We must understand what we are resisting
the border is a weapon
This week, The Intercept published a report stating that U.S. border agents leave asylum seekers outside in cages during record-breaking heatwaves in Arizona.
Ryan Devereaux describes how Tucson has reached over 100 degrees for eleven straight days, and its surrounding towns, like Ajo, where these migrants are caged, reached over 114 degrees. He writes:
The Intercept observed roughly 50 migrants confined in a chain-link pen at the Ajo Border Patrol station, a highly remote outpost two hours west of Tucson. From a ridge overlooking the Border Patrol’s facility, the migrants could be seen gathered under a carport-like structure, crowding themselves into a single, narrow strip of shade to escape the desert sun. The only furniture available was a short stack of metal bleachers baking in the extreme heat.
Last week, we wrote: “There is no ideal thing called “religion.” It’s a historical process. Whether it is humanizing or repressive is up to us. We must assert a liberating faith.”
What does it mean to assert a liberating faith?
Devereaux mentioned human rights groups in his article that are meeting the needs of migrants at the border, including Ajo Samaritans.
The humanitarian group was created in a Catholic church in 2012 following a meeting facilitated by Brother David Buer of Tucson Samaritan. People in the church and the community created the group and organized together to provide water to asylum seekers attempting to cross the border. They developed routes and mutual aid and build with other organizations like Aguilas del Desierto and People Helping People in the Borderlands.
We are learning about the group, which seems like the work we want to invite faith communities to do. Despite southwestern state governments criminalizing this type of direct aid, in defiance of unjust laws, they are meeting the urgent material needs of migrants because they understand the political situation.
What’s at Stake
Our government criminalizes the migration of Black and Brown people through policy, like Biden’s attempt to pass legislation that denies asylum at the southern border to migrants who do not apply for protection first in their home countries. Or his usage of Title 42 to deport over 10,000 Haitian migrants from March 2020 to December 2021. Or Trump’s usage of it. Or Obama’s mass deportations of Latinx women, men, and children from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Xenophobic state violence denies citizenship to and deports Latinx migrants while also exploiting them to maintain various industries, most notably our food.
The creation of a border to “keep out an other” goes back hundreds of years. In Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Harsha Walia writes that understanding immigration enforcement demands that our southern border “be understood not only as a racist weapon to exclude migrants and refugees, but as foundationally organized through, and hence inseparable from, imperialist expansion, Indigenous elimination, and anti-Black enslavement.” This insight helps us to see Texas’ abuse of child refugees, the life-threatening conditions in Arizona’s immigration prisons, and the litany of indignities we learn about each year are all baked into the system. The border is a weapon.
Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash
Immigration enforcement upholds our government’s “racialized hierarchy of citizenship,” a political binary that labels white Europeans worthy of citizenship—and dignity—and all non-white groups, especially darker-skinned people from the global south, as unworthy others. It is why we see Ukrainian refugees welcomed with open arms and borders. And why Black and Brown women, men, and children are left to die in oceans, deserts, and cages.
Our tax dollars furnish the resources used to surveil and incarcerate asylum seekers. Our government decides who is displaced and surveilled and who is not; who is exploited and forced to labor, and who is not. We don’t have to accept this.
A Call to Action
We need to understand how the continual violence at the border connects to the anti-migrant violence occurring worldwide, and how this violence is also ecological violence, from migrants escaping natural disasters in Haiti to Tunisia to India. How empires destabilize. How they exploit Black and Brown countries for financial gain, for political power, to simply acquire lands and resources to grow armies. How they determine our relationships to all physical spaces around us.
We must refuse to blindly accept the narrative of history white supremacists/fascists/our institutions want us to accept. Especially at a time when books are banned, histories are written, here and worldwide. We want to arm our communities with the resources—and faith-based action—to understand our world and histories.
As we prepared Religion in Revolt, we thought a lot about how faith and justice intersect, and the role of Black liberation in this work. Together and individually, we return to James Cone’s Black Theology & Black Power. We believe that a liberating faith demands that the faithful have “the courage to affirm one’s being by striking out at the dehumanizing forces which threaten being.” We want to build a community unafraid to reclaim religious language from fascists.
We are in a time of upheaval; our communities have been here again and again and again. We have always resisted and survived. But we cannot survive without understanding the reality we find ourselves in.
In order to survive, the faithful must challenge fascism.
We must understand the ways in which Black and Indigenous women, children, and men use faith to resist white supremacy.
We must organize together, develop a strategic vision, and assert a liberating faith.
We’d Love to Hear from You!
We invite our community to consider: Who are some people, efforts, and books informing how you think about faith-based community building? What are some organizations engaged in community practices and struggles? How do you envision power building?
E-mail us at religionrevolt@gmail.com.
In solidarity,
Olga & Dwayne