Hurricanes, Immigration, and Climbing

Eric Wustrow
Aug 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Hurricane Harvey is headed to southern Texas, prompting thousands to evacuate their homes to avoid the life-threatening storm. While it’s hard enough to convince people to leave their homes and take the storm seriously, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol intentionally made this decision harder for undocumented residents by leaving its immigration checkpoints open north of the border. The CBP claims that its checkpoints won’t deter illegal immigrants from evacuating, but this is a gross misunderstanding of human rationalization.

I’m reminded of how I’ve felt deciding to bail from rock climbs when it looks like a storm is approaching. Sometimes, retreating to avoid a storm involves leaving pricey climbing equipment behind, and making the choice to leave $30-$100 worth of climbing gear to allow you to bail is surprisingly hard when the threat to your life remains vague or uncertain. What if the storm clears and you wasted your gear for nothing? You’d feel pretty silly then! On the other hand, if you save that $30, keep climbing, and end up in a lightning storm, you’ll wish you had the opportunity to spend $30,000 to save your life, but by then it’s too late. The correct — but often difficult — decision is to bail.

But imagine you’re an undocumented resident in southern Texas. You and your family know the storm is approaching, but it’s not totally certain that you’ll die if you stay: maybe the storm will pass, or miss your home, or you’ll get lucky some other way. On the other hand, if you try to evacuate to safety, CBP will almost certainly catch you, and you and your family will be deported. I’ll admit that I struggle enough deciding to leave easily-affordable climbing gear when there’s any amount of uncertainty that things might not go wrong. But here, instead of a few pieces of climbing gear, CBP is forcing people to consider leaving behind their jobs, families, and livelihoods to avoid the risk of a deadly storm. That’s an impossible decision, and not one we should be encouraging anyone to have to make.

The argument that CBP is simply doing their job and not “abandoning their law enforcement duties” is unconscionable. The CBP’s job is not to put illegal
residents in deadly situations. Doing so betrays the underlying abhorrent belief shared by too many that this is a game, that these aren’t real people, that their lives are somehow less important than a political ideology and rhetoric that for some reason must be upheld, come hell or high water.
Previous hurricanes such as Matthew and Isaac have seen CBP close checkpoints to allow people to move faster and without fear of deportation during emergencies. Are we now considering lives as worth less in 2017 than 2016, simply because of a change in political climate?

We make all kinds of decisions where routine law enforcement takes a backseat to saving lives. Police officers will stop pursuit of a car if it starts to head past a school or crowded pedestrian zones, to avoid potentially injuring innocent bystanders. Hospitals allow drug users to be admitted anonymously without involving police, to encourage treatment of overdose victims who might otherwise die in the street to avoid a drug charge. Even some wilderness search and rescue operations are completely free of charge in order to discourage people in dire situations from getting themselves into a worse one while contemplating the cost of a helicopter evacuation.

Operating border patrol checkpoints is not more important than lives. Hurricane Harvey is coming, and it doesn’t care about the economic impacts of cheap undocumented labor. It’s going to flood homes and leave people stranded regardless of their color, creed, or citizenship status. It’s on us to avoid politicizing a storm and do the right thing: Let people evacuate freely without forcing unnecessary consideration of what they might have to leave behind.

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade