Borderland Resistance

‘The land belongs to us but the border belongs to them.’

by

“We’ve had enough,” Juan Mancias tells me. “They are digging up our people.”

Mancias is the chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe of Texas, whose homeland stretches along the Rio Grande Delta, where the river that separates the Lone Star State from Mexico spills out into the Gulf. In the battle against a border wall, he and other activists have drawn their line in the sand a few feet from where the Trump Administration plans to break ground.

“Anytime that you dig somebody up and you put them somewhere else,” he says, “that’s ethnic cleansing and all part of a continuing genocide.”

Mancias and I met in Tucson, Arizona, in January, as he was preparing to speak on the deteriorating border situation before the United Nations. The intergovernmental body was holding a fact-finding mission at the San Xavier District of the Tohono O’odham Nation, another tribe whose culture and history spans both sides of the United States-Mexico divide. Specifically, the United Nations was seeking testimony and documentation of human rights violations experienced by indigenous and migrant communities. Less than a month later, President Donald Trump would declare a national emergency over border security, claiming that “walls work 100 percent.”

Already fighting back against this claim and the looming construction of a wall is a broad coalition of borderland groups, led largely by indigenous peoples, staging acts of civil disobedience and working with bodies like the United Nations to assert their rights.

Mancias and other local activists, allied with U.S. farmers and cattle ranchers who have also lived for generations in the borderlands of Texas, have set up a resistance camp at the Eli Jackson Cemetery in the small town of San Juan, Texas. Established in the 1860s by the son of a reformed slave owner as a place where all races could be buried together, the cemetery—and the camp it now houses—is less than a rock’s throw north of where the Trump Administration plans to convert a vital river levee into a thirty-foot steel and concrete barrier wall, including a clearing for a 150-foot enforcement zone.

‘We want to take a stand to monitor the excavation and make sure nothing is being dug up that are remains or artifacts.’

The cemetery camp is part of a network of encampments along the border that seeks to protect sacred indigenous sites threatened by the border wall and various fossil fuel projects in the area. Indigenous activists have even accused Border Patrol agents of looting their sacred medicine and artifacts. Says Mancias, “We’ve seen them take loads of stuff and picking peyote, putting it in trash bags.”

The cemetery camp allows the activists close proximity to keep an eye on things. “We want to take a stand to monitor the excavation and make sure nothing is being dug up that are remains or artifacts,” says the tribal leader.

Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), was one of the organizers of the U.N. hearing in Tucson. She tells me the IITC is part of an international movement to resist the negative impacts that expanding border walls are having on indigenous communities around the world. The group has been working with the United Nations on border issues for years, she says, fighting for those whose lives have been upended by border wars across the Western Hemisphere.

“The land belongs to us but the border belongs to them,” Carmen says. “Their decision to put up walls, to violate human rights, to forcibly remove children from their families, to confiscate land from nontribal citizens as well as indigenous citizens—this is a policy that we utterly oppose, as indigenous nations who originally lived on these lands.”

After reporting on border issues for two decades, author and journalist Todd Miller believes it has been the United States’ long-term border policy to make it as dangerous as possible to cross onto American soil.

“If you look at the first border memorandum of the Border Patrol, it refers to crossing in the desert as something that could be ‘mortal,’ and therefore a deterrent,” he tells me in Tucson. Since 1994, he adds, the remains of 8,000 people have been found in the borderlands. Miller, whose latest book is Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, traces this border strategy back to the Clinton Administration.

In 1992, Miller says, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner pushed for more border security, warning that NAFTA could increase migration to the United States. Clinton initiated a strategy of “prevention through deterrence,” increasing budgets for walls and more border agents. There are now approximately 22,000 border agents, he says, up from 4,000 in 1994.

“Sometimes you are actually treated like a military captive,” Peter Yucupicio, vice chairman of the Pascua Yaqui tribe, tells me after testifying at the U.N. hearing. According to Yucupicio, the Pascua Yaqui claim more than 20,000 registered members near Tucson and maybe five times that number south of the border.

“I still travel to the south to visit our traditional villages in Sonora [Mexico],” he relates. “At the checkpoint, the guard asks me to declare my nationality and then says to me before I can answer, ‘What the hell do you think I am, a mind reader?’ ”

But Yucupicio is encouraged by the resilience of the indigenous border communities and their commitment to fighting back against the repression.

“We have not forgotten who we are,” he says. “The traditional ceremonies, the traditional ways of speaking, being part of this area which has been inhabited by tribal members for hundreds and thousands of years.”

Whenever I visit Tucson on a reporting tour, I take a barometer reading from human rights activist and former longtime Pima County Legal Defender Isabel Garcia, who describes herself as the “proud daughter” of Mexican immigrants.

“I was raised on the border in Sonora, Mexico, where my father was an organizer for the copper miners,” Garcia says.

In 1993, she and other lawyers and activists founded Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition). “What we do,” Garcia tells me in the group’s office, “is respond to life-and-death situations and fight for the rights of our community.”

