On Monday, May 23, 2022, as the world awaited the long-fought for lifting of Title 42, the United Nations dropped the bomb that there are now more than 100 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. That means 1 in every 100 people on the planet right now has been driven from their birthplace by war, conflict, crippling poverty, weather-related disasters, etc. Eighty percent of these people are in the Global South.

Title 42, an obscure public health provision under the US Centers for Disease Control, was invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020 in the guise of controlling COVID-19. But what it really did was put an immediate end to the right to seek asylum from persecution at US southern ports of entry. Title 42 cut off one route to lawful migration, trapping Brown, Black, and poor people on the other side of the US line.

The abuse of Title 42 has persisted under Biden. It is to blame for expelling roughly 2 million people, to date, back to the harms they fled without any due process under the law. It has turned untold numbers of the world’s most vulnerable people into sitting ducks for cartel violence and organized crime. Under constant threat in Mexican border towns, waiting their turn to request protection for now years on end, many legitimate asylum seekers have been pushed to try their luck in the unpredictable Rio Grande, or by scaling the now 30-ft border wall, or by hiking through the Sonoran desert – one of the hottest places on earth.

Many won’t make it.

In Episode 14 of Witness Radio, I speak to one person who did survive the desert trek – but only just. Her name is Dora Rodriguez, and her tragic tale, which sparked a movement in the 1980s, stands as a profound example of the failure of the now decades-long US borderlands strategy of deterring migration by taking measures most cruel has created a market for organized crime. The political abuse of Title 42 is just the latest manifestation of that strategy, which has cost the lives of so many already. Because it was not rescinded on May 23rd, as it should have been, others will be forced to follow in Dora’s footsteps this summer. And many more will die.

When will the US government be held accountable for these crimes?

Additional Information:

UN: More than 100 million people forcibly displaced in the world

As Biden Prepares to Take Office, a New Rush at the Border

“THERE IS NO MERCY”

Cited Organizations:

Salvavision

Casa de la Esperanza

Tucson Samaritans

No More Deaths

Humane Borders

Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans

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It starts with a dream that becomes a dot. A red dot, representing a GPS coordinate on a map transformed into a hole, not too deep, cut into the earth with a pickaxe and shovel, then filled with moistened gravel and quick-dry cement into which Tucson, Arizona-based artist, Alvaro Enciso, plants a simple cross of rough 2x3inch pine strips painted a vibrant color and secured at the midpoint with a red dot made from metal trash he’s harvested from the floor of the vast Sonoran.

Since the October 1, 1994 launch of Operation Gatekeeper, the Sonoran desert, one of the hottest places on Earth in the summertime, has destroyed the lives and stolen the dreams of an estimated 10,000 souls. Forcing upon them a death most cruel, the US government remains steadfast in its nearly 30-year bet that the agony of some will deter others from coming. It hasn't. So what started as a dream “to reveal to the world the US government’s responsibility for turning the Sonoran Desert into a graveyard” has resulted in Alvaro transforming the desert into a cemetery, an art installation, and a memorial to the needless suffering of the unknown.

To date, he has marked the red dots of 1,200 (and counting) of the 10,000 (and counting) fallen. It's a work of monumental art, exposing government-sanctioned inhumanity. Art without sentimentality. Art without end. Art intended to lift up the lost while informing the living. It's a symbolic expression of who we should not be as a country. 

Alvaro's Desert Monument to the Dead screams quietly at us to rethink the policy of “Prevention Through Deterrence,” our First, Second, and possibly Third Solution.

Find Alvaro's tale alongside other stories of how art keeps good alive in the worst of times in the now available collection from She Writes Press: Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, in which women writers reveal that in tumultuous times such as these, we need poets more than we need politicians.

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We begin the second season of Witness Radio with a mind-blowing treat. Witness Radio Executive Producer Camilo Perez-Bustillo and I join Nandita Sharma and Reece Jones to explore the question: 

From the war in Ukraine to the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond: Who gets welcome? Who gets to move?

We conclude with ideas about how to create a more inclusive world, one better able to confront such challenges as climate change, global pandemics, capitalist greed run amok, and the hardened, racialized borders throughout the world that have given rise to violent exclusionary tactics.

Our conversation first aired as a webinar hosted by Witness at the Border on March 31, 2022. So, some of the numbers cited have since changed. But we felt the discussion was too important not to republish in audio format. We hope you agree. 

Meet the speakers:

Activist scholar Dr. Nandita Sharma is a professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research addresses human migration, migrant labor, nation-state power, ideologies of racism, sexism, and nationalism, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice. Nandita is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants.

Dr. Reece Jones is a professor of geography and environment at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of White Borders, Violent Borders, and Border Walls. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Geopolitics and co-editor of the Routledge Geopolitics Book Series. His next book, Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, is available for preorder from Counterpoint Press.

Camilo Perez Bustillo is the current chair professor of human rights at National Taiwan University's College of Law. He is also a fellow at both the Institute for the Geography of Peace, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and El Paso, Texas, and Norway's University of Bergen Global Research Program on Inequality; co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Task Force on the Americas; co-founder of the International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement; and lead author of Human Rights, Hegemony and Utopia in Latin America.

Sarah Towle is a London-based author, educator, and human rights defender, sharing her journey from outrage to activism one Witness Radio episode and story at a time in her forthcoming book, The First Solution: Tales of Humanity from the Borderlands.

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