Annunciation House Newsletter - Winter 2003

The Time Has Come to Raise Our Voices

By Ruben Garcia

Try as we may, it has been difficult to comprehend, to accept - put into some kind of context - the shooting death of one of our guests earlier in the year. Perhaps part of what makes it so difficult is that this death was not an accident. It was the result of policy. A policy that for the past 25 years has consciously called for the increased use of force as a tool of border enforcement. It is a policy that with each passing year becomes more lethal and ever more indiscriminate as to who and how it takes human lives.

On the advent of 2004, one finds journalists from New York to San Diego reporting on the many ways immigrants are now dying along the border each year. They cook in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico or drown in the waters of the Rio Grande. They are set upon by criminals in the mountains of California and run over by the freight trains that are among the few remaining modes of transportation available to immigrants. They die of the suffocation and heat stroke that comes when locked into the back of trucks without ventilation, water and at times, not even with enough room to sit down. Then too, there is the death that comes from the bullets of vigilante groups that prowl the border as well as the bullets of Border Patrol agents whom grand juries classify as justifiable shootings.

For generations now, historians have been writing about the intertwined and shared history of the United States and Mexico. A history that, in spite of a war between the two countries, has mostly been about the movement of trade and peoples back and forth across the border as they struggled to make a life for themselves and their families. Whether one speaks of NAFTA, oil imports, the braceros who were actively brought across to harvest the agricultural fields in the US or the undocumented restaurant workers washing dishes, the housekeeping maids cleaning up hotel rooms, the meat processors butchering beef, poultry and hogs in meat plants or the stock personnel in that sacred icon of the US, Wal-Mart, it all has to do with the intimate interdependence between these two countries.

Many are and many have been the forces that push the poor into the stream of migration. And many are and many continue to be the magnets that pull people from South of the border into the US. Migration and fluid borders are not only a part of the history of the US, they are part of the essence of what makes it the US. And over the years, the US managed to work out an accommodation - uneasy and unequal as it may have been across the years - with its interdependence on undocumented labor. At times, this has included special programs, like with the braceros and the seasonal agricultural workers of the 80's, amnesties, the willingness to look the other way all mixed in with deportations and rhetoric about the need to do something about the border. But the accommodation persisted.

Now, however, something is terribly wrong with this relationship. For the past 25 years there has been a slow but consistent application of force as a response and deterrent to border migration. It begun with the decision to move significant numbers of the then existing Border Patrol force from the interior of the country to the border area. It was followed by the introduction and application of military technology as a tool of border enforcement. This included the installation of sophisticated cameras, night vision, motion detectors, helicopters, all-terrain vehicles, etc.

The use of force as a policy of border enforcement expanded with the doubling and then the re-doubling of the size of the Border Patrol and the construction of checkpoints on all highways heading North and emanating from border cities. At different points along the border, imposing fences and walls have also been constructed and then in 1993, Operation Hold the Line, the first in a series of special Border Patrol operations was implemented with the effect of greatly increasing the life-risk to peoples in migration.

The enforcement process has been complimented with Congressional legislation that made it illegal in 1986 to employ an undocumented person and with the application, in 1996, of severe penalties to legalization for anyone caught illegally in the US. In the wake of September 11 and the Patriot Act, people in migration have increasingly come under the suspicion of the terrorism net.

Slowly, this policy of enforcement has evolved into a form of low-intensity warfare against peoples in migration. It is interesting to note that when Operation Hold the Line was first introduced along the border in El Paso, it was officially announced as the implementation of a border blockade. The name of the operation was only changed after it was reported that in international law, a blockade is considered an act of war. But for peoples in migration, policies that result in death are in fact acts of war.

During the entire 25-plus year history of the Berlin Wall, some 280 people died trying to cross the wall between East and West Berlin. Every year now, upwards of 400 migrants are dying trying to cross the border between the US
and Mexico. People in migration find themselves forced to take ever greater risks in their attempts at migration. They have indebted themselves in order to pay coyotes incredible sums of money for a perilous journey and once in the US, must navigate a lifestyle lived ever more in the underground.

All of these efforts have failed to stem the tide. The estimates now are that upwards of 9 to 11 million undocumented people are hard at work helping to sustain the US economy through their mostly low-paid labor. An economy as powerful as that of the US which at the same time is addicted to the fruits of cheap labor has created a symbiotic relationship between peoples in which one side simultaneously employs and persecutes the other side.

Political leaders have fed, counted on and built upon a growing political acceptability among the general public to malign, oppress and repress migrants. The mounting death toll along the border has become an acceptable collateral price tag of that policy. Politicians, civic groups, churches, the media - individuals from all walks of life - accept, or least resign themselves to, this loss of life with the disclaimer that, "after all, they shouldn't be here in the first place."

The words I heard recently at a meeting of a local civic/cultural organization ring ever so loudly. A member of the group, an older woman, having just heard a presentation on the reality of what immigrants and refugees face and must cope with here on the border, interjected her opinion: "As far as I'm concerned, any person who crosses the border illegally should be shot on the spot." In response, her organizational colleagues gave her an ovation. On February 22nd, the agent who shot Juan Patricio Peraza Quijada granted her wish.

Oppressed peoples have always been voiceless and this is no less true for peoples in migration. They are largely silent, faceless people ever fearful of detection, arrest, deportation, prosecution and exploitation. For them, these are times when the moral leadership of institutions, organizations and churches committed to justice, human rights and peace must speak out in prophetic voice against the violence, against the systemic oppression of peoples whose only crime is the poverty that allows no alternative to migration.

The way US border policy treats immigrants constitutes a complete contradiction to the most basic precepts and the understanding of Scripture, theology and doctrine of churches. In an article for the magazine America, written after leading a group of religious leaders to the US/Mexican border to see firsthand the plight of migrants, Gerald F. Kicana, Catholic Bishop of Tucson, Arizona, wrote:

"How can we remain silent? How can we not shout out? Dachau and Auschwitz demand action from us. Though the Holocaust differed from the current border situation in governmental intent, scope, magnitude and effect, it is disturbing to note that they share certain painful common elements. Because of the policies of the US and Mexican governments that blockade the border and give rise to smugglers, people are being led to their death - this time migrants who seek a better life for themselves and their families. The loss of one life because of our silence is unacceptable. The loss of thousands is immoral."

The plight of people in migration, the death of what are now thousands is indeed a moral and faith imperative for faith communities. Scripture brooks no sanctuary for those who would seek refuge there from this imperative. Leviticus reads, "When an alien resides with you in your land, do not molest him. You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the native born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself." Exodus continues, "You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt." Deuteronomy judges, "Cursed be he who violates the rights of the alien."

In the midst of a voiceless and persecuted people, faith communities must search out a response if they are to remain faithful and maintain their integrity. As was true in the 80's through the sanctuary movement in response to the peoples in migration from El Salvador and Guatemala, faith communities will be held accountable for how the alien in their midst has been received, treated, loved and protected. To do any less runs the risk of allowing an oppressive governmental border policy to masquerade as acceptable belief, doctrine and teaching for faith communities.

The voice of the prophet of the 80's, Archbishop Oscar Romero, rings true today as it so powerfully did then when from the pulpit of his faith community he responded to the persecution and oppression of the poor with these words, "The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression!"