Photographs we're seeing online today, including one by Mark Lambie of the El Paso Times, below, capture the desperation of the unknown number of men, women, and children currently penned in, inside cages, under the Mexico-US international bridge, in El Paso, Texas.
This should have been the featured photo. The United States government is penning in asylum seekers under the international bridge in El Paso. pic.twitter.com/8CDc5MOZjr
— Brooke Binkowski (@brooklynmarie) March 28, 2019
Hundreds of migrants are being held beneath the Paso Del Norte International Bridge in El Paso. CBP says it has run out of space to process the asylum seekers. In the El Paso Times' photo above, two boys look out from the fence at the bridge as protestors demand their release.
As reported yesterday, most are from Central America, many are families, and some are in urgent need of medical attention.
Let's be clear about what we are witnessing in these images.
The United States government under Donald Trump is creating impromptu wire fence concentration camps for asylum seekers, as part of a manufactured border crisis driven by the Trump administration's white nationalist, white separatist, white supremacist policies.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan visited El Paso today, El Paso Times reports, and said the border has hit its "breaking point."
The recent influx of Central American migrants has made the El Paso Sector the second-busiest location on the U.S.-Mexico border.
From today's edition of the El Paso Times:
The Border Network for Human Rights, an El Paso immigrant advocacy group, said that the government should invest in staff and infrastructure "to make our asylum system in ways that uplift our values and humanity of all persons."
In a statement, the group accused McAleenan of painting migrants as criminals.
“Asylum seekers are not criminals,” the group stated. “Asylum is a lawful process and migrants need to have an ability to claim asylum. Denying migrants the ability to claim asylum at ports, as our laws are designed to work, may force them to cross without authorization but does not make them criminals or undermine their asylum claims in any way.”
The group added that they "invite Commissioner McAleenan to tell the Irish of the 1840s or the Italians of the 1890s that poverty and starvation are not reasons to come to seek the opportunity, welcome, and grace of these United States."
[via brooklynmarie]
