No More Deaths: Fourth Trip

Katie D.

September 25, 2010 - 10:14 PM

I've just returned home from my fourth week of volunteering with humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, working on the Mexico/Arizona border to end the suffering and death of migrants on the trails through the Sonora Desert. It has been an incredibly difficult, uplifting, and inspiring trip. We hiked the trails in heat that consistently exceeded 105 degrees Fahrenheit. We left gallons of drinking water along well-used trails, and offered medical assistance to two migrants who found our aid station.

Before I write about the social justice aspects of the trip, I want to write again about the beauty. I love the Arizona desert like I love the Oregon Cascade mountains. I love the desert plants and wildlife, the mountains and arroyos, and the desert sky. This was the week of the full moon, and on Thursday the moon rose just at sunset, huge and yellow in a purple/pink sky, and set the next morning at sunrise. This was also a grasshopper time of year. We saw grasshoppers in all sizes and colors, in addition to gigantic beetles, praying mantis, and an extremely impressive tarantula that tried to move into our tent for the night. I saw deer, hawks, jackrabbits, quail, and hundreds of lizards (including a horned toad). I saw a beautiful snake near camp: dark green on top and bright pink on the bottom. I saw a road runner sitting in a mesquite tree and a kangaroo rat hanging around camp. Others in the group saw javelina, which are hairy wild pigs. The entire trip was framed by heat and natural beauty, from bugs to birds and back again. The desert is a living, changing place, and this trip I experienced the beauty as never before.

I had other new experiences, unlike my previous travels with No More Deaths. The first was searching for a lost Guatemalan woman, and the second was witnessing a Project Streamline trial of migrants in Tucson.

I spent Tuesday morning and early afternoon searching for a Guatemalan woman who had been reported missing two weeks earlier. I worked with seven other volunteers, hiking an area of the desert not commonly patrolled by No More Deaths volunteers. It was desolate and remote, marked prominently by a string of power lines and the access road that ran beneath them. The woman had been traveling with her group on a trail parallel to the power lines, but had been too exhausted to keep up, and was left behind. That was two weeks ago. The leaders of the search party were honest with me: in the heat and terrain we were hiking, it was extremely unlikely we would find the woman alive.

We searched for the trail for hours, constantly on the phone with the woman's brother, who lives in Washington state and made the same crossing three years earlier. As we battled through cactus and hard-packed earth, searching for the trail, I kept thinking of her brother, desperately directing us to a place where we might find the body of his twenty-two year old sister.

We received a phone call around 1:30 pm, telling us the woman had been deported to Guatemala City. I am so glad that this story does not end in the death of this woman, or in her family suffering the ongoing loss of uncertainty. The tension I had felt all day was lifted from me, and I felt like celebrating. However, we later visited a small marker for another woman from her community, who had died on the same trail years earlier. The desert is full of stories of tragedy and loss.

The Project Streamline trials in Tucson are held daily, charging captured migrants with the criminal offense of illegal entry in the United States. The trial lasted less than an hour and a half, and processed thirty-nine men and woman who had been captured on the trails, and were standing before a judge in their migrant clothes and shackles that bound their ankles together and their hands to their waists. They were sentenced to serve time in jail before their deportation: sometimes several weeks up to three months. Each had met with a lawyer for half an hour, and each affirmed that they understood the process and the laws they had broken.

I sat in the classroom, witnessing the trail and imagining what these individuals must have felt. I imagined the process of justice I was witnessing, the herding of desperate people in their dirty clothes and unwashed bodies from trail to holding cell to trial to jail and back to Mexico or Guatemala.

I thought about my academic discussions of justice and our legal systems, about the Conflict Resolution perspectives about restorative justice and alternative processes. I thought about systems of injustice and the stark reality I was witnessing. I thought about my studies and the emerging passion I have for international human rights law and systems of justice. I thought about studies about border crossings and identity politics and the way these play out in our courts and within our communities.

I am arriving home, again, with a sense of troubled purpose. The border is fresh in my mind and on my body in sunburn, blisters, a wasp sting, and eyes full of desert sky. I imagine the hundreds of individuals hiking the trails tonight, and the hundreds held in prison for the crime of transporting themselves to a new land and new opportunities.

I do not know the answers to the larger questions of laws and policies. I only know that what I witnessed does not square with my idea of justice, with my idea of humanity, and with the America that I love. I have returned with a new and profound desire to study and practice justice and the resolution of conflict in our world: in our communities, on our borders, in our discourse and in our imaginations. I think about that trail beside the power lines and the sounds of the chains on the hands of the captured migrants.

When classes begin again on Monday, I will be looking for answers. Ideas and skills to sustain me in my work, now and in the future. There is much to be done, and I hope I am worthy of the task ahead.