The sun was high in the sky when the Migrant Trail participants neared their final destination, after 75 miles and seven days of late-spring Arizonan heat, with worn feet and heavy hearts. Along Highway 86, they marched, wearing hats and hiking boots and carrying 2-foot white crosses with names like Juan Manuel Ramirez, Marcia Torres and hundreds of others. On many of the crosses is just the word “desconocido”—unknown.
Roughly 60 people, from many states and countries, walked the 14th annual Migrant Trail from Sasabe to Kennedy Park to honor and remember the thousands of men, women and children who’ve died while attempting to cross the desert through the Arizona-Mexico borderlands and also to bring attention to an ongoing crisis that’s persisted for more than two decades.
“This is a group of committed individuals and organizations that gather around this issue of ending migrant deaths in the desert,” said volunteer Olivia Mena. “Many of the people have committed to doing this until the deaths end.”
The group sets out daily around 5 or 6 a.m. and walks an average of 10 to 12 miles. They have a support team who carry water provided by the human-rights group Humane Borders, driving up the road and setting up a refill water station every mile-and-a-half. They also have vehicles carrying most of their tents, sleeping bags and gear, as well as a trailer carrying two porta potties.
For breakfast, they have light snacks, and community supporters provide them with lunch and dinner.
Their last evening, at a campsite dubbed “hell camp” for the lack of shade and abundance of broken glass on the ground, walkers gather under tarp lean-tos and eat chilli, cornbread, salad and watermelon, provided by No More Deaths.
That night, Kat Rodriguez sat in the shaded gravel and ate half-melted ice cream. She’s walked every year and says she doesn’t intend to stop until there’s an end to the immigration policies that perpetuate the deaths along the border.
“It’s not meant to be a migration simulation,” Rodriguez says. “We’re not pretending to be migrants. We’re not pretending any of that. It’s just that there’s something about walking and being in that space that gives you insight.”
She remembered the first year, a participant had to be taken to a hospital and receive fluids because she became so dehydrated. Rodriguez was scared for the young woman as they waited for help. The woman was crying when she looked up at the group gathered around her and said that if they were really migrants, she’d be the first to die.
“We all know that none of us would make it,” Rodriguez said. “Pretty much none of us were raised in privilege—the way we grow up and have water and food and some basic securities, none of us would be able to make that trek. It’s amazing that people do, and it’s tragic that so many end up dying.”
The group has gotten way more organized since that first journey. As they walk, people yell out “water” as a reminder to keep drinking, and they even talk to each other about bodily functions to make sure signs of extreme dehydration don’t go unnoticed. And if someone does need a rest, they can take a break in an air-conditioned support vehicle.
As the group walked into the final destination, Kennedy Park, they held the crosses high and called out the names of the dead. Community supporters waited for them, with a buffet laid out. Musicians Pablo Peregrina and Ted Warmbrand played songs of peace and finding an end to suffering.
The participants shouted in English and Spanish that they walk and will continue to walk for all the men, women and children whose remains are found in the desert and all whose remains are never found.
A few first-time walkers spoke to the group about why they came and what they learned. Samantha Shipman, from Alabama, told the group that on the walk, she won the unofficial award for worst blister. The group clapped for her as she recounted all the support she got treating her blister while struggling to walk.
“I had a team of support vehicles to carry me when I couldn’t walk,” she said. “I had a seemingly unlimited supply of water and food from so many people who graciously volunteered to support us on our journey. I had shade, a tent, gear, chairs. And I also had the luxury of not being afraid.”
And despite all the support, Shipman said the journey was still really hard. She tells the crowd had she been an immigrant, without a support team, she would have died because of a blister.
“The people who somehow do make it across are friends and neighbors,” she said. “People who, just like you and me, want to support and protect their families and live the American dream.”
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2017.
Some people feel so guilty for being born American. Instead of doing this easy thing, why not do something useful and leave the U.S. to help really poor people in Africa, Asia, and Central America.
Don’t make me pay for your terminal guilty conscience by flooding my country with illegal immigrants.
For the past 3 decades the above so-called “humanitarians” have aided and abetted, enticed and invited and otherwise ENCOURAGED the illegal entry of Mexico’s poor with the following result:
1.Excess labor by Illegal Workers has driven DOWN the wages of American working families,many of whom are Hispanic or recent lawful immigrants;
2. Illegal Workers have driven UP the profits of fat cat employers who often employ them for less than minimum wage;
3. The American Legal Establishment now has an endless number of criminal cases to prosecute, adjudicate and defend;
4 Groups like Derechos Humanos have received tens of millions of dollars to alleviate the misery of Mexico’s Poor they helped to create;
5. Criminal Cartels have made hundreds of millions of dollars in human trafficking;
7. Entering women have been subject to rape, and sold into sexual slavery;
9. Entering children have been kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery.
And the Tucson Weekly has assisted this hideous enterprise by hiding the truth and failing to report what REALLY happens to Illegals in America!
