Advocates begin Migrant Trail to ‘bear witness’ to deaths along U.S.-Mexico border

Under a sharp blue sky, lines of heat shimmered along the armored edges of the border wall near Sasabe, Arizona, as a group of 60 people held a short ceremony Monday before beginning the Migrant Trail—a 75-mile walk from the U.S.-Mexico border to Tucson. 

Over the next week, 43 people will make the journey along Highway 286 — the remote two-lane highway that runs past the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge— before heading east toward Tucson.

The group will end their trek on June 1 at Kennedy Park in Tucson.

This is the 22nd migrant trail, an event organizers call a “pilgrimage to bear witness to migrant deaths in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and oppose decades of inhumane border policies.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers held “virtual” walks, however, the group returned to their pilgrimage last year, and the event has a renewed focus with Donald Trump’s reelection last November.

The Trump administration has engaged in a harsh crackdown against immigrants since January 20, shuttering asylum programs, gutting key oversight programs, and likely violating human rights by shipping people to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

The administration has also refused to return a man deported to El Salvador despite federal court orders to do so, and federal attorneys may face contempt charges. Meanwhile, the White House has sought legal cover to allow ICE officials to raid churches and schools, and ordered the military to occupy federal land and arrest people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Even as apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico have collapsed following a
long-term trend that began last June, officials have recovered 154 sets
of human remains in the Arizona desert in the last year. These remains are largely skeletal remains,
making an exact time and cause of death difficult to determine.

The Trump administration has cheered low apprehension levels, but after while U.S. Border Patrol agents took around 29,000 people into custody in February, numbers have jumped up slightly in March and April.

“It has become cliché to quote Niemöeler’s ‘First They
Came’ poem, which talks about the dire consequences of not standing up
for those who are more vulnerable than us,” said Saulo Padilla, a
veteran walker and the migration education program coordinator for
Mennonite Central Committee. 

“But that so essentially describes
what those who join the Migrant Trail seek to do. We have been speaking
out for over two decades,” Padilla said in a statement. “We refuse to
remain silent about these completely avoidable migrant deaths. These are
atrocities committed by our government, in our name. We are seeing in
real time that the longer that people who know better refuse to stand
up, the more imperiled we all become.”

‘A graveyard of the missing’

As the group noted, since the 1990s under the Clinton administration, more than 8,600 people have perished attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. In Arizona, federal officials, humanitarians and local law enforcement have recovered the remains of 4,376 people.

Advocates have often called Arizona’s deserts a “graveyard of the missing” arguing that U.S. policies, specifically the concept of “prevention through deference,” caused of these loses.

Jason de León, a professor of archaeology and anthropology, at UCLA called the desert as a “Land of Open Graves” in his book,  and described how remains are broken apart by vultures and other animals, while heat and sun degrades bones.

In 1994, the commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Doris Meissner, outlined the future of border enforcement in a strategic plan that relied on the concept of “prevention through deterrence.” Among the keystones of Meissner’s plan was the use of fencing and infrastructure along “traditional entry and smuggling routes,” which would force people “over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.”

The policy assumed that by forcing people into the harshest
parts of the U.S.-Mexico border’s deserts, people would stop attempting
the trip. Instead, migrants faced harder journeys in Arizona’s dangerous and empty spaces where its impossible to carry enough water, and people endure searing triple-digit temperatures.

Over the last decade, smugglers have also shifted their tactics. In the 1990s and early 2000s, large groups of people were led by guides, often known as “coyotes” who could lead people from water source to water source.

Now, guides are increasingly directing small groups of people remotely, using directions via social media apps, and keeping them moving through the desert. Migrants who are hurt, or slow the group down, are often abandoned and left without food or water, and they must hope that their cellphone works and they can get help.

‘These are preventable deaths’

Early Monday morning, the group assembled at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson to open the pilgrimage and hand out dozens of small wooden crosses — each one made to recognize a person who died in the desert. Many of the crosses have the name and age of the person who died, which includes women and children. Other crosses are marked only with “desconocido” the Spanish word for unknown.

“We stand here to decry these preventable deaths, and we know that they are our responsibility,” said Jamie Wilson, an organizer and spokeswoman who has attended migrant trails over the last several years. “These are preventable deaths, and they are the direct result of our policies.”

She called deaths along the border a kind of violence that Americans widely ignore.

“Those of us that are here to walk today have chosen to not be blind to this violence, and instead to bear witness and to take responsibility for the devastating consequences of our nation’s policies.”

She was followed by Liz Marie Alvarado who said she joined to represent the immigrant community. She said a friend, Claudette Sanchez Rubin, perished “trying to get here to have a better life and to be able to provide money to her family, particularly to her mom, who was facing a fatal disease.” 

Alvarado also noted another friend survived the journey, but now lives “in the constant fear of deportation.” 

“I am here to stand up for justice, and I am here with all of you people of faith,” Alvarado said. “We are gathered here because we believe that those that have been uprooted from their homelands like to be treated with dignity and respect. We are all strangers to this land.”

“The stakes of the Migrant Trail have never been more clear,” Wilson said. “We have been bearing witness to the results of
the deadly investments in border warfare and for-profit detention for
decades.”

Wilson called walking the migrant trail an “act of defiance and responsibility. 

“I reject these
policies and I, too, am responsible for their consequences,” Wilson said. “As I walk, I
carry a cross for an individual that died because my country wouldn’t
let them enter safely.” 

Isabel Garcia, a long-time Tucson attorney and activist, spoke to the walkers and described a world on the move in recent years, as more than 200 million people have been displaced because of war, corruption and famine.

“This is on top of our history of migration” she said, noting that over the last decades the U.S. invited migration from Mexico for cheap labor to build the country. However, over the five years, the U.S.-Mexico border has become the “most fatal border in the world that is not at war,” she said. And, she said with these policies and the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant fervor, “we will see more death.”

After the speakers, Wilson invited the walkers to come and get a cross, and then each person was asked to say the name of the person borne of the cross in their hand. After each name was spoken, the group said “Presente” a way to invoke the presence of each person lost in the desert.

The group packed their gear and headed in vehicles to Sasabe, where outside of the U.S. border crossing, the group reassembled and prepared for their journey on foot, pausing to take photos and add sunscreen and prepare for the day’s rising heat. The high temperature Monday afternoon in the border hamlet was 92 degrees with just 5 percent humidity, the National Weather Service said.

There was a short smudging ceremony, and a prayer to the cardinal directions. As the group held silence, a Border Patrol agent pulled up to the border wall. He paused, sitting in a rumbling truck before heading west into the vast desert where the walls rising and falls in a scar across the landscape. 

The group began to walk together, a few with crosses held high and one woman clutching a bundle of sacred ribbons.