No More Deaths / No Más Muertes on the Mexico / US Frontier
This week, I spoke with two members of No More Deaths, a 20 year old humanitarian organization operating in the borderlands between Mexico and the USA. We talked about the organization, the work it does, how the border has changed, the political legacy of the Republicans and Democrats in the current situation for immigrants, deaths at the border and ways to get involved in supporting people on the move. Here’s a chat from 2017 we did with NMD as well.
- https://www.humaneborders.org/
- https://www.tucsonsamaritans.org/
- https://linktr.ee/borderlandsreliefcollective
- https://borderkindness.org/
- https://alotrolado.org/
- https://www.hopeborder.org/
- https://southtexashumanrights.org/about/
- https://haitianbridgealliance.org/
- https://www.instagram.com/casa_carmelita
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Featured Track:
- La Frontera by Lhasa from The Living Road
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Transcription
Ary: Hi, I’m Ary. I use she/her pronouns. I usually live in Tucson, Arizona, and I volunteer with the aid group No Más Muertes/No More Deaths.
Bryce: My name is Bryce (he/him). I also volunteer for No Más Muertes/No More Deaths but I also volunteer for the Tucson Samaritans and some other groups.
TFSR: What brought you two into organizing around the border and around human rights?
Ary: I first got interested in doing humanitarian aid from seeing other friends going down to the border and doing work in the southern Arizona Borderlands, and also some family connection to migration crossing through the Mexico border, and it feels, felt like a really tangible way to get involved and support people who are still crossing through.
Bryce: Five years ago, I ended up riding freight trains in Mexico. It was during Trump’s border shutdown, and so I saw a lot of people riding north from Central America, and just the horrible things they went through in Mexico and then directly at the border; the whole dramatic thing. I got really interested in trying to figure out ways to do direct action on the US side, once I came across and found out about No More Deaths and other groups working, and started trying to get involved once I moved to Tucson.
TFSR: Would you all tell people a little bit about No Más Muertes or No More Deaths and its history and what the group does?
Ary: I can start on that. We began working in the southern Arizona Borderlands in 2004, I believe. No More Deaths was formed by a coalition of a bunch of different faith groups and aid groups that were working at the time to support people migrating over and seeking refuge. It was supported by a lot of churches, and I think this is what has given No More Deaths specifically, a lot of support over the years and legal protection to do the humanitarian aid that we still do to this day, 20 years later. Which has been really, really helpful. Our main mission is to stop death and suffering in the borderlands. The ways that we do that, look like running a humanitarian aid camp for folks who are crossing through the desert to get water, food, medical relief. We also do water drops in the Sonoran desert. That stretches from Ajo in the western desert to south of Tucson, in the Arivaca corridor. Now in present day, in the last year and a half or so, we’ve been doing work further out towards El Paso in the New Mexico region, doing a bunch of exploratories out there. No More Deaths also runs a hotline for folks who are crossing through the desert who have gotten lost, or loved ones who have lost people in the desert, to call in and support with that. Am I missing anything Bryce?
Bryce: One thing that often gets brought up about the history of the organization is that at the beginning, it kind of came out of Humane Borders. Humane Borders was making deals with government agencies for advocacy and also for other kinds of direct aid and then Tucson Samaritans split off from them to search for people directly in the desert. No More Deaths ended up splitting off from them, just out of a need to have a group that has more of an antagonistic relationship with Border Patrol, that avoids contact with Border Patrol and is willing to take more risks and not be as friendly. For Tucson Samaritans and Humane Borders, part of their strength is that they are willing to speak to Border Patrol on certain things, or advocate for certain things, and No More Deaths really exists as a little bit of a counter to that. One other thing that we do is act as the more vocal witness to things that go on in the desert. Over the years, we’ve had quite a few reports come out that document some of the abuses of Border Patrol in the Borderlands, through direct research, through our hotline and other things, just showing some of the human rights abuses that happen out in the desert.
Ary: To add to what Bryce was saying about the antagonistic nature of No More Deaths, in comparison to a lot of other aid groups, specifically in southern Arizona, is that we are so linked to our team who does what is called abuse documentation. It’s very simply named for what it does, which is documenting abuses of Border Patrol and state officials in creating a very hostile environment of death and deterrence for people crossing the borderlands. So this inherently, puts us on a side with law enforcement that other groups aren’t on.
TFSR: I didn’t realize that this is the 20th anniversary of the organization. That’s pretty awesome. I mean, it’s also pretty tragic, right? For this sort of organizing to feel like it’s still necessary, after 20 years of doing this direct action, direct support on the border area. I don’t know if you have anything to say about the that anniversary.
