Immigration | United States
Writing the Handbook for a More Humane World, Part II
What Five Texas Teachers Can Teach Global Leadership About Running a Refugee Camp and Containing COVID-19
If Being Trapped in No Man’s Land Weren’t Enough…
On Saturday May 16, 2020, a biblical storm ripped through the Matamoros tent city encampment where 2,500 refugees await their asylum hearing in the United States. Some had been waiting already for 8, 9, even 10 months due to a Trump & Co policy called Migrant “Protection” Protocol (MPP) when the US border closed due to COVID-19, suspending their court dates indefinitely.
In the deluge, pummeling rain took down tents and tarps. Belongings were ruined by flood waters that coursed through the encampment like rivers, turning the Rio Bravo levee into a mudslide. Matamoros refugees went from sweltering in 100°F heat to being drenched to the skin. Having survived tragedies most of us can’t even imagine — from persecution by cartels to persecution by a US administration with a penchant for cruelty — they now face new hardships, like mosquitoes, mold, mildew, and more rain as hurricane season approaches.
Fortunately, the Team Brownsville co-founders, introduced in Part I of this story, were just a bridge away. Michael Benavides, Sergio Cordova, Juan-David Liendo-Lucio, Andrea Rudnik, and Dr. Melba Salazar-Lucio didn’t have to wait long for updates…
Andrea: We began to get pictures and videos from the encampment immediately. Everyone wanted to tell us what happened. And when we stopped to view them, we were horrified. We had to act. We had to figure out how to help in this emerging disaster.
As soon as they could get across the closed border, Team Brownsville and volunteers were replenishing needed supplies and starting to replace the 200 (of 800) tents that did not survive the storm. For nearly two straight years, they’ve been supporting the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of the victims of Trump & Co’s criminal immigration agenda along with myriad collaborators and supporters because — as they will be the first to tell you — seeing to the common good is a team effort.
“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.” — Song of Solomon 8:7
Continued from Part I…
July 2019: Something Wicked this Way Comes
MELBA: The mission was growing into something we never thought it would be, and with it the mood changed. Before MPP, migrants still had hope of getting across the border and eventually winning asylum. But MPP offered only ‘false hope.’ The refugees still believed that if they held out long enough, their asylum dreams would come true. We could see that they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
DAVID: There was this cultural shift in the Valley, too. It started after Trump came to power. Before Trump, ICE officials never walked out onto the bridge to block people from coming across. That started with this administration. In July, ICE stood side-by-side in the middle of the bridge and stopped people. Desperate people. Some of them went into the river where they drowned or were forced into the hands of CBP who took their kids from them and threw them in jail.
MIKE: This administration has stirred up the worst in us. There will always be bullies: those who get off on being cruel. But when those whose parents raised them to understand the difference between right and wrong, moral and immoral, ethical and unjust — when they were told to take children out of their mothers’ arms, they quit the force. Then there are those trapped in between, for whom getting a job with the CBP or ICE has meant being the first in the family to buy a house. Now they’re stuck; they have mortgages to pay. So they close their eyes and do what’s expected. Eventually, even for them, cruelty becomes normalized.
DAVID: Some of them are brainwashed. They come out of the military or the police academy where they’re taught to do what their superior says without question. They’re taught that a higher authority knows better. Others are just misinformed. They believe what they hear on Fox News or at Church. The same people who say they are Christian, are fiercely nationalistic too. Under this administration, you can’t be both. Not anymore.
Goliath on Steroids
Despite Trump & Co’s statements that under MPP, Mexico agreed to provide asylum seekers “with appropriate humanitarian protections for the duration of their stay,” help was not forthcoming, neither from governments nor the United Nations.
ANDREA: The UN came that fall. But it was a workshop here, an assessment there, some talk about the need to create a `safe space,’ but no instructions about how to do it.
SERGIO: We are supported by individuals and faith groups of all denominations from all over the country. Many of our volunteers come from the Jewish community. Trump’s treatment of Central American immigrants reminds them of the 1930s and 1940s when ships packed with Jews, hoping to escape Hitler’s Germany, were turned away. The US said it would never do that again. But it is. We have a chance, right now, to redeem ourselves as a country, but we’re committing the same atrocities again.
DAVID: Some of our supporters aren’t religious at all, but are a lot more ‘Christian’ than many Christians right here in Texas.
