CPTnet
26 June 2007
ARIZONA/MEXICO BORDERLANDS REFLECTION: "Seventeen bodies were recovered this
month"

by John Heid

[CPTer John Heid (Luck, WI) has spent June working with No More Deaths and
the Samaritans in southern Arizona, providing humanitarian assistance to
migrants. In July, CPTers Sarah Shirk (Chicago, IL), Haven Whiteside (Palm
Harbor, FL), and Brian Young (Richmond, IN) will join him in CPT's July
month-long Borderlands Witness Drive.]

Laceless shoes on weary feet identify these hundreds as migrants, dumped
back across the US/Mexico border each day at Nogales. Each face reveals a
story. Each story is punctuated by hunger, loss and determination. Their
bodies are usually weary, blistered and dehydrated. The spirits are often
resilient despite these facts. So the migrants keep coming, and the buses
keep deporting.

Temperatures in southern Arizona have exceeded 100 degrees every day since
13 June 2007. No end is in sight. Seventeen bodies were recovered in the
Tucson sector this month. These neighbors died of dehydration, but the
political analysis autopsy reads, "failed immigration policy." The headline
in last Sunday's Arizona Daily Star read, "Efforts to cut summer deaths
along the border aren't working." While the US Border Patrol scours the
desert for laborers, fathers, mothers and increasing numbers of children,
the public has a scant understanding of the reasons our neighbors risk life
and limb simply to work.

The politically constructed border is a flash point, a locus of life and
death. Yet, the crisis neither begins nor ends in the Sonoran desert.
Economic policies created this crisis. Federal and state policies
exacerbate it long after a migrant finds work in a labor camp, truck farm,
construction site or poultry plant.

CPT Borderlands Witness Drive begins this week in the literally blistering
Arizona heat and culminates in late July, 3,000 miles away in the
air-conditioned halls of Congress. The team will follow a migrant trail of
sorts--from the fences, walls and watchtowers of the border and through the
south and southeast as they gather testimonies, join solidarity vigils, and
pray. We will look squarely into the faces of immigrants with a vision that
authentic human spirit, theirs and ours, can be breathed into the currently
comatose debate on immigration policy.

Visit http://cptborderlandswitness.blogspot.com/ for frequent updates
written from the road during the Borderlands Witness Drive.