Ary: It is a shame that we are celebrating our 20th anniversary, and at the same time, it is pretty amazing that we still have the support after 20 years in organizing. What we’re doing is so exhausting and really hard for so many people. A lot of us can’t wait for the day that we don’t have to be doing this. I hope that’s the case for so many other humanitarian aid groups doing it along the border. But until then, we will still be here, and hopefully everyone else will be leaving water in the desert and doing cool things that help people.
Bryce: I recently went out with somebody who was around for the first couple years of No More Deaths, and actually asked him a similar question. He said, yeah, right at the beginning that, because the death started as a direct result of the Prevention Through Deterrence policy. It just started happening as a direct result. He said, right at the beginning of the first few years, people were talking about it as something that was only going to last for a couple of years. So they were going really hard with the understanding that “Okay, once, once this is over, we make our statement. Once the deaths stop, then we can stop doing this. The fact that we’ve been here for 20 years really makes the name No More Deaths feel almost depressing. It just keeps going, and more and more restrictive policies keep getting instituted.
TFSR: I understood that No More Deaths is aligned with a progressive or maybe Liberation Theology reading of Catholicism, and probably folks that would be involved in Catholic Worker type organizing, might also be involved in this. I’m not sure about you all’s faith or lack of, but I wonder if there’s anything about some of the religious orientations that are involved in this sort of practice and this organizing. You did mention that it allowed for the organization to have this sort of staying power, but what kind of cultural cache that allows this organizing to happen under.
Bryce: Ary could probably answer that way better than me. But there are some actual Catholic workers involved, for sure. So yeah, definitely. It definitely attracts the exact type of people you’re talking about.
Ary: I also think that the type of volunteer that has been attracted to this work over the last 20 years has changed a lot, as we’ve seen things just get worse in the desert and militarization continues to get worse. There is such a mixed bag of people doing desert aid. It’s people who have religious affiliations, and so many people who do not, who do this for the same reasons that someone who is doing it for their religious affiliation is. Which is a pretty special thing, that so many different folks are able to come together to do this. Especially at the beginning of this organizing, it was so centered around religious affiliation and beliefs, and as we continue to watch that change, I think we’re in it for the better, for seeing so many different people come through.
TFSR: I think it’s interesting though that even if the culture shifted away from primarily being focused in that sort of activism, that folks that do experience the world in that way, still find a home in that sort of activity and find it like that. It resonates with their values. It’s already been talked about, that the border has shifted over this period of time. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the border itself, a little bit about the unchecked power of the Border Patrol and how the US government, as one zine on the subject, called it, was designed to kill at that border.
Ary: Every day the border becomes more militarized. We see that with border technology, with surveillance towers that stretch 20 miles out from the physical border itself. We see that with physical barriers – whether that’s in the form of old Normandy barriers that have been around for a long time, or the new border wall, which started under Trump. A lot of people don’t recognize that it’s still happening under Biden. The most border wall construction, I believe, has happened under the Biden administration. Every day when we go down to the wall, there is a new stretch of border wall that is being erected. That looks like taking down mountains that have been there for time immemorial, to erect this wall that stretches all along the border. Bryce, do you want to talk about infrastructure, border-wise?
Bryce: The border policy we have now is quite literally, as you said, designed to kill. In 1993 it started with Operation hold the line in El Paso, where they had a line of Border Patrol agents in the city. So people couldn’t cross because there was a line of Border Patrol agents just standing there. There was evidence that this strategy didn’t actually work, but it was really popular, and they took it on as a border wide strategy that they called provincially, the deterrence. In the policy itself, it says that ideally, people would die, and their families would talk, the news would get around, and then people wouldn’t want to come anymore. It’s literally stated in the policy, and that’s only been strengthened over time. They’ve pushed people out of the cities towards more dangerous areas.
Something that started happening more recently, that I think is underappreciated, is that the militarization has gotten so intense now that just the idea that people are having to cross out in the middle of nowhere isn’t really the thing anymore. There’s been so much criminalization and militarization, to the point where even not in the middle of the nowhere, even very close to a town– like, for example, some places in Texas or El Paso or New Mexico, where deaths have increased drastically recently– you can be in a populated area, and because there’s so much Border Patrol, because the consequences are so high for being deported or for having to re enter, you essentially can’t seek help. Even in a populated area, you can be in a town and be afraid to ask for water. People are afraid to give you water, because people helping people are afraid of being criminalized. So it’s really just this whole zone of borderlands, where if you’re an undocumented person, if you’re in the process of migration, you essentially don’t have a right to life. Over the past 20 years, the border budget has just increased exponentially.