ANDREA: It’s all about seeing. About not looking away. When everyone looks away, that’s when we all lose. There are so many naysayers, but there are also people from all over the country volunteering and sending donations to Team Brownsville. The outpouring of support of every kind has been incredible. People’s generosity has lifted us up on days when ongoing stories of brutality and kidnapping had the power to drag us down.
MELBA: Sometimes people come up to me — spouses of influential people in the community, on both sides of the river — and they tell me, ‘I’m going to give you a donation, but don’t tell anyone.’ This proves that people do know better, they know what is happening, and that what our government is doing is wrong. But they can’t be seen to be helping.
SERGIO: When the volunteers come and bear witness, they hug me and start weeping. They know what’s happening, that’s why they come. But it’s so much harder to accept when you see it. They ask me, how many of these people are going to be trafficked for organs? Or raped? Or kidnapped for ransom? Or killed?
MELBA: What strikes the deepest chord is the children. We hear the stories of their journeys. We learn why they fled. There is so much suffering, so much pain. They’ve already lost their childhood, many of them, and now they’re being made to live like this?
MIKE: When I look in the eyes of these people, I see the same stare I brought back from Desert Storm: the blank, glassy stare of trauma. They all have the stare. They are all suffering trauma.
As the situation under MPP worsened, Team Brownsville kept pivoting in response to real needs.
MELBA: When summer 2019 was coming to an end, and we were getting ready to go back to school, I kept asking, ‘What is going to happen to these kids? How can we keep their education going?’ We decided to bring the mountain to them. ‘We’re all teachers,’ I said. ‘We love books.’ It started with 10 people. They committed to adding an another half-day to their work week. They came with us to the camp on Sundays to teach the children. It was totally grassroots. I told them, ‘Bring what resources you have. Bring a lesson.’ My only requirement was that lessons had to be in Spanish or bilingual.
DAVID: Team Brownsville’s Escuelita de la Banqueta (Sidewalk School) started on August 11, 2019, with 20 kids. In no time, 150 kids came and it just kept growing. The idea of the school really resonated.
MELBA: If I asked for books and supplies on Facebook, they came. Volunteer teachers came as well — specialty teachers in music and art — people all over the country dedicated to helping the Escuelita. A group of retired librarians, called Reforma Children in Crisis, donated books; also First Books and Vamos a Leer donated; Highlights sent bilingual magazines, and not old issues either, brand new editions. The children love the Highlights. Someone got the Eric Carle Museum involved. He sent so many books! And Usborne Books has donated. This is why we now have a library for asylum seekers at the camp: our biblioburros, rolling bookselves. There are about 18 at last count, from picture books through young adult and many bilingual books.
In October, Lily Lugo, a daycare center owner and early childhood expert from Brownsville, joined our teaching team at Escuelita on Sunday mornings. We gave her her own tent. Then someone else came over to work with teens. We gave them a space too. Several other pop up schools began, hiring the already trained teachers among the asylum seekers: Pastor Abraham Barberi’s Escuelita de el Puente taught mathematics during the week; and Felicia Rangel-Samponaro started the weekday Sidewalk School.
The Dignity Village Collaborative
After a year of triage, Team Brownsville was confronted with a much more complex task: how to manage a refugee camp in the absence of governmental or UN support. There were now 2,500 people who needed not just food and shelter, but also toilets and water and health care and education and legal advice and political advocacy, etc. It was time to scale up. The answer became the Dignity Village Collaborative.
MIKE: Andrea spearheaded this idea and we followed her lead. As President of the Board, she had crafted our simple mission: to make people as comfortable as we can while they’re here. The Dignity Village idea flows logically from that.
ANDREA: I can’t take all the credit for coming up with the Dignity Village. There were many discussions, meetings with the other NGOs, and a good deal of support from Woodson Martin [EVP and GM, AppExchange at Salesforce, Board Member, and Team Brownsville Treasurer]. We worked collaboratively to envision the project.
As a collaborative, the collection of grassroots NGOs agreed to share projects and resources as well as bring together key representatives from each group to act as a single voice for the asylum seekers in discussions with Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Migracion (INM) and local business and political concerns.
MIKE: We’re at their mercy. And they are at the mercy of their constituencies. We’re the guests, and so are the refugees. So it’s been a delicate dance.
