Editor’s note: Members of the Witness at the Border group and others are traveling the length of the US-Mexico border from Texas to California Dec. 3-18, 2022, to call attention to the plight of migrants and refugees and the work of organizations along the border. The following is from a Dec. 14 Facebook post by Joshua Rubin, founder of Witness at the Border. See the group’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/witnessborder.
Our eyes are seeing more things than our hearts and minds can absorb. I find myself perched in an unfamiliar place, on the edge of tears. This trip along the border is no easy trek, even for one hovering above the tragedy such as myself, with a home to go back to, with a life free of privation.
We are conquerors who have never stopped waging our war of conquest. Bullets are still fired across the walls we build to defend our conquered land and the obscene wealth of a few, whose coffers could feed, clothe and shelter billions. The wall is the physical manifestation of the blind eye we turn to those that the conquest has robbed and deprived.
And through the chinks of that chain link wall here in Nogales came shot after shot into the body of a teen boy, José Antonio Elena Rodriguez, killing him [José was shot by a US Border Patrol agent on Oct. 10, 2012]. And the system of conquest that made a murderer of that Border Patrolman defended the murder, exonerated the murderer, and has established that the conqueror’s bullets can travel where they will, with impunity.
The bollard wall that now runs up and down the hills of Nogales runs through every heart here, reminding all those not yet blind that the war of conquest is a hot war, guns and the brutality of the sun and the waiting hills leaving graves and tears on the terrible bare beauty of the Sonoran desert.
Joshua Rubin is founder of Witness at the Border.
