Photography and the Wall

A former janitor for the Border Patrol, Thomas Kiefer, has been making photographs of possessions confiscated from immigrants arrested as they tried to enter the USA. The photographs move me profoundly. 

Some people from the First Unitarian Church in Portland spent a week in Arizona examining the obscene wall being built to keep Central and South American immigrants out of the USA. They met some immigrants and visited a couple of small organizations that attempt to provide water and information to migrants, and they heard of thousands, many of them children, who may be raped and traumatized or who die on the journey. The Portland delegation participated in a remembrance repeated every month, in which names of the dead are inscribed on crosses and called out loud, and they repeated this ritual with a group of us locally on Sunday. 

In Arizona they witnessed arrests and deportation hearings and learned that when immigrants are arrested, they may be held for weeks in icily air-conditioned buildings with minimal food and water before being herded into private, for-profit prisons. Immigrants’ identity papers, money, and personal belongings are confiscated, so when the immigrants are finally released and sent back to the Mexican side of the border, they have no resources even to acquire a bottle of water, let alone to return to their homes, if they even have homes to return to.

The wall, started by President Bush's administration and unfortunately not stopped by President Obama's, theoretically protects the USA from “terrorism,” but it serves only to make the passage for economic and political refugees, many fleeing situations created by the intervention of the USA, far more dangerous and deadly. I detest the wall and view it as an extension of paranoia, racism, classism, and xenophobia: a blight on all our souls.

Also important: If you'd like to see additional photographs of the situation, see RaspberryJefe's blips forward and back of this one.  He made in October 2015 the same tour and visited the same places as the Portland Unitarian group, and his blips of the experience helped to prepare me to hear what our group had to say.