TWO ANGLES

by Marianna Ariel ColesCurtis

I.

I watched Border SOS 2 by Julio Cesar Morales on an iPad tacked to the back of a large adobe-chain-link installation at the Tucson MOCA.

When the music begins with a loop that continues for the duration of the video, the fleeing man can be seen hugging a metal pole, high up and stuck. We might read a lack of experience in his inability to continue. Or miles and miles of desert and dehydration in his limbs. Agents of empire circle below.

Tentative metallic tapping signals the first steps of a dance. The rescuer appears. He is fluid, fast, fluent. He has taken seriously the wall as an obstacle, but his ease makes of the wall a joke. When he reaches the stuck man, he offers his feet as platforms like a father dancing with a child.

The music which signals his arrival takes the wall for an instrument, conjuring a resonance machine of mallets on metal.

While the men ascend together up opposite sides of two countries, US Border Patrol agents film them. We’ve seen a Mexican cop car already, and we can’t expect Mexico to provide much haven.

But as the fleeing man makes his way across the apex, and as the rescuer encircles his body, a kind of safety emerges. Father-brother-lover-lower down a mammoth divide.

Almost cartoonish in their shimmying, safety is utterly temporary, seconds-long and shining. In the deadly serious, this escape is a victory dance.

II

At the Kino Border Initiative Comedor in Nogales, Sonora, I sat with Jaret, the education coordinator, behind a portable, plexiglass covid barrier while he performed an intake interview with a family from Guerrero. Many families from Guerrero had been arriving to the Comedor over the past weeks, Jaret told us. Cartel violence was escalating there, sometimes evicting entire villages.

The family was young, with a two year old daughter, L, who kept touching my fingers through the plexiglass. The cartel had threatened to kidnap L, and so they fled with their neighbors, another young family who sat at a table behind them, waiting for their own interview. They had all come to Nogales in hopes of applying for asylum in the US. 

Unfortunately, Jaret told them, the next open slot for a meeting with the lawyers was in September, two months out. The Florence Project, one of the only organizations providing free legal resources and representation to migrants entering Arizona, could only meet with nine families a day. The day we visited the Comedor, 450 people came to get food.

Debriefing later, Jaret had a hard time answering some of our questions about the current asylum process. It’s just that all of this is so new, he said.

At the time of our visit, lawyers from the Florence Project were committed to helping anyone who wanted to fill out an asylum application. These applications were then forwarded on to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), who decided, by a seemingly mysterious process, which people were the most vulnerable, and then passed some number of those applications on to the Department of Homeland Security. I balked. The IRC was deciding who got to apply for asylum?

Early in the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the Trump Administration invoked Title 42, which allowed CBP and Border Patrol to expel people attempting to cross the US-Mexico border without due process, effectively halting any new asylum applications. Immigrant rights advocates were hopeful that the Biden administration would revoke the use of Title 42, but as I write this in the ninth month of his presidency, that still hasn’t happened.

There is no clear dividing line between non-profits and non-governmental organizations and the states they work under and around. I’ve witnessed many decisions, particularly in the borderlands, made by organizations which tip over into a grey area where an organization seems to be providing aid not only to people neglected by and/or oppressed by the state, but also to the state itself. In my mind, IRC’s decision fell into that category. Filtering asylum applicants seemed very clearly to be the DHS’s work, and making decisions about who was most worthy of asylum seemed to directly condone a deeply problematic process.

From my understanding, this whole arrangement with the IRC (and, it turns out, five more organizations on both sides of the border) came about as a settlement for two lawsuits the ACLU brought against the Biden Administration for its use of Title 42. I say “from my understanding” because it’s hard to find news articles on all this. It’s been pretty quiet. 

In exchange for dropping the lawsuits, the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security agreed to let some of the most dire cases enter the US and begin the asylum application process. But the IRC had to do the work of choosing those cases, essentially gatekeeping the asylum process in the US.

It was hard not to feel outrage at the blatant folding of an NGO into the workings of the DHS.

But that was just a moment when things felt somewhat clear. Evidently it was clear to the IRC as well, because they pulled out of the agreement shortly after the Biden administration announced at the end of July that Title 42 would continue on as the law of the land.

Living in Tucson for the past four and a half years, I’ve been struck by just how much energy on the left goes into humanitarian aid projects. When people’s lives are constantly on the line, and the political landscape is an ever-shifting field, it seems hard to do anything other than react, to fill the newest need in the best way the moment seems to make available. Sometimes, that can look a lot like compromise. Or worse, collaboration.

But whatever clarity I might have felt at the Comedor as I learned about the IRC’s involvement in asylum proceedings, I’d also sat across the table talking to L’s young family, and as far as asylum went, this new system which involved the IRC was the only hope they had. Now there’s no system at all.