TFSR: Considering the possibility that you’ve come into contact with people facing immediate health concerns after making the long trek across the border– who may need higher levels of care than you can provide, like you mentioned, people being afraid to ask for water– can you talk a bit about how interacting with hospitals, paramedics and other organizations that interact or work alongside of law enforcement. Like how that interfaces with your work, any ways that you’ve had to change the way that you navigate around that, or any ways that hospitals or paramedics or whoever have shifted in their policies or practices?
Ary: This is just me getting caught on the wording, but I think it’s less how we interact, or avoid those systems and more how people migrating choose to make their decisions based upon what the repercussions of seeking care are, if that makes sense. So it’s not our say to take someone to the hospital or to not take someone to the hospital. It’s someones say, to be like, “If I go to the hospital, I’m going to get deported”. We see that happen all the time, whether someone has a small injury or is on the verge of death. I think this plays into a big problem that we see a lot.
It came out in a recent abuse documentation that we put out about the lack of emergency services for migrants as well. And that’s when people are out in the desert and they make a call to 911, in search of a rescue. If that was someone who was a documented US citizen, there would be a search team, there would be a SAR activated for that person almost immediately. There would be this valiant effort put in to saving someone who has documentation. We just don’t see that across the board with migrants. There is something recent that happened, I believe, in San Diego, or outside of San Diego, with a woman who was on the border wall, crossing over. She fell from the border wall and died. I believe she was 20 years old. I can’t remember her name. It was just an utter lack of care. There were agents on the ground. They were filming the entire interaction. Things like this happen every single day on a smaller scale, but that is such a drastic view of someone crossing over the border wall, help being right there and help not being able to help someone. I think that is the biggest problem that folks crossing the desert interface with a lot when it comes to seeking medical services. They’re either not going to get it or they’re too scared to ask for it because of the repercussions.
Bryce: Just to double down on that statement, there’s the occasional dramatic case like that, that make the news, but it’s really like an instituted policy. If you call 911 and it’s just not being documented– if you call 911 in the Borderlands and you’re speaking Spanish, or the dispatcher even has a hint that maybe you’re in the process of crossing the border, then they just transfer you to to Border Patrol. Then Border Patrol, more often than not, will just drop the call, or if they can’t get exact coordinates right away, they’ll just say “Okay, well, we can’t come” and the person is shit out of luck. That’s the time when a person is at their most desperate. That’s at the point at which somebody is going to die, and they’re just completely left out. It’s not just that the Border Patrol makes themselves the only responder for these things, to a problem that they themselves caused, and then they don’t actually respond to it.
There’s also a system in place where if emergency responders respond to a migrant, that they are supposed to get money from Border Patrol. The idea is that they bring the person to Border Patrol afterwards, and if they don’t bring people to Border Patrol, then they don’t get paid for doing the emergency response. This sort of snitching gets instituted. Even if people know the right thing to do– not just ethically or morally, but medically (to take somebody to the hospital, to not call Border Patrol, because if they get deported before having received higher medical care, they’re gonna have further, if not lifelong, medical issues)– in order to even have the funding necessary to do emergency response, they kind of have to send people to Border Patrol. So we’ve seen, in our area, just really horrible things. We’ve come into contact with people with horrible injuries, only to find that they’ve been deported the same day. It’s really not an abstract thing. Every single day this is happening across the border.
Just quick counterpoint to that, in the El Paso area, Sunland Park, New Mexico, the fire department there doesn’t do this. When they need Border Patrol’s help, they will ask for Border Patrol. They do collaborate with Border Patrol, but they’ve been on record saying that they very specifically don’t take money from Border Patrol. They’re like “They take forever to pay us off. They usually just don’t even pay us at all, so why bother? We’re just going to start handling this ourselves.” They don’t ask people’s immigration status. They show up to every single 911 call, and once they pick people up. They still don’t ask. They just give them whatever medical care they need. So it really shows there’s no law saying that this is the way that it has to be. It can change at at any moment local authorities and medical responders just actually have the desire to help.
Ary: To that point, there are no laws directly saying that you cannot give, or not give someone medical care based upon their migration status. That is a very explicit thing. Border Patrol finds ways to make themselves the first responder, they find ways to not allow people to get access to the things they need. That’s the way that they do it in the southern Arizona borderlands. It has led to countless deaths and people not receiving the care they need. People are getting deported really quickly with injuries, into the place where they came fleeing from, or into a new city that they’ve never been to with a broken leg or internal bleeding. So many people are leaving here, so much more hurt than they came.
