Border Network for Human Rights - an insight to the winner of the 2018 Raymond Milefsky Award

In 2018, IBRU gave the first annual Raymond Milefsky Award to the ‘Border Network for Human Rights’ (BNHR). Based in El Paso, Texas, BNHR has a membership of more than 700 families in West Texas and southern New Mexico. Its aim is to facilitate the education, organising and participation of marginalised border communities, to defend and promote human and civil rights.

Dr Lauren Martin, Lecturer in Geography at Durham University and IBRU Steering Committee member, spoke to Fernando Garcia, Executive Director of BNHR, about the organisation. The interview in full is presented here.

Could you say a little about what prompted the formation of the organisation. Are there any specific cases or events that that drew people together?

It took us from 1998 until about 2001 to establish two pillars: the human rights promoter and the human rights committee. [By then] we had then trained close to 500 human rights promoters in West Texas and southern New Mexico. And right now we have close to 40 human rights committees and 1,000 families participating in the committees. We started creating Regional Coordinators so we could have levels of leadership to actually make sure that we would expand the work of our networks every year.

Every year since 2002, … members of our community have come together in a Gathering and it is at that Gathering where the decisions [are made]. That means they evaluate the priorities of next year and [have] discussions with members and also, very importantly, make the leadership accountable. So if the members do not give you a vote of confidence then you have anything to do with the Border Network.

One of our latest campaigns is ‘Hugs Not Walls’. It is essentially an act of humanity. But it is also an act of protest because we are organizing an event at the middle of the Rio Grande. Right there at the borderline, to bring together families that have been separated to showcase the immoral and horrible impact of US policies.

Every time we organize an event like this, we just have capacity for 300 families. We have had requests from thousands of people, families that have been separated. So we have been able to, in six events, bring together more than 1,200 families. And this is nothing, [compared to] the rest of the universe of families being impacted by hate, by xenophobia and racism of these immigration policies.

So how do these events work? Do people from the Mexican side and people from the US side walk to the middle of the river or in to a space where they can meet?

It’s a very complex process. What we do is work with border institutions, including putting pressure on Border Patrol to allow this to happen. Because they understood, at the end of the day, this is about families and human beings. At least in El Paso, we have developed a state of engagement with Border Patrol to make them accountable. Because of this, we were able to organise these events.

Just to give you a picture, there are 3,000 people on both sides of the Border, representing close to 300 families. 1500 people on each side. So we organise blocks of 10 families. They walk down, each family with a [Border Network] member and they come and embrace for few minutes. It’s brief, like 5 minutes. We take five hours to go through all of the families.

Every time we do it, it is extremely painful because some of them cannot stop crying. They cannot say any words. Some of them have just been deported, others a month [ago], a year ago, some it has been ten years since they have seen each other. This is a testament of the resistance of the families but also an act of protest.  As long as they keep separating families, we’ll keep doing it.

That is one aspect of our work: to visualize and reconstruct the face of the immigrant family. We are not criminals. We are not rapists. There is no invasion. The border is not out of control. These families that we working with, families that are coming here… They came to this country for the same reasons that European families went through Ellis Island. The border region is a new Ellis Island.  This is a moment of excitement. This is the moment of opportunity. The Beacon of Hope.

In addition to Hugs Not Walls, what else is the BNHR working on?

We have been doing a lot of local, national and international immigration work. Every year we have sent members to Washington to Austin to Mexico City. We also will bring delegations from Washington to the Border to understand the needs of the communities that live along the border.

Since the inception of Border Network, we’ve been launching abuse documentation campaigns. So that means a whole methodology of documentation: denounce it, make it public, and give the people a chance to tell the story of abuse. Every year, we launch a campaign where, for several weeks in October and November, we have hundreds of documenters trained from these same families going to their neighbours and picking up cases of abuses. They are trained on how to document, do interviews, and then we circulate the testimonies. By December 10^th, International Human Rights Day, we release the report on the status of human rights and abuse in the region. We’ve released a report every year since 2000. And that has also [helped make] Border Patrol accountable.

Back in the year 2000, we had to take a decision. Do we, as a community, act as a traditional activist organisation just [acting] to denounce Border Patrol and not do anything else? Because we were denouncing people abuses and impunity but in practice things were not changing.

So, we said, how do we do this? We transformed this tool [we had created] of abuse documentation by traditional human rights organizations to produce a community report. And we had families from several communities presenting testimonies about the report, not one, but hundreds.

That's when we saw border patrol changing. Usually Border Patrol would say, well, those are ‘loony toony leftist groups’, right? But now they're seeing hundreds of people in the community room. You know, this is the community. This is not just one organization anymore. We make massive--we ‘massify’—the abuse documentation. And then border patrol reacted.

We started organising community forums with Border Patrol. So we had multiple people, many of them maybe documented (we don't ask them), in the forum with Border Patrol Chiefs. They were questioning Border Patrol Chiefs about constitutional rights; Border Patrol will actually explain the policy to them. But they also explain the rights of people based on the Constitution. So at that moment, we had a realization that immigrants had become the first offenders of the Constitution.

We had somewhere on video the chief of Border Patrol saying: yes, I mean ‘if one of my agents goes to your house and does not have an arrest warrant, without your permission they cannot enter your house’. That just reaffirms the idea that rights were important, the knowledge of rights.

Also we did cross-training with Border Patrol. Sometimes we sent our leaders to a master training with Border Patrol on human rights and then Border Patrol would send some of the officers to talk with us about their complaint process, for example.

Every time something would happen we put a lot of pressure, but all we were engaged with them.

Where would you like to see BNHR work move in the future?

Firstly, to communicate and replicate the engagement model, making local entities and federal institutions at the border accountable. All along the border.  That is one thing that we want to share. And that can only happen when you [have] got a strong organising process. And I say that, but organising is not easy. It's about changing consciousness. Changing consciousness and building consciousness, both those impacted numbers in a community. Saying, you can change the reality, and nobody is going to do it for you. So build yourself and become a leader and involve your families. I think we need that kind of organising along the border. So that is one goal.

The second goal is that we need to connect the immigrant border resident struggle to the social justice struggle in the United States because we are not separated from that.  And sometimes even "the immigrant Rights Movement" becomes very isolated.  And it is not true: what immigrants are going through is the same thing that African American youth are going through.  The issues of poverty, police repression, lack of access to services and healthcare, you name it. Immigrants around the country are the same. So for us connecting that and being part of a larger human rights social movement--that is where I see our organisation going.

And obviously we would like to be a very important part of providing the policy vision coming from the border into the immigration discussion nationally. Because the border is always treated as a trade-off.  They start immigration reform and they say, ‘yeah, we're going to exchange DACA for border walls or more detention centres, more separation of families, and things like that, more Border Patrol. [It’s] time to move from quantity into quality, and we need to infuse enforcement with human rights.