Seifert: Hope

A couple of weeks ago I was standing in a small kitchen, just off the reception area of a shelter for migrants in a Mexican city on the border with Texas. A woman was calmly stirring a large pot of stew on the stove.  She smiled at me, and I asked her what she was cooking.

“I am making chicken soup for twenty-five people,” she replied.

 “What a challenge,” she continued, “The people from Haiti like it really spiced up, the people from El Salvador want just a small taste of chili, and Guatemalans would prefer it seasoned just with salt.”

“And your people?” I asked her.

“Ah, I am from the Dominican Republic, and we just want it to be delicious! That is why I made myself the cook!” she said with a laugh.

Her laughter was sweet but incongruous for the place that I was visiting. The cook was a part of a huge community of people who were in the purgatory known as the Mexican border. Their homelands—Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador and so many other places– had been ruined by the violent consequences of lawlessness. These people became migrants and had made their way to the US border with the desperate hope of finding safety for their families. The United States continues to be an attractive sanctuary for the migrants; it is supposed to be a safe place, populated by generous people with many opportunities to reestablish a life.

For years I have asked migrants why they had endured so much suffering to come to the United States. Invariably, constantly, the answer was, “Because I trust you. I know once an American judge hears my story, he will protect me.” Since 1990, the American government that so many migrants admire and trust, has intentionally imposed organized suffering on people trying to enter the country. This policy was based upon the (still) mistaken idea that if you make a migrant trying to get to the United States miserable enough, the word will get back to their home countries that it is a horrible mistake to come to the America. The word does get back, the misery is real—nearly 10,000 people have died in the past twenty-five years attempting to cross into the United States. The International Organization for Migration describes the US/Mexico border as the most dangerous land crossing point in the world. But people continue to believe and trust in the US and the US continues to betray that trust in increasingly vile ways.

A year ago, the United States implemented a new attempt to control migration. Asylum applicants at the US/Mexico border now must use a cell phone app (CBP1) to preschedule an appointment to process an asylum claim. Getting the appointment is mostly a matter of luck—only 1,450 people a day, across the entire southern border, get an appointment. Most asylum seekers must wait months before having any success. For migrants waiting south of the US border, however, CBP1 is no casual game of chance. Asylum seekers in Mexico are desirable targets for organized criminals, for the gangs know that people seeking asylum in the United States most likely have someone in the US who knows and loves them, and that someone would have money that could be paid as ransom. The kidnappers are armed and ruthless and have perfected a system of terrorizing their victims.

For instance, in the room just off the kitchen in which I was visiting with the delightful (and terrified) cook was a family that had arrived the night before. There were two smaller children, a twelve-year-old boy, and their mother and grandmother. Just a few days before, back in their hometown in southern Mexico, the family had been happily preparing to celebrate the twelve-year old’s birthday. However, a few weeks before his birthday, local gang members had tried to recruit the boy’s father and grandfather. Both men refused. On the day of his birthday, his grandfather and his father were carrying a birthday cake into the family home when gang members shot the two men to death. The children, the twelve-year old, the mother and the grandmother witnessed the slaughter of their loved ones. The gang members assured the surviving family members that they would be back, and so the surviving family members left the very next day for the border, hoping to get to the safety of the United States, where they had relatives. The reach of organized criminals in Mexico is long and the family did not feel safe in their own country. Still in shock from the violence that had wrecked their lives, the family now learned that their safety depended upon a phone app. As the family was trying to understand what all of this meant, some of the shelter staff had shown up with a birthday cake, a well-intentioned effort to cheer up the twelve-year-old and the family. Understandably, the children looked at the cake and the staff with blank, affectless faces. The mother stood stiffly in the middle of the room, looking down at the floor. Only the grandmother seemed capable of a different sort of response. She was weeping.

A short while later, after finishing our visit with the shelter staff, we took our leave. As we went out the gate, we passed another family coming into the shelter. They were from Guatemala—the women were dressed in traditional clothing. There were two men, three women and four children. They came into the place with their eyes cast down.

Once we were out of earshot, the migrant advocate who was with our group noted, “They must have been taken by a gang, tortured, probably raped. They can never look at you in the face after that humiliation.”

International groups providing services in this part of the border have reported 62 documented cases of sexual assault, some involving children, over the past month. We were assured that this was a massive undercount—there are so few people who would dare report such cases while in Mexico. The assaults are organized: the buses, coming from the south, are stopped at an immigration checkpoint just outside the city. Migrants report that Mexican immigration authorities board the bus and take peoples’ money and documents. Five minutes further on up the highway, gang members hijack the bus, take the passengers, and load them onto pickup trucks. They take the victims to a warehouse or a large barn, some place that can accommodate the horrific violence that is about to be levelled at these people.

The violence practiced by the criminal groups is vicious, vile, and relentless. It is not only directed at the adults, but children are forced to witness the beatings of their parents, the rape of their mothers and their fathers. Parents, then, are forced to watch the sexual assault of their children. All the while, someone is filming the violence, noting at the end of session, according to one migrant, “Now the whole world will witness your humiliation.”

Travel through Mexico for immigrants has always been dangerous, particularly those areas near the border with the United States. Our government is aware of the situation; the State Department issues travel advisories for American citizens warning about the violence in the state of Tamaulipas. Supposedly, American citizens trust the State Department and heed the warnings. No such warnings exist for these migrant families seeking shelter in the United States. To the contrary, the state of Tamaulipas has become one large, toxic waiting room, filled with victims sent there by policies responding to the hard-hearted fearful people who make up our electorate.

Before our group left Mexico and headed back across the border, we walked down to the Rio Grande. We could look across the river and see concertina wire covering the northern bank of the Rio Grande.  Our guide explained that the wire eventually slips down the bank into the water and that Texas law enforcement will then pile yet more wire at the top of the bank. The practical effect of this is that yards of wire—designed to slice human flesh—lies unseen beneath the surface of the water. Migrants–men, women, and children, have been sliced up by the wire, so many that the wounds have come to have their own name: “Abbott scars,” named for the governor of Texas who ordered the wire to be installed.

During this long day of hearing these stories, of visiting with people who had suffered this abuse, and of trying to imagine what these families were experiencing, we had a long conversation with one of the people who cares for the families. She was well acquainted with the world of misery that they had experienced. She told us that what deeply impressed her about the migrants was their resilience. Despite having everything taken from them, despite the murders of their loved ones, the theft of all of their resources, the torture and sexual humiliation that they experienced, despite the daily terror of being in Mexico while awaiting an appointment that never seems to arrive, despite all of that they maintained their hope, a hope rooted in a deep faith that God would not fail them. She told us this in a gentle voice, as if in awe of these peoples’ strength. I was reminded of a comment someone once made: “We do not lose hope, we just need to locate where it is.”

As Lent moves into Holy Week, a time when many Christians will locate hope in the Gospel story of the passion of Jesus Christ. Politicians will of course be at these services; it is after all an election year. Perhaps if they happen to catch a fine sermon that focuses on the wounds in the flesh of the innocent Jesus Christ, they could have a change of heart about the way our nation permits the wounding of so many innocents. Maybe, on Easter Sunday, a preacher will effectively reach the hearts of someone up for election, and this candidate might attend to the lesson of the disciple Thomas, who was ordered to place his hand in one of the wounds of the Risen Christ, “and believe.” The churches insist that we are the Body of Christ, and the recent wounds in this body are not that far from the centers of power. One could take a short drive across the border into Mexico, share a meal of chicken soup prepared by a Dominican migrant, and perhaps an ironic slice of birthday cake. One could listen, just a bit, to the stories told by the migrants, and come away, as I was, deeply impressed by their courage and their faith. One could study this version of the Body of Christ.

One could, then, believe.

The above guest column was penned by community leader and writer Michael Seifert. The column first appeared on Seifert’s blog. It appears in The Rio Grande Guardian International News Service with the permission of the author. Seifert can be reached by email via: seifertjamesmichael@gmail.com.

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