Tugging wagons loaded with chicken dinners, blankets, coats and shoes, Mike Benavides and his partner, Sergio Cordova, guided half a dozen volunteers across the bridge from Texas into one of Mexico’s most dangerous states.
They walked past Mexican customs and headed to a group of about two dozen migrants camping under tarps at the foot of the bridge. Days before, the volunteers had brought them the tarps.
It’s a routine repeated every evening as the volunteers enter Mexico to feed and clothe the stranded asylum seekers.
U.S. Customs officers stationed at the center of the bridge wave volunteers through but keep asylum seekers from entering the country. Mexican immigration officials instruct the migrants to add their names to a waiting list that has now stretched to 80 people. Some had been waiting for more than a month.
The lucky ones would be allowed to cross the bridge, be held in immigration detention and then released at the bus station in neighboring Brownsville, Texas. There, some of the same volunteers would greet them with donated backpacks of supplies, breakfast tacos and help deciphering their bus tickets and court paperwork.
In a sense, it’s the new Ellis Island, but run by local volunteers.
“Sergio and I sometimes feel like we’re spitting on a bonfire. Shouldn’t they have the Red Cross or somebody over here?” said Benavides, 49. “But if we don’t do it, they go hungry.”
The two don’t have nonprofit status or a budget, relying instead on donations through Facebook and a GoFundMe page. They have recruited 20 helpers, whose ranks sometimes swell to 50. They call themselves Team Brownsville.
For now, they operate out of the couple’s ranch-style house. The garage is packed with supplies, its walls lined with donated toiletries, underwear, shoe laces, and other essentials. Migrants’ shoe laces are confiscated for safety reasons when they’re detained, and they often don’t get a chance to bathe while in detention.
The couple converted two spare bedrooms into temporary shelters. They’ve hosted 20 migrants so far, and persuaded a local homeless day program to open a temporary migrant shelter to take in more. The migrants generally leave the next day by bus. If they have far to go, the couple gives them $10 to $20 for food. They call the migrants “our sons for the day.”
The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.
You, ah, don’t think it’s unfair to judge people’s morals based on their finances?
I, ah, think that it’s perfectly fair to judge people’s morals based on the amount of money they pour into neo-nazi political movements, yeah actually.
hey if you have to lie about your gf or gender or sexual orientation these holidays, just know you aren’t a bad person!!!! you are valuing your safety over all else and you are right for doing so!!!
I’d just like to add that this includes your emotional safety. Even if you are pretty sure you won’t face any major consequences, if you’re not ready you’re not ready.
You deserve to come out on your own time in exactly the way that you want/need to. If you need to keep some information to yourself until that moment comes, it’s absolutely okay.
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