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Meeting Truth in the Desert

By Rich Stolz, New America Media

THE BORDER, NEAR TUCSON--On a jolting drive over a rough, cratered road to the Mexican border, I accompanied an organizer from the border rights organization Derechos Humanos, hoping to understand a truth so easily obscured by the debate over immigration reform and border security in the United States. I met the truth when I met a healthy 2-year-old boy sitting in his mother's lap in a corrugated metal shelter, hiding from the punishing July desert heat.

Having already journeyed a great distance, mother and son had a long road ahead across the border on their way to North Carolina. I could only ask myself, did they have enough water? How far will she be able to carry that child? Did they know that more than 120 migrants had already lost their lives this year in the Arizona desert?

Driving through the desert southwest of Tucson, it seemed that we crossed paths with green-striped border patrol vehicles -- they look alarmingly like dog-catcher trucks -- every 10 minutes. Homeland Security buses sit idling on dirt pullouts along two-lane roads waiting for border patrol agents to drop off migrants they apprehend. In this particular district, more than 160 migrants get apprehended each day.

When the buses fill up, they take their detainees to be processed back in Tucson or Phoenix, and then take them to drop-off points along the border and usher them back into Mexico more tired, dehydrated and weary than the last time they crossed. More often than not, with few other options, the migrants will try again. It's usually on the third or fourth time trying to cross the desert that migrants finally succumb to the heat or to blistered feet and get left behind to die.

Over the last decade, the United States has been deliberate about its border strategy. Build fences along urbanized areas along the border, driving people to the harsh desert terrain. This was viewed as a deterrent, but the flow of migrants has only grown exponentially. A fence, no matter how intimidating, has little to do with why more migrants attempt to cross the border into the United States every year.

I remembered something an immigrant once told me about why he made the trip to California. He said he could stay in Mexico and watch his children starve, or he could travel to the United States and do something for them. That made sense to me then.

Meeting this mother and her son in the "Brickyard" -- a haphazard collection of loosely built brick houses about four miles south of the Mexican border with Arizona, I could imagine what lay before them: a bumpy drive in a packed cattle truck to a drop off point along the border, a difficult and long walk through the desert heat keeping a wary eye out for bandits and border patrol agents. At each point of the way, I could imagine how vulnerable this mother and her child could be, falling prey to organized criminals trolling the Mexican side of the border or to unscrupulous coyotes. They could get caught by law enforcement officers any step of the way, and have to decide whether to try again.

Should she finally get to where she's taking her son, she'll be exploited again by employers trying to squeeze greater profits out of cheap unorganized labor. She and her son will be labeled illegal aliens, and they'll live in the shadows always fearful of being caught or separated and deported back to Mexico.

But I think she knows this, and she's here in the Brickyard anyway, anxiously awaiting her chance to cross the border to make a better life for her son. Lighting a candle for this mother and her son in church, and dwelling on this encounter days later, I asked myself, could it really be love that would drive a mother to risk her own life and that of her son in a difficult border crossing into Arizona? I know in my heart that the answer to that question is yes.

It's time for anti-immigrant demagogues to face their own truth. They're not securing the border against criminals or terrorists. But they are turning the military might of the most powerful nation in the world against the meek and the desperate who do believe that this is a land of hope and any opportunity.