Bryce: One more thing then we can move on. To what Ary said about being deported with a broken leg in New Mexico and El Paso and California– this is a new problem that also is very different from the sort of Prevention Through Deterrence narrative that we’ve had for the past 20 or 30 years, since the construction of the higher border walls. The amount of people getting traumatic brain injury or skeletal spinal injuries from falling off the border wall has just been astronomical. There’s only one person in California who’s been releasing some of this data for California, but just from anecdotal evidence and from the death data in El Paso, New Mexico. It seems like the problem is even higher over there, potentially. These are people who often were coming here because they were hoping to be a source of income for a struggling family, and now they get deported with just completely devastating injuries, to then become a financial burden on their family. There are not really numbers on the amount of people this is happening to, but it’s just astronomical right now.
TFSR: That really reminds me of the way that police, generally in the US, have interceded in all sorts of circumstances, creating more deadly moments for people. As public health infrastructure gets defunded, then what immediate emergency response to mental health crises or even just medical calls, starts including law enforcement, who can end up becoming arbiters for funding distribution, and then lead to more deaths of people generally. This seems not disconnected from that trend. It’s inspiring to hear about that fire department in New Mexico actually being like, “Nah, this is bull. It’s not even doing what it says it’s supposed to do, and we’re just going to do what we are called to do despite all the jurisdictional and funding medical neglect.” Outside of that example have there been any sort of collective medical professional responses to this pattern, that’s been set up from nurses or doctors? Because clearly the people– dispatchers, the Border Patrol, probably a lot of the other intermediaries– who are determining whether or not Border Patrol or medical professionals show up to a situation don’t take The Hippocratic Oath and don’t have that same legal responsibility. That’s so clear to people in healthcare. Do you hear any sort of like push back from medical professionals around this issue?
Bryce: Well, we have doctors and nurses who obviously push back on that. Yet I don’t know a whole lot of people on the first responder level, aside from in the New Mexico El Paso area, the search and rescue team, because the amount of deaths has just gone up a lot more recently there. So there hasn’t been time for people to get used to the status quo. I’ve spoken with the County Sheriff search and rescue team there, and they’ve witnessed some of this happening, of not being able to go out on a search because it’s “Border Patrol’s jurisdiction,” which is not true. Seeing them be kind of horrified about what’s going on. I think there’s definitely a push for that to change. And then just doctors. There’s an ER doctor in El Paso, Brian Elmore, who’s been talking about some of this. Then another ER doctor in San Diego, Alexander Tenorio, who has been trying to put a call out about the falls from the border wall and things like that.
Ary: I think we have a lot of medical responders within No More Deaths. Being a humanitarian aid group, we have so many people who are either nurses or doctors or who are WFR trained, etc. So in our personal response, we do as much as we can in the field, or at our aid camp, or along the border wall, to support people until they can get to further medical care. But a lot of the time, the things that we’re dealing with are severe dehydration on top of pre-existing medical conditions that people have had crossing over the border. A lot of the time when people are crossing they don’t have access to medication that they were consistently taking when they were at home.
There’s so little that we can actually do in the field when it comes to someone who’s been in medical distress for either five days or two weeks, who’s been exerting themselves, not drinking enough water, not taking in enough food. We saw this in a really tragic way. This wintertime along the border wall, there was a really big influx in folks crossing, seeking asylum along the US/Mexico border. Every day we were going out. We set up another humanitarian aid station there with tents and structures for folks, kind of like a rapid response medical team to support folks down there, going down every day, cooking meals and triaging with the Arivaca fire department to get people out when they were in dire medical distress.
Something that a lot of us saw firsthand was that when we make calls to 911, even if we are US citizens who are speaking English, we immediately get transferred to Border Patrol because of our location and because we say that we’re with migrants or asylum seekers. They will peg the question of “do you know if they’re documented or not?” You can try to avoid it as much as you can, because it doesn’t matter, and they’ll still redirect you to Border Patrol. That leaves you with a response time that could be up to two hours for someone, for a child who is having a seizure or something. This winter specifically, a lot of us really stepped up in regards of triaging with emergency services to get people the care they need. When the emergency services wouldn’t respond to us, taking people to the hospitals ourselves and supporting people through navigating that really bureaucratic, frustrating system of healthcare in the US as an undocumented person and as someone who has also just crossed the desert.
Bryce: Ari said response time of two hours, but there was often response times of three or four days or just not showing up. Near the beginning of people coming through the wall, we’d very regularly run into diabetic people, people with broken legs, children with heart problems, kidney problems, a 10 year old child that hadn’t been able to urinate for over three days and was just stuck in the cold in the middle of the desert.
Ary: The pregnant woman who was out along the border wall going into labor for like six hours.
Bryce: With New York Times there. What did the Border Patrol tell the reporter? Do you remember?
