Desert Walk and Wall Protest - by Karen Peterson-Iyer

Today we headed out—to the desert. Our aim was to get a better idea of the terrain that is routinely crossed by migrants seeking to escape desperate poverty, violence, persecution, and fear in their home countries. Migrants seeking to provide for their families and themselves. Migrants seeking LIFE.

The Sonoran Desert near Tucson is certainly harsh—dry, disorienting, and seemingly endless as it stretches to distant mountains. But it was far from barren; in fact it was teeming with cacti, in all their needly splendor. Beautiful—but dangerous and painful, as Margaret soon discovered:

Our guide on the walk was Larry, a former U.S. Marine and now a volunteer with Samaritans. Samaritans is a dedicated group who hikes the desert carrying water, food, and medical supplies for desperate migrants, often leaving the water at various points on the trail where those migrants are known to travel.

At a few spots not far from the path, we encountered weather-beaten backpacks, evidently discarded by migrants at some point on their journeys—maybe when they were picked up by Border Patrol? Maybe as they approached civilization, and thus tried to disguise where they had come from? We had no way of knowing. These served as sobering reminders of the dangerous and sometimes deadly nature of those journeys.

The packs also left many of us wondering about what they had once contained—meager provisions to sustain a person through the harsh crossing...religious ornaments with which to pray during times of fear...small mementos of a life left behind...or perhaps small trinkets to help connect that past life to the hope for a brighter life ahead.

Not far into our walk we came across a wooden yellow cross, built by Tucson artist Alvaro Enciso. Enciso erects many such crosses in the desert, in places where migrants are known to have died while attempting to make it to safety. In this case, the cross commemorated Jose Luis Cruz Cruz, age 41, whose remains were found on April 10, 2011. Jose was one of so many who attempted but did not survive this perilous journey.

  

Together we formed a circle and shared a quiet and tearful prayer for those whose lives had been lost in this desert, on this pilgrimage of hope and pain. The words of the late Oscar Romero, martyred archbishop of El Salvador, reflect the moment well for me: “There are things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”

After returning to the BorderLinks office and a quick lunch, some in our group then made our way to downtown Tucson, to join a small but mighty protest against the “national emergency” on the border declared by Trump last Friday.

 

The protest felt like a fitting follow-on to a morning of sorrow—sorrow for the victims of a dysfunctional U.S. immigration policy, one that unjustly and inhumanely vilifies the poor and the desperate for seeking a livable existence for themselves and their families. And ultimately, our prayer of protest was also one of hope—hope that we may eventually have a border where there truly can be no more deaths, and for a desert that may exist as a place simply of beauty, and not one of sorrow and pain.