Two powerful forces collide at the U.S.-Mexico border, as immigration policy meets desperation
It will be dangerous and take a LONG time, but I have to hope that US compassion will, in the long run, win out over hate and bigotry from the #trump administration!
Two powerful forces collide at the U.S.-Mexico border, as immigration policy meets desperation
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/two-powerful-forces-meet-at-the-us-mexico-border-as-immigration-policy-meets-desperation/2018/06/22/fa8a65b6-7626-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html?utm_term=.3c3b92b8daf2
by Maria Sacchetti, Michael E. Miller, Tony Perry and Kevin Sullivan June 22 at 4:35 PM Email the author
TIJUANA, Mexico — To Carmen Palma, a Salvadoran migrant waiting at a shelter just south of the border, her 6-year-old daughter’s life depends on getting asylum in the United States. She and hundreds of thousands of others have staked their lives on getting there.
“In El Salvador, there is only death,” Palma said. “Dead bodies are in the streets; women are violated and killed. We are ready to risk having our children separated from us so we can come to the United States.”
North of the border, President Trump has staked his presidency on keeping unauthorized immigrants out, making it harder to seek asylum, deploying more law enforcement across the region, trying to build a wall. His administration also tried to deter immigrants by taking away their children at the border — a policy he abandoned by executive order Wednesday in the face of ferocious political backlash.
Trump’s will and migrants’ desperation are two powerful forces colliding in the immigrant shelters, crossings, courtrooms, detention centers and the vast empty desert along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. The struggle is playing out from Tijuana on the Pacific Ocean to Nogales in the Arizona desert to Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico, with all the predictability, clarity and order of an earthquake.
2:22
Mixed messages in Washington, confusion on the border
The Trump administration ordered an end to family separations but has offered no plan to reunite the more than 2,300 children it separated from their parents. (Jon Gerberg, Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)
Trump’s executive order and his tweets about immigrants “infesting” America and Congress avoiding immigration issues until after the midterm elections have created new uncertainty along an already tense border....................................
Members of the Romero and Arcos Avila families wait at the Nogales Port of Entry on the Mexican side of the U.S. border Thursday, hoping to request asylum in the United States. (Stuart Palley for The Washington Post)