Ary: Yeah. I was in Tucson, and I was trying to get Border Patrol go out to support this person who had a five year old child with her. She had just crossed over. I don’t think she spoke Spanish. I believe she was from North Africa, and she was pregnant. She believed she was going into labor. I forget what the Border Patrol agent said. Oh, he said something about “if her water has not broken, then she’s not in labor and that they’re not going to rush” or something like that. It was just an extremely confusing, frustrating situation. A lot of us are advocating for people who we know need support under a system that is constantly and consistently trying to not support people. We see that all across the border. We see that now. People saw that 10 years ago, and we’re going to continue to witness like this type of disregard for people’s basic medical needs unless something changes.
Bryce: The quote I was thinking of is, Border Patrol told the reporter, “Oh, you should write about this. It would make a really good story”, while they were not responding to a medical emergency. It just really showed they do not care about even the image of just doing the very basic, minimum, to stop somebody from dying. Like, they’ll even make a joke like that to a reporter. The things we saw in the winter really dialed in the degree that Border Patrol will say, individually, “Oh, yeah, no, we really, we don’t want people to die.” All this stuff or whatever. Some people are all for that, or think “Oh well, some Border Patrol agents are mean, but mostly they’re they’re good.” This is seeing it instituted. There are Border Patrol agents on the ground, and they’re not gonna pick up a 10 year old with horrible health problems. Just absurd things that you never thought you would see here.
TFSR: Or the extension of that logic of “Well, we don’t want you to die, so you shouldn’t come because this is a dangerous place.”
Bryce: Yeah, exactly.
TFSR: I know that, as you’ve already stated, people come away from these instances with long-term negative physical effects from medical neglect or from the injuries that they’ve gotten along the way and the lack of medical care afterwards. Plus, I’m sure any number of mental health crises compounding on that. Just to say that death is not the only measure for the harm that’s caused by US border policy and by the actions of these institutions. With borders, there’s no sort of real, definite number of deaths that can be attributed but I wonder, what are the sort of numbers that if somebody asks. How many people die on the US Mexico border every year around Arivaca, or Ajo or these other places? Do you have a number? And how do you figure that number?
Ary: First, I want to state that all of the known migrant deaths are incredibly off. There’s some folks that believe the number is three to seven times higher than what is recorded. Humane Borders in Arizona, another aid group we talked about earlier, presents a map every month. They update it monthly with known migrant deaths, and it’s a really helpful resource. It’s incredibly important for us as aid workers to see where people are dying, so we can address where we need to support people. Like what routes are being used a lot or where is there a need? It’s also just incredibly important research for people to see what is happening in Arizona.
I believe in 2023, there were 197 migrants who died while crossing the borderlands, just in Arizona alone. Like I said, that number is most definitely, probably three to seven times higher. There was a search we had gone out on and found a woman, and she had likely been there for over six months. So a lot of the time with these numbers, it just reflects that a person got found, but not how many people actually died that year. In 2024 on the Humane Borders map, we’re at 95 cases. But so many people have not been found. So many people still remain missing. Bryce, do you want to talk about the numbers in El Paso, New Mexico?
Bryce: No More Deaths actually put together a similar resource as the Humane Borders one for the El Paso area. Because these are only the deaths that have been recovered, which is like, in so many areas, is depending on the weather and animals and things like that. A person can essentially just disappear, so there just is nothing to be found. And like Ari said, once you’ve gone on a few searches and found remains, or even search for somebody that ends up just never being found. You had perfect coordinates, and just never find the person and the family searches for years. It just really makes you start to think it’s more like seven times than three times.
So not only is it just the people that I recovered, but there’s actually not good data, border wide. Southern Arizona has the medical examiner that keeps track and has sort of an independent record. But border wide, essentially the reporters and whatever numbers we have, use border patrols data. By comparing it with the Humane Borders data, you can see that it’s just a really drastic undercount. So the border wide data that we have, or even recovered remains, is a total undercount of the actual amount of people that have been found in the desert. And then the people that have actually died, is way higher than that even. We started trying to get data for El Paso County, Hudspeth County in West Texas and the state of New Mexico, and found– just in the past four or five years– that the amount of deaths has skyrocketed to the point where now that area is actually, in terms of recovered remains, deadlier than southern Arizona.
Just in one county– Dona Ana County, which is west of El Paso (so this isn’t even counting El Paso County)– it’s something like 110 deaths so far this year, mostly just in June and July. It’s just been this incredibly deadly place. There’s been government reports getting Border Patrol in trouble for not accurately counting deaths or including better counts from medical examiners for their data. So southern Texas– places that don’t have these independent observations of the death counts– there’s just no real knowledge of exactly how many people are dying, but it’s a very, very high number.
