect history and halt the humanitarian crisis we face worldwide.

As we round out another year, I cannot help but ask…

Is this who we want to be as a nation? A people who deny food, water, and shelter to those in need?

Do we want to be the global leader in the dehumanization of those in search of safety?

Do we want to be a people who justify "cruelty for cruelty's sake," even in the frigid temperatures of the holiday season, in order to send the message: Do not come. Do not come.

I don't think so. I think we are better than this. I know we are.

May the coming year bring an end to the cruelty and the beginning of a more heartfelt, compassionate, and creative response to borderlands issues worldwide. Seeking asylum is a human and legal right. The rulings of our courts with regard to the continued abuse of Title 42, including now the highest court in the land, blatantly disregard not only these obligations, they make a mockery of our moral imperative to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Happy New Year. See you in 2023,

Sarah