ANDREA: But we needed to get them to the table to discuss how to provide the best humanitarian response possible for the benefit of the US asylum seekers trapped in Mexico.
The Collaborative named Sister Norma Pimentel of Catholic Charities their titular head. A respected religious leader throughout the Rio Grande Valley and on both sides of the border, she brought immediate legitimacy to the organization. Then Mike traveled to Washington, DC in November 2019 with Gaby Zavala of Resource Center Matamoros to represent the Dignity Village Collaborative with the Mexican Ambassador.
MIKE: I told him, the refugees aren’t going away. We need to work together to mitigate a humanitarian disaster on your doorstep. ‘Let us help you save face,’ I said.
Before the new decade dawned, the joint effort “to provide infrastructure and services to create a safer, more sanitary refuge for asylum seekers living temporarily at the base of the Gateway International Bridge” had already borne fruit. The various projects I observed on my first tour through the encampment, and in varying stages of completion, resulted from the joint-NGO collaboration:
- AquaBlock water filtration systems: installed by Global Response Management with funds from Team Brownsville;
- Showers, laundry station, and Port-a-Potties: installed by INM with funds from Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías & Abuelas of the RGV, and staffed by asylum seekers trained and paid by Resource Center Matamoros (RCM);
- A fourth “free store”: staffed and stocked by Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías and managed by asylum seekers hired, trained, and paid for by the same;
- A camp comedor (cafeteria): the canopy tent under construction on our arrival — by INM — would house Chef José Andres’ World Central Kitchen (WCK) in collaboration with Team Brownsville before Jim and I left Matamoros in late January 2020.
From Goliath on Steroids to the Invisible Hulk
Unfortunately, the Dignity Village Collaborative did not win its ultimate prize: moving asylum seekers out of tents and into hard-walled structures called “Better Shelters,” which would have served them better in the recent storm. Nor did they get the chance to realize the new Escuelita: a mobile school created from an old school bus, donated by actress Estefania Rebellon and her Yes We Can World Foundation.
The group did have everything in place, however, when their foe transformed from MPP into COVID-19.
Refusing, again, to look away, Team Brownsville and members of the Dignity Village Collaborative sensed the new evil before it blew in. They battened down the hatches and braced themselves for the coronavirus. Here’s what they did:
ANDREA: First, we moved all asylum seekers formerly on the plaza up onto the levee at the wishes of INM. We promised them sturdier four-person canvas tents if they moved up. We couldn’t get them Better Shelters, so we decided to get them better tents — ones you can stand up in.
Then we organized a battalion of asylum seekers to clean and paint the plaza as a thank you to Matamoros residents and just in time for the Charro Days Fiesta in late February.
Charro Days is an annual festival that celebrates the culture of the borderlands on both sides of the river.
SERGIO: We met as a board in early March and decided to stop volunteers who fly into Brownsville from crossing the border. Only visits from volunteers who arrived in a private car.
They did this well before the governor imposed stay-at-home measures and before the government closed the border.
SERGIO: We also put two shipping containers in the camp, then we took over truckloads of supplies.
Arm-in-arm with the Angry Tías, particularly Tía Cindy, they stocked the containers with non-perishable food stores to last for months.
ANDREA: We established a fourth “free store.” We call them Tiendas. They are staffed by asylum seekers, our “store managers,” and there is now one in each of the four camp zones. The shipping containers are their distribution centers.
SERGIO: And we’re using technology to communicate. We talk with the store managers every day via What’s App. If anything is needed, we buy it online in Mexico and have it delivered. We also built up capacity in the camp cocinas, adding more cooks and upgrading the makeshift stoves with camping stoves.
ANDREA: Once the plaza was cleared, Team Brownsville brought in additional port-a-potties. We had them placed in the north end of the camp to make toilets accessible to people living at both ends, and to make them safer to access at night. RCM hired asylum seekers to keep the toilets clean and tidy between twice-daily flushings, and to hand out toilet paper. We also added additional wash-water tanks — there are now 10.
MIKE: Tucker designed and built hand-washing stations with the help of asylum seekers. [There are now 96 sinks throughout the camp]. GRM spearheaded an educational campaign to explain why, how, and how often asylum seekers should use them. RCM hired and trained staff to keep them stocked and disinfected. And we bought tons of hand-sanitizer. Whenever I’m over there, I use it all the time to model it for the kids.
