“It Made a Difference for This One”

A few times when I’ve been witnessing this week at the spot where people come off the bridge from Mexico, I’ve wondered if our actions were making a difference—especially when we’ve discovered and participating in so many opportunities to roll up your sleeves and get involved directly with helping the refugees. Haven’t the people of Brownsville and those crossing from Matamoros already gotten the message?

Yesterday, my doubts were answered emphatically.

Remember the old story of the boy gently returning beached starfish to the ocean? When told he couldn’t make a difference among the thousands of stranded starfish, he replied, “It made a difference to that one.”

Around 4 p.m. yesterday, we were just wrapping up the witness for the day, tidying the site and starting to put signs back in the van, when a young man approached from the bridge, saw the signs about stopping MPP, and got extremely excited.

It turned out he wasn’t coming from the bridge, but from the the tent court behind the bridge, where Judge Barbara Cigarroa had just granted his asylum. This was the judge that several in our group had observed on Tuesday.

He hugged us all and shared a bit of his story. His name was José and like 60 percent of the refugees in the camps, he is Honduran. Guatemalans make up the next-largest contingent, but we’ve met refugees from Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico, and elsewhere. Most of his family had been killed in Honduras. He was shaking with emotion and also ravenously hungry after a long day in court. Fortunately, a volunteer named Kat had a whole ice chest full of food and drink, so we were able to fix that part easily.

We were also able to have Rebecca, a native Spanish-speaker, explain his options to him. He had been provided very little information on his release and planned to catch a plane that night to meet his brother in Orlando. We googled for him and determined that there wasn’t going to be another flight out of Brownsville. Then he thought he would take a bus to Houston then fly from there. Rebecca convinced him that he was much better off staying overnight at a safe house the volunteers run and then flying in the morning, because Brownsville ICE officials are a lot more familiar with asylum papers than Houston’s.

“It made a difference to that one.”

Note: I had originally posted a photo of José celebrating at the border but was advised that this could put any remaining family in Honduras at risk. I have cropped out any identifying information from his asylum paper. So the absence of his picture should be another reminder of how much work we still have to do.