Page 23 - Sonoma County Gazette August 2019

Our Immigration Experience
Last month, the first part of this article outlined the recent experience
my wife and I had working with migrants in El Paso. The discussion of the immense scale of the problem, with 100,000 people a month being apprehended at the Southern border, and the desperation of the people coming into this country due to extreme poverty and violence in their homelands continues to be relevant.
Alot has changed in the last month, though. The president has altered the laws so that Central Americans can be deported back to Mexico. The horrible conditions of the detention facilities, especially for children, have been exposed by journalists.
The two concluding points gleaned from our experience:
1) Our government’s response is inadequate to the immigration crisis.
It now appears that the government’s major strategy is deterrence.
The Border Patrol has tried forcefully separating children from their families, building walls, increasing security, and making detention extremely unpleasant (bordering on torture). These approaches make many US citizens concerned about these extreme measures that could be considered inhumane.
While there, we saw only families, so we had no contact with unaccompanied minors. The conditions in detention that people reported to us included:
● Extended stays in ICE detention, up to two weeks.
● Confiscation of possessions and documents (including medication).
● Often confined in “hieleras,” or iceboxes, kept cold and uncomfortable.
Sometimes they went into the “perreras,” or dog pens—small caged areas. ● Some cells were so crowded that they couldn’t sit or lie down—several
people claimed they were packed so tight that it was impossible to sit for
over 48 hours.
● Shortages of food and water.
2) Volunteers in impacted communities are stepping up to respond.
Sonoma Joins Tri-National Campaign to Protect Monarch Butterflies
Mayor Amy Harrington signed
the National Wildlife Federation’s Mayors’ Tri-National Monarch Pledge committing
to the protection of Monarch Butterflies and their habitat in the City of Sonoma.
Our time was spent at Annunciation House, a volunteer organization that is helping refugees as they are released from custody and dropped on the streets. They were usually pretty bedraggled and with absolutely no resources. The work at the safe house was mainly logistics—getting a shower, food, a bed, clean clothes, medical care, and making contact with their sponsors (usually family). These sponsors are scattered around the country, and buy bus or plane tickets to get them to their new home. This work in the shelters was done by volunteers, many were college students on break, with little funding and in very chaotic circumstances.
IMMIGRANT STORIES cont’d from page 22
And now, decades later, we want to tell them they are law breakers and they should abandon all that and go home.
There is a way to have sensible but humane immigration policies without having open borders. We can adopt rational policies and procedures for considering asylum claims by those fleeing persecution without letting everybody in. We can have a system that encourages family unification and still imposes limits on immigration.
Where a month ago, the border patrol was releasing people into the U.S., now our government is trying to “out-source” the problem to Mexico. They are beginning to dump the people back over the border to towns like Juarez and Tijuana—dangerous border towns without the resources to cope. Very likely, there will be bad outcomes for many of the young people that have been crossing recently. Some volunteer organizations are working on the Mexican side, but I suspect that they will soon be overwhelmed.
“Any action
we can take to
support Monarch
Butterflies benefits all
pollinators. Council members are uniformly supportive as they understand the value of a sustainable ecosystem for both plants and animals”, she says.
We are better than that.
Thanks to the interest of Sonoma leaders, citizens may do so by visiting the Sonoma Garden Park Butterfly Garden (19996 7th St E, Sonoma), a project of the Sonoma Ecology Center, and the Monarch-Pollinator Garden located behind the First Congregational Church (252 W Spain St., Sonoma).
Donald Trump is just wrong. It’s neither right nor American to tell families here for decades or single mothers fleeing terror south of the border that they should just return to their “shit-hole countries”. I believe that America is better than that. I believe that most Americans want America to be better than that.
A major help for the cause is the City of Sonoma’s ban on the use of glyphosate (a key ingredient in products such as Monsanto’s RoundUp) within city limits. Pesticide use has had a devastating effect on pollinators and all life forms along with droughts, floods, fires, climate change, habitat loss due to urbanization and sweeping mono-cultures.
FREE milkweed seeds and native narrow leaf milkweed plants are available from the latter location during tour times. Garden tours there are Wednesdays & Sundays from 4-6pm, through August.
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