SERGIO: World Central Kitchen has been wonderful! They trained four asylum seekers as the camp’s food service professionals before the border closed and they were forced to pull out. They are paying several Matamoros restaurants to prepare food for refugees, which meant that we could use our funds for tents and medical supplies for GRM, and put in the water filtration systems and sinks. And Pastor Abraham is now bringing firewood in so the asylum seekers can stop cutting down the trees.
MELBA: Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías also kitted out the Tiendas with seating areas. The Tiendas are the heart of each camp colonia. We installed a large-screen TV in each one so teachers could continue to deliver lessons by video-conferencing and pre-recorded video content. In the absence of regular face-to-face Escuelita teachers from the US, parents and teens are helping to teach. And the biblioburros are available to everyone at all times so adults can continue reading to the children.
ANDREA: Also, Tía Joyce arranged to have sewing machines brought over — Victor actually carried them over one by one. The Tías sent fabric and screens and RCM engaged some of the women to make masks for all camp residents.
INM encircled the refugee camp in new fencing. In another place and time, this might have felt threatening. But one camp gateway makes it easier for GRM to keep infection out.
MIKE: The government explained: the fence is not to keep you in, but to keep you safe.
Finally, GRM just recently completed a 20-bed field hospital within the camp. Staff will now be able to quarantine and treat victims of COVID-19.
As of this writing, 22 May 2020, the field hospital had yet to treat a COVID patient.
DAVID: Though coronavirus cases are starting to mount in Matamoros and Brownsville, there are so far 0 cases in the camp.
ANDREA: No outsiders are allowed in. And if insiders leave camp for any reason, they must be tested on their way back in.
MIKE: The Collaborative continues to meet weekly, on Sunday, by Zoom. We really love each other and work well together. Monday meetings with INM also continue, also by Zoom. We keep the would-be US asylum seekers central to all things, discussions are focused on security, health, safety, food, and supplies.
Among the members of the Collaborative, Tucker and Gaby as well as a small crew of GRM health practitioners committed to staying in or nearby the camp. They are poised to support asylum seekers when required. Mike and Tía Cindy still cross as needed and never enter the camp without gloves and masks and hand sanitizer. But all other members of Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías are staying away for everyone’s safety.
What Keeps You Going?
ANDREA: We didn’t choose it, we were called to do it.
MELBA: The kids. You can see God in their eyes. And the personal relationships you make in the camp. Being there, meeting the people, hearing their stories — that holds a lot of weight.
SERGIO: Because they have so many worries. They worry about not getting asylum. They worry about being deported and what will happen to them if they’re forced to go home. They worry about their kids, and if they’ll be okay after all they’ve had to live through. The least we can do is take away the worry about whether or not they’ll eat.
MIKE: Never wanting to lose the trust of the asylum seekers, keeps me going. They know they can always call on me if they need something. I’ll always do my best to provide it, no questions asked. I believe our entire team feels that way.
DAVID: What if it were my family? I would want them to have hope.
What Do You Want the World to Know?
MIKE: That we’re not unique. Anyone can make someone else’s life better. It’s easier to make a big impact as a team. But you can change lives for the better in your own backyard too.
SERGIO: We’re just doing what every US citizen can and should do: listening to our hearts and doing what’s right.
DAVID: I think this pandemic is producing empathy. Suddenly people understand what it means to have your freedom taken away, what it means to have your safety and routine taken from you. I hope that empathy will extend to the asylum seekers when it’s all over.
MELBA: Don’t be afraid to look into the eyes of another. You’ll see yourself there. There will be no question in your mind about whether you will help them or not.
ANDREA: Yes, it’s about seeing and not looking away. But more importantly it’s about recognizing that these people are our brothers and sisters, people that deserve every opportunity to live their lives in safety and security.
Author’s Note: Team Brownsville is a completely volunteer-run organization. None of the five co-founders nor any of the board members has ever drawn a cent of monies donated or raised.
Thank you for reading Episode 10 in my travelogue of a road trip gone awry: THE FIRST SOLUTION: Tales of Humanity and Heroism from Trump’s Manufactured Border Crisis, rolling out on Medium as fast as I can write it because the issues are Just. That. Urgent. Click here to access the Project Forward followed by links to all other articles in the series.
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”
— Toni Morrison, 1995
