years of Obama’s presidency—a number that Trump has provided as a possible goal for his administration. And the criteria in place for granting refuge or asylum were established fifty years ago, initially based on international humanitarian goals but implemented in the service of convenience and political interests.
This book aims to lay bare these two phenomena. U.S. immigration policy during the Trump presidency and in the years beyond could be outrageous and appalling, but discriminatory policy is nothing new. Most Americans have refused to acknowledge that the immigrant community has endured discrimination and a hostile environment for decades. Tax dollars paid by U.S. residents are spent to lock up immigrants, re-victimizing those who have already been victimized in their home countries, who have reached out to “the best democracy in the world” in an attempt to save their own lives. Those who come to the United States fleeing violence, or for health reasons, or to escape hate and harassment because of their sexual orientation or religious beliefs have been forgotten by their home countries. But in the United States, we have not done much better. We rarely think about the new arrivals who have had to leave everything behind and come here as a last resort, arriving in a new land only to be labeled “the other,” the foreigner, and whose lives depend on accepting this description. From the comfort of our own secure legal status, we have already built the Wall.
In Part One, I will present a general overview of the hundreds of thousands of victims of violence who arrive in the United States each year seeking asylum and the series of obstacles, including bureaucratic red tape, a confounding legal system, and social indifference, they meet here. I will discuss how the southern border of the United States has functioned as a port of entry for those whose presence in the country ultimately benefits the government, while this same border has also served to reinforce the concept of “the other.”
Part Two offers a deeper analysis of how the criteria for granting and denying asylum were developed. I also examine the robust business these criteria represent for the corporations that manage private immigration detention centers. In Part Three, I talk about the governments of Mexico and other countries that not only have failed to meet their responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of their citizens, but also are at times complicit in the violence and persecution that compels people to leave. Finally, in Part Four I will tell the stories of those who have had to start their lives all over again in the United States, a completely unknown land, to the great indifference of most of its residents.
The stories told in this book only hint at the enormous debt the United States owes to its own image as a democratic country, and the role it plays in human rights violations committed around the world, including in Mexico. My hope is that through reading this book, people inside and outside the United States can knock down the wall of indifference that we have propped up for years, and offer understanding and solidarity to the most courageous among us: those who have risked their lives to denounce injustice, to defend what they believe in, and who, years later, with tremendous strength, have learned to live again.
The Line Between Life and Death
The desert is wily. With every breeze, dust wafts across the highway leading into town, a fine sand that clings to cars, to your shoes, to your tongue. Lines of desert sand run along the edges of the streets, separating the pavement from the simple ranch houses, painted in earth tones, surrounded by chicken-wire fences. In some yards small trees struggle to grow, defying the arid conditions, surrounded by tricycles and clothes hung on lines to dry in the sun. It feels like we’re in Guadalupe, in Juárez Valley, Chihuahua, Mexico; the Church of the Nazarene, the tortilla stand at the supermarket, the hand-lettered signs advertising home-cooked meals all add to the illusion. But before turning around on the highway, right where the desert ends and the row of humble little houses begins, a small, unassuming sign tells you where you are: Fabens, Texas.
A nine-mile stretch bisected by the Río Grande separates Fabens from Guadalupe, along the U.S.-Mexico border, a thirty-minute drive east of the bridge connecting El Paso and Juárez, Mexico. Lower Island Avenue on this side of the border becomes Cruz Reyes Street on the other. Just beyond a sign reading, “Estados Unidos Mexicanos,” another row of houses begins, a mirror image of the first: the same colors, the same stunted trees, the same sand swept across the road, the same first names, the same last names. The difference is that in Guadalupe, the homes are empty. The people who lived there were killed. The ones left alive were threatened, extorted, mutilated. They grabbed a few belongings when they could, crossed the border, and never went back.
The ones who managed to get out of Guadalupe alive arrived in Fabens with nothing. They don’t speak English, they have no savings, no furniture, no property, no papers. Some don’t even have an old family photo album. They came to Fabens with nothing more than their beating hearts—no dreams, no plans beyond the simple will to survive.
The distance between Fabens and Guadalupe is the distance between life and death.
On New Year’s Eve, 2013, the Reyes house glows with light. Saúl Reyes, his wife Gloria, his children, his mother Sara, and six or seven close friends have gathered for dinner. Saúl lives in this little residential enclave in the middle of the desert, in Fabens, but just like the rest of his family, his home will always be on the Mexico side, in Guadalupe. He fled north to survive. The Reyes Salazar family, a clan of bakers with a long history of social activism, resisted leaving their hometown. But out of ten siblings, four of them men, Saúl Reyes Salazar and three of his sisters are the only ones still living. Two died of natural causes. Four were murdered.
The members of the Reyes Salazar family had been militant leftists for decades. They belonged to various organizations and political parties that sprang up across Mexico in the sixties: from the Popular Defense Committee (CDP) and the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM) to the still-functioning Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD). Eusebio Reyes, a baker and the family patriarch, was born in Torreón, Coahuila, a state bordering Texas. After trying to organize his fellow bakers to demand better working conditions, he was fired, and no one else would hire him. He decided to move away, and wound up in Guadalupe. He opened his own bakery and taught his children the trade, while imparting lessons in worker solidarity and social activism.
In the early nineties, the Reyeses led a resistance movement against a proposed nuclear waste dump in Sierra Blanca, Texas, nine miles north of the Mexican border and Juárez Valley. On March 21, 1992, along with other local activist groups, they held a protest called “Marcha por la Vida” (March for Life), which advanced towards Sierra Blanca from El Paso and both sides of the border, to highlight the rights of border communities to a safe environment free of pollution.
Saúl, in his forties and about average height, has a ruddy, dark complexion. With a sharp gaze and a tendency to get right to the point, he is serious, attentive. But when he looks back on the protest, he smiles proudly. They shut down every border crossing in the area for an entire hour.
“It was the first time in history anything like that was ever done,” he points out. As a result of the wave of protests, the Sierra Blanca nuclear waste project was canceled. Years later some attempts were made to revive it, with no success.
The Reyes family came to symbolize the fight to protect the environment against big corporations and U.S. interests, in a part of Mexico that had never seemed