TFSR: When I think about No More Deaths work, and as has been mentioned, water drops along areas where people are known to transit, is one thing that you all are known for. Just like the Border Patrol is known for recording videos of themselves stabbing those water bottles and destroying food deposits and stuff. Then also providing medical care, as you said, being a first responder where you’re aware of somebody having needs, doing triage work. So No More Deaths activists have faced prosecution in the past for offering aid to people on the move. As, I’m assuming, non-lawyers yourselves, can you talk a bit about this and the impact that it’s had on the work. What if any legal protection aid workers with groups like No More Deaths/No Más Muertes can claim. Like Good Samaritan law sorts of things.
Ary: I can start with this. It was 2019 I believe, the Scott Warren case was going on at the same time. The Cabeza Prieta case was also going on that year. 2020 was the height of so much legal repression against humanitarian aid workers. Not just with No More Deaths, but also at the same time as the Scott Warren case, there were also multiple people on the Tohono O’odham Nation who were facing similar charges for supporting people crossing through the desert with water and food and medical attention. We won those cases, and I think the precedent this has created, reinforces our values and our fight against death and suffering in the borderlands. What we’re doing isn’t a crime. What we’re doing is humanitarian aid. It’s protected under the Religious Freedoms Protect Protection Act, I believe. We follow the Red Cross Code of Conduct that is an international code of conduct for humanitarian aid across the world.
No More Deaths has created this precedent of aid work not being illegal and it doesn’t need to be criminalized. When they have tried criminalizing us for it, they haven’t won. Since then, there has been such a big uptick in other aid groups popping up across the borderlands. There are so many podcasts I’ve listened to, of folks out in California, who are like “Oh, yeah. This group, No More Deaths Did this thing, and now we’re doing aid work.” Which is not to say that we started doing water drops or any of that, because that is not the case. But it’s cool to see how these legal cases that have come from the US government towards us, that we’ve won, have inspired other people to do this work and not feel like they are going to immediately be criminalized for this.
I also want to say it comes with a lot of privilege, from a group who is with the church the especially. A lot of aid groups are predominantly white in the southern Arizona Borderlands and documented folks as well. And that’s really different from what we’re seeing and what we have seen on the Tohono O’odham Nation, of Nation members being criminalized and jailed for also doing humanitarian aid work. It’s really hard to do aid work depending on who you are, because racism exists, and it is the system which upholds the border, and it is the system that also criminalizes aid workers too. Bryce, do you have anything to add to that?
Bryce: No, that was it.
TFSR: So the last few federal administrations have seen increasing deportations through the southern US border: large numbers of detentions in horrendous conditions escalated tensions between right-wing governors and federal troops in Eagle Creek last year, the bussing of immigrants and asylum seekers from southern border states to more northern states. While the Republicans are especially vitriolic on the subject, this election season has seen ramping up rhetoric and action on both sides of the aisle, on the subject of the immigration “crisis.” Can you talk about the politicization of people on the move and what this means for the people and the communities in the crosshairs?
Bryce: It’s like with the previous question. Giving people water is just such basic. It’s in the freaking Bible. It’s kind of the number one. You don’t let people die because they don’t have water. There’s groups, like the Samaritans, that say “Oh, well, we’re not a political organization. We’re very a-political, we’re just giving people water, it’s not blah, blah, blah, this, that, and the other. But it has become politicized and criminalized by the governments. The real world just seems like it matters less and less in this political and media environment. It’s just so frustrating to see all this stuff come out. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both seem to be demagogues about it. During the Trump administration, Kamala Harris was yelling about how, when she’s president, she’s going to be really good to migrants and things like that. Now, because it seems like the polls show that she should be tougher on immigration, she’s saying almost Trumpian anti-immigrant things. It’s really just become so divorced from the actual reality on the ground. They’ve done studies where people think that Biden is actually easy on immigration, which is just wildly untrue. Even just in the past year, the amount of restrictions on asylum that have directly led to increased deaths of people is horrific to see.
Ary: My hot take is that migration hasn’t become politicized. It is that migration and its form that it has been in for the last 100 years in the United States, was inherently political. Because it is inherently racist and xenophobic and upholds settler colonialism to the highest degree. So it’s very funny to me when it’s like “Oh, well, you know, migration just became political, or “You don’t have to be political with your work.” Well, we are because the systems that we exist under force us into that. Every political stance right now. And that has been the case for so long with every Democratic president that has been so harsh on migration, and not any different from their Republican counterpart.
They haven’t eased up on migration. They haven’t divorced themselves from militarization of the borderlands, from the death and suffering that people are going through. That will not change at all until we re-imagine a world that exists outside of this current context. That may be a little tricky to do in the next few months, most definitely. But there is going to be continued violence against migrants and people who who flee to this country until we re-evaluate all of those systems of oppression, of why people are coming here, of the harm that US intervention abroad has done. We haven’t done that on a large scale in any meaningful way.
