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P H O T O B Y M O N IC A L O Z A N O
A woman with her child meets her spouse on the opposite side o f the border wall.
BY INAKI ESTÌVALIZ
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT É R
F I \h e nonprofit Border Network of
Human Rights, dedicated to educating
and organizing El Paso, Texas,
residents and migrants, holds one of the
most emotional events that can be held,
each time they are allowed to. It happens on
the border of the U.S. and Mexico, and is
called “Abrazos no muros” (“Hugs not
walls”).
The founder and executive director of the
organization, Fernando García, announced
that they will try to celebrate this October
again. It is an opportunity for some families
of migrants separated by U.S. immigration
policies to meet again, even for a few
moments, and embrace each other.
García explains that even though the Rio
Grande, which separates the American city,
El Paso, from thè Mexican city, Ciudad
Juarez, dries up at some times of the year,
they still take advantage of the opportunity
to “take the border for a few hours” and
allow the momentary family reunion.
They have to coordinate with the U.S.
Border Patrol, on one side, and the Mexican
Federal Police, on the other, “to allow
families that have been separated by
deportation, mothèrs who are separated
from their children, husbands who have
been separated, to get together briefly in
the middle of the river, and to embrace each
other. That is the central concept”
JL
The activist explains that they have
already done five “Abrazos no muros,” in
which families have managed to “reunify
briefly, to embrace for three, four, five
minutes. It’s not a long time, but for us it’s
not just an act of love, of humanity, of trying
to bring those families together; it’s an act
of protest. It’s bringing attention to this
crisis that the U.S. immigration policy has
generated. That is a crisis that is bursting
and destroying the Latino family by the
thousands, if not millions.
“Seriously, I’m not joking: in the last 10
years families have been busted and
separated ... Children separated from their
parents by 10 years, for five years, for two
years, husbands who cannot be seen,
boyfriends who are committed, all of them
are separated,” García said, regretfully.
He explains that on some occasions they
have managed to get some of those couples
to marry each other on one side of the wall,
“and then they had to return to their sides,
to be separated.
“With this we want to present to the
country the real image of the separation. We
will try to do the next one in October,
depending on the conditions, of course.
That is a thorn in the system that does not
want us to do it, but we will try to continue
doing it. They continue separating families;
we are going to keep unifying them so that
they embrace,” the activist asserts.
The Human Rights Border Network has
been documenting abuses of authority,
police abuses and Border Patrol abuses for
20 years,
“We have been trying to change that
pattern of abuse and institutional behavior
that happen on the border, especially
against migrants, but also against residents,
who are citizens and who also live in this
region but who are Latino and are
sometimes racially profiled, because of
racism on the part of police and immigration
agencies,” he says.
“Our job is to resist abuse, educate our
communities, and organize them also, to
fight for changes in laws. It is recognized
that migrants are the cornerstone of the
U.S., that there are millions of migrants
living in the United States without
documents and that they have to be
recognized as part of society,” García says.
Photographer Monica Lozano has
documented several “Abrazos no muros”
and explains that one of the things that
most attracted her attention at the event
was Once in December 2017, when the river
had water (it is usually dry), so they could
not celebrate it at the usual place in the
river basin. They had to do it at the border
wall.
“The wall is made of metal. It was frozen,
very cold, but people did not care, and they
stuck their faces there in the metal, just to
hug the children with their little faces stuck
to the metal. Human warmth and the need
for connection and to embrace in this icy
wall that was all rusted,” Lozano says.
The aberration of the border that
only the common citizen can
overcome
The drama of the U.S.-Mexico border is
that of an undeclared war that fy? not new,
although the Trump administration has
exacerbated it to unprecedented limits by
caging migrant children separated from
their parents, an infamy that the politicians
will not solve, but the common American
will.
This is what one of the people who knows
most about the aberration of the border
believes, Fernando García, founder and
executive director of the Border Network of
Human Rights, an organization that has
spent the past 20 years working to educate
and organize the residents and migrants of
the area.
“For 20 years we have been documenting
abuses of authority, abuses by the police,
abuses by the Border Patrol, and we have
been trying to change that pattern of abuse
and institutional behavior that happens on
the border, especially against migrants, but
also against residents, who are citizens and
who also live in this region but who are
Latino and are sometimes inclined to be
See EL PASO, page 5