Talking to Deported Immigrants Through the US-Mexico Border Fence Shanrah Wakefield - VICE News
go to original August 5, 2014

The recent influx of children and adults arriving at the US border has thrust immigration onto center stage yet again. Every busload of immigrants seems to be met by hostile protesters, who characterize the immigrants as disease carriers, job stealers, and criminals. This type of discourse isn't new: Conservative policymakers and the less-informed masses have long stereotyped and dehumanized these groups of people. But between the discussions by politicians and protesters, it can be too easy to forget that, at the heart of the drama, we're talking about actual human beings.

Organizations like the Border Angels are helping to support the forgotten people living in the nightmare debated by pundits on Fox News every night of the week. "Whatever happened to 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses'?" says founder and president Enrique Morones, of the organization's pledge to improve the situations of those whom he says immigration law forgets.

He took me to a place where it's possible to see, first hand, the trauma of families torn apart at the heart of undocumented immigration. At the most western point of the US-Mexico border, just south of San Diego, is a place called Friendship Park. Here, a fiercely sturdy 20-foot steel wall slips from the land into the ocean, marking in no uncertain terms the line between the two countries. It’s rife with unsettling symbolism.



US Border Patrol mans a tiny section of the fence, where families separated by the triple-layered steel can interact with one another, from 10AM and 2PM on weekends, through dense mesh holes not quite large enough to poke a finger through. “Sound waves are the only things allowed through the fence,” says Bishop Dermot Rodgers, who comes here every Sunday to run a joint religious ceremony along with another pastor on the Mexican side of the fence.

Children play with their siblings and cousins through this wall, poking glow sticks back and forth, giggling and gripping onto the steel bars. For many, this will remain the only way they can see their mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, and grandparents for the foreseeable future.

Read the rest at VICE News

Photos: Julian Lucas

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