TFSR: An important element that feeds into the xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric, is the directed, semi-independent work of groups like FAIR or NumbersUSA and the right-wing media ecosystem that a lot of them pop out of, and social media ecosystem. We’ve seen how narratives can be shaped quickly to the advantage of fear and anger at conditions directed against immigrants– in the USA and the UK recently, and in Ireland and elsewhere– to whip up violence against marginalized populations (in a lot of ways to ignore other systematic issues like capitalism and settler colonialism, that are causing the actual woes that people are suffering.)
Do you all have suggestions of how we can get better at pushing counter-narratives to these emotionally driven, viral moments? It’s clear that through your interactions, one on one, with people and in the community, that you show how much better it is when we just help each other and the humanity among all the people engaging there, and the inhumanity of these institutions. Just to say, I think that narrative is important. That’s the first contact that people have with a lot of these concerns, which is why it’s so easy to create these dehumanizing situations.
Bryce: I’m often not good at thinking about the big picture and larger narratives. Doing on the ground work and seeing these small scale, like how the big picture ends up affecting the small picture. We’re just sort of in it all the time. As soon as any event happens, you can almost see all these different narratives that already exist, pull that event into whatever their narrative or agenda is. There are just so many different groups whether they call themselves liberal, or conservative, or far right groups, that are just sitting there waiting to have literally anything that happens, or any new viewpoint or political decision, or anything like that. Like Border Patrol will say “All these people died. This just shows these horrible smugglers are preying on people. You really just shouldn’t come to the United States. It’s just too dangerous. Unfortunately, the smugglers have made it too dangerous”.
All these narratives just already exist. I know Ary is on the media team. We have our narrative and our viewpoint that we put out there. In terms of a more general thing, aside from just not wavering, from just treating reality as reality, there are just not that many things in my mind that are this transparent. If you actually go see it and talk to a few people that are directly affected, it’s just not that complicated of a thing. It really takes a huge political and media effort to to make it out, like it’s this thing that is super complex and needs to be thought about a whole lot before you have a moral take on it.
Ary: What we do on the ground is such a tangible thing. Personally, it feels the most helpful when something is incredibly tangible. Something with border policy and just immigration itself is that it feels so difficult– like so many other struggles that are currently going on to– find incredibly tangible ways to support each other and support things. The easiest thing to do and the most supportive thing to do sometimes, is support people who are directly affected on a larger scale. We will not see the border change until the abolition of the border. We won’t see a change until the abolition of the Border Patrol, and until people have the right and freedom to movement.
How we get there, looks like a million small things, like more people supporting folks with immigration law to push their cases, so that in the meantime, they have access to safety. More folks doing aid work, more folks talking about what’s going on. Maybe that’s answering your question. It’s a matter of all of these small things, in the small ways and our personal communities. Because the border is not just the US/Mexico border. Every city that is on the coast is a part of of this, this enforced border. Even as we’re seeing now, with more militarization seeping into the country, whether that’s through Border Patrol or cop cities popping up. It’s deeper and deeper militarization and xenophobic and racist rhetoric that is coming from all sides. How are we all collectively pushing against that within our own communities? Because that’s what matters, is the small things.
Bryce: They got Border Patrol in Pittsburgh. Now they got Border Patrol in Portland. In 2020, border patrols were out there doing heinous stuff to protesters. Like Ari said, remembering that it’s totally connected. It’s gotten to the point where it’s totally connected with all of our struggles and with all of our lives. Even with Homeland Security and ICE, that’s beyond the supposed border zone. They deport people from neighborhoods in Iowa. So, yeah, I think just remembering that this is a real nationwide thing that affects literally everybody.
TFSR: I was reading a while ago Nobody is Protected by Reece Jones and it was talking about the history of Border Patrol and how it developed, and also opens up with talking about how jurisdiction is within 100 miles of any border or port. I’m sure it extends past that but I was curious about how Border Patrol was showing up to be a Brute Squad in Portland, and how that made sense. As you all point out, the border reaches into the heart of the so called USA, as a settler colonial project– through police, prisons, courts, social services and employment, medical care– where you’re talking about people being asked for whether or not they have immigration status, or what that is when they’re visiting a hospital.
Can you talk about how folks can get involved in immigration solidarity, even if they’re not in border regions, like the southwest, the so called USA? I know here in North Carolina, we’re pretty far from any of the external borders. There are groups, there are community centers, like Nuestro Centro and CIMA, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that for folks that aren’t in the southwest and for folks that are in the southwest who want to get involved. How can people join up with y’all or other similar groups?
