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Friday, Jan 9, 2009
The record pace of deaths in recent months now has moved a second church-based group into action. On July 1, Ufford-Chase joined Southside Presbyterian pastor John Fife and a few supporters gathered around a volunteer's SUV and slapped magnetic signs on its doors identifying it as the Samaritan Patrol, then sent it, a driver, a medic and a translator into the desert searching for people in distress. Every day that week, a group went four-wheeling along dirt roads south of where June's deaths were concentrated, stopping at washes (migrants commonly follow dry streambeds until they find a road) and hiking 20 to 30 minutes in each direction, calling out "Somos amigos!" -- "We're friends!" -- as they looked for migrants in distress.
Samaritan Patrols didn't encounter anyone during the first week, although late on July 2 another body was discovered about a mile from a point Ufford-Chase had passed earlier that day. But had the group found somebody, it would have been ready. The patrol leaves Tucson at 4:30 a.m. with 30 gallons of water, a case of tuna fish, an emergency medical kit, rehydration packets, a satellite phone, a GPS unit to track its position, binoculars and walkie-talkies.
The migrants' plight attracted 50 potential volunteers -- students, retirees, church members, schoolteachers, professors and veteran activists -- to a July 7 orientation in the sanctuary of Southside Presbyterian. The room, like the audience, was ecumenical: a circular adobe space with a flagstone floor, a ceiling of wood beams, and a niche under each window holding votive candles and small, carved religious figurines. It evoked both a Hopi kiva and a Mexican Catholic chapel, and it was half-full of Presbyterians, Quakers, Jews and members of other religions.
The Border Patrol has declined to comment on Samaritan Patrol, but no doubt has a keen interest in the group -- interest, and perhaps wariness, because of its long-running conflict with John Fife, who co-founded the sanctuary movement 20 years ago. That was a nationwide effort by 330 churches to transport and shelter refugees, most of whom were fleeing the U.S.-backed civil strife in El Salvador and had been denied legal entry to the United States. Some sanctuary workers helped refugees cross the border illegally, and transported them through the country in defiance of U.S. law.
Two decades and two felony convictions later, Fife was obviously spoiling for another fight during a sanctuary reunion in March. "There may be a need for another civil initiative to protect these people again," he said of Latin American economic migrants and potential asylum seekers.
Although Samaritan Patrol makes a point of operating aboveboard, including telling the Border Patrol what it's going to do in advance, several volunteers were concerned about how much trouble they could get into. A. Bates Butler, one of the sanctuary defense attorneys, pointed out at the reunion that in the current anti-terrorism climate, people testing the Border Patrol's authority are more likely to go to jail than they were 20 years ago. So, volunteers asked, if the Border Patrol catches them driving dehydrated migrants to the hospital -- one option in the Samaritan Patrol protocol -- could their vehicles be impounded? Fife and Ufford-Chase believe they can work within the law as long as they are providing humanitarian aid. But they are advising volunteers, for example, that while showing a migrant a map is OK, giving the migrant the map could be illegal. Exactly how much slack the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service will cut Samaritan Patrol remains to be seen.
Still, it is enough to give some hope to the Mexican workers who wait to cross the border -- but not much.
Sol de Justicia Presbyterian Church, two blocks south of the 16-foot steel wall separating Nogales, Sonora, from its Arizona counterpart, serves dinner three times a week to migrants on their way north and recent deportees from the United States. That's where Alfonso and his friends, most of them 20- to 40-year-olds staying at a government-sponsored shelter down the street, sat talking about why they want to return to the United States.
Carrying one of the work documents issued by the Mexican bureaucracy, Alfonso had been searching for a job on the Sonoran side of the border all day. "I've got paperwork for everything," he complains in a gravelly voice, " but I can't find a job."
Even if he finds work here, the best they could hope for might be manual labor paying $85 for a six-day week. In the United States, Alfonso had made $17 an hour as a roofer; another diner, Juan Luis, says he got $32 an hour in construction. As bad as the pay in Nogales is, Juan Luis says, jobs further south pay only a third as much. "This country is messed up and poor," he says.
As a group, the men left the little church and shuffled down the dusty city street toward the shelter. There they would spend another night biding their time, waiting for another chance to cross. Inevitably, some among them would dare to cross the desert.
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