Tucson to Nogales and Back

TRIP TO THE BORDER

BorderLinks Delegation:   Tucson to Nogales and Back

Participants:  Steve Goering, Susan Ortman Goering, John Schneider,  Anne-Marie Patrie

March 11-14, 2013

March 12. Nogales South of the Border                                                          

The Iniciativa Kino para la Frontera (The Kino Border Initiatives).

By: Susan and Steve

Crossing the Border.  The auto trip south from Tucson to Nogales is only about 70 miles and 1 ¼ hours.  Walking the desert would be a whole different story.  Nogales, AZ, U.S., has a population of about 21,000; Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, is approximately 10 times that size, or about 220,000 as of 2010.  Nogales has four primary border crossing points and has the largest port of entry along the Arizona border. Billions of dollars of agricultural produce and manufactured products pass through these ports of entry each year. The Nogales area, east and west along the border, is also an important drug trafficking area from Mexico to the U.S. Drug cartels are ruthless criminals and a threat both to men and women seeking to come to the United States and also to persons in the United States. More about that later in our reports of conversations with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

First glimpse of the Border Wall

As we approached the border, we were advised to put away all cameras, etc.  The “Wall” identifying the border is imposing in its own right and pictured below. John will speak more about “The Wall” in the next two days. Our Borderlinks delegation easily passed through the border crossing into Mexico.  There is seldom an issue going south.  It is only going north into the United States where vehicles are searched, and passports checked, especially if one or more passengers are Latino. Tito, one of our two delegation leaders, and an Associate Pastor at a Presbyterian Church in Nogales, drove our van through the unfamiliar web of Nogales streets.  We were glad he was driving as traffic was heavy with cars and vans merging lanes in active ways!  We arrived at HEPAC, sister organization to BorderLinks, where we were to stay for the night, got situated and then headed to the Iniciativa Kino para la Frontera.

Crossing into Sonora, Mexico

The Iniciativa Kino para la Frontera (The Kino Border Initiatives).

We met with West Cosgrove, another long distance runner addressing immigration issues.  He worked many years in Texas on immigration issues, and has now been in Nogales, Az and Nogales, Sonora for several years working with an organization called the Kino Border Initiatives. The Kino Initiatives are Catholic (Jesuit) Ministries. On the Arizona side, Kino is involved in advocacy and education.  On the Sonora side, Kino provides direct services.  We met in the Comedor, the direct services center on the Sonora side. This is a day-ministry providing food and medical care for deported migrants only.  Men who have just been deported the night before eat here in the morning but often start to move to other places by afternoon. They must decide quickly whether to try again or go back home. The Mexican government provides few services. There is one overnight shelter with a maximum 2-3 night stay.

Kino Border Initiative, Nogales, Mexico 

The Comedor was within sight of the busiest port of entry in Nogales, the point used most often by the big trucks that carry produce and manufactured goods into the United States. There was a constant stream of truck traffic.  We had to wait for West in the van, and I saw a young man come down the hill where the trucks were lined up to go through customs.  I picked him out as a migrant.  He was young, certainly under 20, had a back pack and a small bundle wrapped in a black garbage bag.  He walked right by the van; he looked tired.  He waited around the corner, and when the meal was served, he came in to eat.

When the U.S. deports non-legal immigrants, they are bused to the border and then simply dropped off at the border port of entry itself. Typically they have no money, and may be many miles from family or support systems.  They may not even be from Mexico but rather from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.  This means that every day, Nogales has an additional 200+ homeless people deposited at their doorstep. Kino is one of very few ministries in the city offering services to these deported and homeless people. 

West shared that more migrants have been deported in President Obama’s office tenure than in any other presidential tenure; 1.2 million people have been deported in the last four years.  Families are separated in this process.  Nearly 205,000 parents were deported in the last two years, torn from their children who may or may not be citizens of the U.S. These children then often grow up in abject poverty. If they are not citizens, they will not be able to get legal residency, except possibly through DACA.  As of now, they have no legal employment future in the United States. Many of these parents are immigrants who have lived in the US for 10-30 years; often they are discovered in traffic stops or other, similar misdemeanor offenses.  

 The Comedor serves 2 meals a day to whoever comes --the first at 10 a.m. the second at 4 p.m.  Last year they served 58,000 meals to deported homeless men and women. To access services at the Comedor, one has to show deportation papers dated within the prior three days.  Kino also runs a small shelter in a nearby apartment house.  Last year 302 women and children were served there.  They can stay 15 days at a time.  Most of the people they serve will try again to cross the border; few plan to stay in Nogales or return home.  When the minimum wage in Mexico is $5.00 a day, there is little incentive to stay in Mexico. The fact is that mothers and fathers cannot feed their children. They come to the United States because of poverty, and some of that is induced by the United States itself.  For example, when NAFTA was enacted, subsidized corn from the U.S. entered Mexico tariff free. That destroyed the Mexican corn/farm production industry which could not compete.  As a result 3 ½ million Mexican farmers were displaced and unemployed.  Many came to the United States. They came with our tacit approval. Often, they brought their families.  Often they married U.S. citizens and had children. Often they are the primary bread-winners for their dependents. We are complicit in causing this “immigration problem.” We built in an advantage with NAFTA and now we have an unintended consequence.

“Welcoming the stranger” is one of the Bible’s clearest mandates. Also, our very salvation, according to Matthew 25, depends on our caring for those in need –“for they were hungry and you gave them food….”  In many ways, the debate about immigration is not so much about them; it is about us and what kind of nation, what kind of people, we choose to be. We need to do better.

It is a most interesting question. Honestly, if our children were starving, if our children were hungry in the evenings, would we do something illegal to change that? Is that not the moral act to do when there are no other options?  Would we come north? Most of us try to have respect for the law. Yet is there higher moral law at work here?  Is it God’s wish that we actually criminalize poverty? Is it God’s wish for families to be torn apart without prospect of being re-united.  Yes, we can acknowledge that immigration issues are complex and multi-faceted. Yet what we are doing now just doesn’t sound very Jesus-like.  

© Susan Ortman Goering. April 4, 2013