There would be fewer or no deaths if they were not determined to violate our laws in crossing the border illegally.
Everyone has lost sight of the fact that it is the governments in the countries that they come from who do absolutely nothing to help their poor and impovished…..they are the real problem and not America and it’s immigration laws!
…and now they are heading to Canada. Better get your hiking shoes on.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/hundreds-of-immigrants-use-washington-state-to-sneak-into-canada-for-asylum/
The purpose of the walk is to raise awareness and to remember the dead. More than 7,000 people have died crossing the US-Mexico border in the last 20 years — and that number only includes the ones who have been discovered. Now you know. What you choose to do with that information is between you and your God.
To suggest that our 75-mile walk encourages or discourages anyone from making the trek north is foolish. People migrate to escape violence, reunite with family, and to search for a better life. I am certain that the face of a hungry child is more compelling than my blistered feet.
While governments in source countries share the blame, the United States cannot claim to be innocent. International trade policies that make it impossible for people to make a living in their home countries, expatriated gang members who learned the thug life in the U.S. and are now committing atrocities in their original homelands, immigration policies that make it unrealistic to wait in line, walls around urban crossing ports of entry that force people into more remote and dangerous routes, and the continued demonization of people who simply want to feed their families all contribute to this man-made humanitarian crisis. Migration (as we see it in the animal kingdom) is part of God’s Creation. While we can agree that borders help a nation regulate who enters and who does not, border enforcement must be humane. Judgment day will come for us individually and as nations (see Matthew 25:31-45).
Finally, how we treat one another matters. Walls, anti-immigrant ordinances, and sin all separate us from one another and from God.
“We wholeheartedly believe that Christians are called to be compassionate and merciful toward immigrants (Exodus 22:21; Leviticus 19:3334; Matthew 25:35). We also believe that the United States should have a more compassionate and merciful immigration policy. However, that is not the question at hand. The question at hand concerns illegal immigrationwhether it is wrong to violate a nations borders and transgress its immigration laws.
Romans 13:17 makes it abundantly clear that God expects us to obey the laws of the government. The only exception to this is when a law of the government forces us to disobey a command of God (Acts 5:29). Illegal immigration is the breaking of a governments law. There is nothing in Scripture that contradicts the idea of a sovereign nation having immigration laws. Therefore, it is rebellion against God to unlawfully enter another country. Illegal immigration is a sin.”
https://www.gotquestions.org/illegal-immigration.html
Carlos, I appreciated your post above until I thought about it and researched some facts.
Follow the Laws, we can disagree on whether migrants sin when they cross. I’m really not in the position to say as I don’t claim to know specific circumstances. In my comments, I was stating the question at hand as having to do with our reaction to migration. We seem to agree that we are called to be merciful. Where we seem to disagree is whether Jesus’ command to extend mercy (as he says we must do when we visit the imprisoned) relies on whether we deem them to be guilty or innocent. I believe it does not. We are to visit prisoners, as we are to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc. if they have sinned or not. Whether they “deserve” our mercy is immaterial. For example, if a person gets hit by a car while jaywalking (or robbing a bank even) we need to come to their aid and at least call an ambulance. If a person broke immigration laws and, for the sake of argument, sinned, we must still come to their aid and welcome the stranger when they are treated unjustly. When does that happen? When people are deported after many years of living in this country without getting into trouble; when we deport U.S. combat veterans who break the law (even for minor offenses); when we deport DACA students if they steal a pair of shoes; when we cause children to fear that they’ll come home after school and not find their parents. To treat them just is to make them pay penalties like everybody else. To treat them unjustly is to tack on additional penalties simply because of their legal status and because we want to be all about the law. But what about God’s Law? How do I sin when I don’t extend mercy, and how does the nation disobey a command of God (as you reference in Acts) when we fail to see others as fellow children of God. Further along the passage you quote in Romans, Paul instructs us that ‘Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.’ In essence, we are to love for love, ahem, trumps law.
If your religion tells you to let people die in the desert because they committed the horrible “sin” of trying to survive then your religion is wrong. You efforts to seriously try to invoke your ridiculous idea of “god” as justification for such hatred is right up there with those others you hate so much for their “hateful” religion.
And if you don’t have a single religious motive but still think allowing people to die in the desert is OK, then you certainly have no heart and are an evil person.
They need more people telling them not to come and we need border security that does not allow them to put themselves at risk. That would solve lots of problems. Instead bleeding hearts try to compartmentalize their thoughts and actions . This really doesn’t serve anybody well.