The coalition’s work includes educating migrants about their rights, helping to locate missing migrants, and propelling campaigns to oppose U.S. border policies like Operation Streamline that criminalize migration.

Surrounding us are dozens of painted wooden crosses, hammered together by Garcia and others at Derechos Humanos, to memorialize refugees who’ve died in the desert attempting to cross into El Norte. Each one will be hand-painted with a name of an individual who has died, if it can be verified.

“With the wall and the expanding military occupation,” she says, “we are not only killing [refugees], we are disappearing them. And these are all unnecessary deaths.”

Garcia angrily refutes Trump’s claims of a huge upsurge of border crossings. She’s right: According to The New York Times, “Illegal border crossings have been declining for nearly two decades. In 2017, border-crossing apprehensions were at their lowest point since 1971.”

“We are being stripped of our basic rights based on phony claims of mass migration,” she tells me. “They have kept the American people ignorant—not only of the history of immigration, but of what is happening today.”

“We are being stripped of our basic rights based on phony claims of mass migration.”

U.S. citizens, she notes, have a right to a lawyer if charged with a crime, “but that doesn’t apply to immigrants.” Often, the lack of due process includes a failure to notify their families. “Since the late nineties, people have been calling us to say, ‘My brother crossed five days ago and no one has heard from him.’ ”

Environmentalists have also expanded their work on the border to include responding to the humanitarian needs of border crossers. Dan Millis, the borderlands program manager for the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, has been ticketed and prosecuted for leaving bottled water in the desert where refugees, fleeing war and risking dehydration and death, might find it.

In his modest downtown Tucson office in The Historic Y building, Millis describes how he was drawn into the border battle for refugee rights. After discovering that people were dying trying to cross over, he began volunteering with No Más Muertes, or No More Deaths, a human rights organization that has worked openly since 2004.

“We have a fairly elaborate system for leaving water,” he says. “We communicate with the authorities about what we are doing and keep track of where we leave water and other life-saving supplies.”

“We go on foot patrols,” Millis adds, “looking for people suffering from extreme dehydration and blisters on their feet. It is basic humanitarian aid work, the least we can do to respond to these tragic conditions.”

In February 2009, Millis and another volunteer doing a regular desert patrol encountered the body of a fourteen-year-old who had died attempting to cross the border. Two days later, he was out on patrol again when a federal law enforcement officer told him not to leave water out.

“I was prosecuted for littering,” Millis says. “They were trying to say that water is trash, whereas we know that water is life.” A federal Circuit Court of Appeals later overturned his conviction.

Two of Millis’s volunteer friends, Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss, were arrested in 2005 after they found someone crossing the border who was vomiting blood. On their way to the hospital on a doctor’s advice, Border Patrol pulled them over and charged them each with a felony. A judge later threw out the charges.

“People should understand that we already have a series of border walls,” Millis says, invoking his background as an environmentalist. “There are about 375 miles of wall already constructed. In addition to that, we have 280 miles of vehicle barrier. All of these border walls block wildlife and they block water. This is serious because, if you can’t migrate or move around freely in your habitat, how are you going to survive?”

SIDEBAR: Borderland Lessons from Palestine 

If you want to know what an expanding military occupation looks like, ask a Palestinian. 

“I was born in a town in Palestine which existed for 3,000 years until 1967, when it was completely bulldozed,” says Mohyeddin Abdulaziz.

Palestine has been violently and illegally occupied since 1948. Indeed, as a result there is a large Palestinian diaspora in Europe and the United States. One of those Palestinians forced into exile, Abdulaziz ended up in the United States and now lives in Tucson, where he has worked with the city’s Immigrant Task Force and the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. In January, he was a presenter at a United Nations fact-finding mission in Tucson that sought testimony on human rights violations at the United States-Mexico border. 

“Settler colonialism seeks to replace indigenous people with the colonizers,” Abdulaziz tells me, wearing the traditional Palestinian kufiya. “I was just a young boy when I heard how our situation was similar to that of the American Indians. Little did I know that a few decades later I would be here and see exactly the same situation.”

Trump himself has drawn this parallel, saying in 2017, “Walls work, just ask Israel.”

Abdulaziz works with a Tucson-based organization called the Arizona Palestine Solidarity Alliance. “We do studies on militarization around the world. We recently sent a team to study the effects of militarization on the Tohono O’odham Nation in Mexico.”  

Every year at the end of May, Abdulaziz takes part in a seventy-five-mile walk across the desert. The action, called The Migrant Trail: We Walk For Life, is an effort to build solidarity with border crossers and push for a more humane border policy. 

“All you can see when you travel down there are Border Patrol vehicles, military equipment, towers, big bulldozers destroying the land,” he says.

“Walls don’t solve problems,” he adds. “Communication solves problems. There is no peace for either the Israelis or the Palestinians. How is it going to solve problems here?”

—Dennis J. Bernstein