Ary: There’s immigration legal clinics in almost every city. They’re usually incredibly understaffed, and a lot of them love volunteers. Those are really great places to start with. Is just researching legal clinics for immigrants and people seeking asylum, to help them go through paperwork, or see what other connections they have. Specifically in Arizona, there are in the borderland itself, from San Diego into Texas, there are so many rad groups doing aid work. There’s The Borderlands relief collective in San Diego that popped up in the last few years. I think Border Kindness is out there. Al Otro Lado does some on the ground work and then also legal support work out that way. We’re out in Tucson, Humane Borders, The Samaritans. There’s a bunch of folks doing stuff. If you want to get involved with No More Deaths. You can go to our website, click the little volunteer link. We do month long programs where folks can come out for a full month at a time. We have housing for volunteers, so we’ll put folks up in housing. And you come out to the desert. Do desert aid, hang out with some nice people and drive some big trucks. And, yeah, you can do that. Bryce, any plugs for New Mexico support?
Bryce: Yeah. So there’s been a lot of organizing going on recently in El Paso. New Mexico. Hope Border Institute is a really great group in El Paso. If you look on Instagram, Casa Carmelita has started organizing some direct aid that you can get plugged in with. That’s all in the process of getting formed. In the borderlands region, the militarization goes on both sides of the border. So if you are in one of these border areas, a lot of our groups need help. A lot of groups over on the Mexican side need help. In Juarez, I know there’s medical clinics and shelters that would love volunteers to come through and support or just monetary assistance. Most of these groups needs are just based on donations. There’s very little government support. South Texas Human Rights Center.
Across the nation, there are things you can plug into. Like Ary said, there are legal clinics in every city. I know there are a lot of really good mutual aid networks. I know one in Boston, whose name I totally forget. Just everywhere where there are people showing up, whether it’s asylum seekers or just regular immigrants who are in need of immediate support. There are a lot of groups that have popped up with needs for housing, with needs for keeping people on their feet until they can figure some stuff out, with connecting with jobs, all stuff like that. So I definitely encourage people to get connected in their own communities. There’s sort of an idea of “The border is just death” and “No More Deaths are on it.” A lot of anarchists will have a whole thing coming down here and supporting, but the place that they came from is usually in need of support too.
Harris and Trump have both threatened Mass deportations. So when that comes, I think there’s going to be a lot of need for people just to be protecting their neighbors, physically, from from getting deported. Having networks and groups in place that are just thinking about this, even if they’re involved in different struggles, I think is super important.
TFSR: And remembering also that at the beginning of the Trump administration, the actions that happened, for instance, at airports to block deportations, was huge and widespread across across all of this terrible nation. People showing up to stop Muslim ban, deportations.
So you’ve named a bunch of organizations that we can put links to in the show notes and tag on the social media when we put the episode out. Were there any other groups you wanted to shout out, that didn’t get a mention? Or is there anything else that I didn’t ask about that you wanted to mention as we close up the conversation?
Bryce: One more group in California. Ary had a great list, but The Haitian Bridge Alliance has been doing a lot of really good work recently, especially with the amount of asylum seekers and people from African countries that have been coming in recently.
Ary: There is an endless amount of groups doing border aid and solidarity in the borderlands, and it compounds my brain to think of the names right now. There are so many groups, so many people doing aid work like we do– so many groups who are built up by migrants who have crossed by themselves a lot of the time– doing search and rescue and search and recovery. Those groups are the backbone of civilian SAR in the borderlands. There are so many people doing so much. Look into them and add them in the caption or something.
TFSR: Were there any closing thoughts that I didn’t ask about, or do we feel good about where we’re landing with that?
Ary: One thing I want to add, something that just feels incredibly important right now, is recognizing the struggle against death and suffering in the borderlands, and how deeply, deeply connected it is to the struggle for liberation of oppressed people all across the world– specifically right now in Gaza. When thinking about freedom and protection and safety for people crossing the border, just also thinking about that on the larger scale. Whether it’s folks crossing the Mediterranean, or people in Poland, or people in Gaza, it is the same systems of oppression everywhere. Our heart goes out to all of the folks all across the world doing really important work, and to all oppressed peoples everywhere fighting for liberation, especially right now in Palestine. So just a shout out to that.
Bryce: Yeah, absolutely and not just the systems, but the actual infrastructure is the same. Like individuals and companies building the walls and surveillance systems in Palestine are building them on the wall here.
TFSR: Well, thank you, Ary and Bryce, so much for having this conversation, for the work that you do. I would love to talk to you sometime in the future again and catch up with how things are going.
Ary: Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Bryce: Yeah, thanks. Thanks.