The 7-day, 75-mile Migrant Trail Walk has spent 20 years challenging US border policy. More than 30 people are joining us again in Arizona’s hottest month.share

when i first did Immigrant Trail Walk The 2004 75-mile, seven-day walk from Sassave, Sonora to Tucson, Arizona had a sense of urgency.

Horrible tales came from the desert. People could not carry enough water or food, and walked for days in the oven-like summer desert. A woman told me that when her group ran out of water, she walked for five days. She described scenes of people falling and blood spontaneously spurting out of her nose. She herself fainted, and when she woke up in her hospital, her doctors shocked her to life. Another woman survived 26 days thanks to puddles in the May desert after twisting her ankle and falling behind her.

Encountering human corpses in the desert was so common that a lieutenant in Douglas, Arizona was put in charge of retrieving them.Sociologist interviews say he used to tie bodies to cars like deer Timothy Dunn I spoke with Cochise County Commissioner in 2006 when he was researching his book on the origins of deterrence strategies. Border closures and human rights: Operation El Paso reworked immigration enforcement. Commissioner Dunn told me he “didn’t think the guy was malicious” but thought it was “really grossly inappropriate”. The secretary speculated that this happened because the lieutenant “couldn’t bear to see so many immigrants die”.

In March 2004, longtime solidarity activist Richard Bohlen said after many conversations: video Richard talked about walking), border link Holly Hilburn, the organizer, and I committed to walking from the border to Tucson. Currently, we have the following humanitarian organizations: humanitarian borders, Samaritanand no more deathwas just born. George W. Bush had become President of the United States, and the Department of Homeland Security had just been established the previous year. Agencies such as Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are still in their infancy and were created out of the now expired Immigration and Naturalization Service. We didn’t realize how open the border budget floodgates were.

The three of us were going for a walk no matter what. It doesn’t matter if no one attended. We wanted to draw attention to the death toll, gradually increase crackdowns in border cities, and drive policy changes that force people to take dangerous and lonely routes. The walk was supposed to be done in solidarity with desert travelers and in memory of those who died. Fortunately, human rights groups Derechos Hunos Coalition She soon joined, and Kathryn Rodriguez got to work organizing the walk, which she has done every year for 20 years. In that moment, Rodriguez became the heart and soul of Woking, and we pledged to keep walking until we die.

Twenty years later, after Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden, the dead are still not over. On Monday, 30-plus participants began the walk, which was scheduled to begin in Sassave, Sonora, and end in Tucson on Sunday. Far from changing policy, the federal government is pushing it further. Since 2004, almost $400 billion It is spent on border security and immigration control. For example, that first year, where we started in Sasabe, there was no border wall. It was just a cow fence. There was no border guard post. There is now. half the agents. And there weren’t any smart watchtowers near where Walker was camping that could see beyond 11 miles. Deterrence is growing rather than being curtailed.

Record high in FY2022 (October to October) 853 bodies Found by Border Patrol. If you didn’t know this, don’t be surprised. The number of people who die across borders is a routine atrocity that is rarely reported in the domestic media. Border policies are now so mechanical that they are influenced by computer programs, and people are predicted to die every year, including this year (43 people already died in Arizona since January 1). And by the end of summer, we can predict like clockwork that hundreds of healthy people will die by the end of summer. It has the feel of a premeditated murder.

“For 20 years, we have stood in solidarity with immigrants and their families,” Rodriguez said. To do.”

When I went out on Tuesday, the sun was starting to set and the day was hitting a hot, dry temperature of 97 degrees, which was “comfortable” by late May/early June standards. Dryness appeared on the walkers’ faces, chapped lips, dust caked, and cracked skin. It was still his second day and the desert, as usual, was tough.

This walk is not meant to mimic a human border crossing. Pedestrians have many supports, mainly water, food and housing. And you don’t have to worry about border guards. Still, people are hit with injuries and illnesses on a regular basis. I did that walk 4 times, and each time my inner thighs were chafing so badly that I couldn’t walk properly. In the hottest year of the year, the sun burned my retinas when temperatures stood at 110 degrees for consecutive days. I didn’t know that was possible. Believe me, it was an uncomfortable feeling. And my eyes were so sore and full of tears that it became impossible to keep them open. Another time, my legs cramped while I was walking with a lot of chafing. I continued to walk, or tried to walk, and kept limping, but I fell further and further behind the group until I could no longer walk and had to take a truck. Walking through the desert, I didn’t realize there were no trucks to board.

Another aspect of this common suffering, or its consequences, is the camaraderie and respect of the walk. I could already feel it happening in the camp. Ms. Nativida Kano, a walker from Sasabe, sits in a folding chair and says, “I am walking feeling the sorrow” of those who are walking in the desert around us and those who died before us. she said. , for each step. On the walk, many carry crosses with the names of those who died on their journey. The “desconoside” that Nativida refers to is unknown. But this person, she told me, only we don’t know. He knows and knows this person. Another walker, Chris Amoroso, who walked with me in 2013 when he was 80, said the walk was like “praying with your walking feet.” Brother David Boor, a Franciscan friar who tended the meal in a slightly torn brown cassock, once told me that, in the Franciscan tradition, he was motivated by “overflowing love.”

In my own experience, there are moments during walks when you start to lose your sense of yourself. Usually around the second day. Whatever personal ambitions I had, they were frustrated. What matters is that I take the next step towards Tucson, pursue the group’s common goals, and stay connected with the people who travel the desert around me. No chafing thighs or hot eyes. There are always moments during a walk where you feel part of something much bigger than yourself.

I remember that feeling vividly when I took my first Migrant Trail Walk in 2004. By the time I finished the 75 miles, I knew I could do something great. Perhaps the usual paradigm can and does change, is changing, and can mold it into something else. I had a feeling that I could keep walking, that I could either go back 75 miles to the border and tear down the wall with my bare hands, or cross the country to Washington. It was transformative.

As Pedestrian Saul Padilla— coordinator A member of the Mennonite Central Committee Immigration Program asked at the beginning of the walk: “What would you do if your loved one went missing?” When would you stop looking? where do you look? when will you forget ’ Of course, the answer is never. You may stop watching it after a long time, but you will never forget it.

If you live in Southern Arizona, you can help out with this year’s Migrant Trail Walk by going to Kennedy Park in Tucson on Sunday, June 4th at 11am. Or, if you’re even more ambitious, join us for a walk at 7:30. I’m in the suburbs of Tucson to walk the last 10.7 miles. For more information, here.

This first appeared in border chronicle.