Journey For Justice December 16th, Day 16 Yuma

We get to the Colorado River's edge that delineates the u.s.a. & Mexico by 5a.m.

In the dark and down the bank from the road, we see several little fires burning and dark silhouettes of people huddling around them.

The humanitarian aid folks who show up every morning to hand out snacks, fruit, & water tell us we might be stopped & not allowed to share food, depending on which agents are there.

This morning there is abundant press so the border patrol basically ignores us.

It is freezing cold & many refugees are wet & in flimsy warm weather clothes. Even the ones that have more substantial clothes are shivering.

There is the first line of maybe 50 people standing along the edge where border patrol has selected them to be out of the hundreds of other people hanging back. These first line will be taken to the center to be processed. If they make it through that, then they can be released to go on to family or friends here in the states until they see an immigration lawyer.

Many, if not most of these people will be sent back to Mexico or some other country – without their possessions and shoe laces - & not allowed asylum here.

We meet people here in the dark and cold from all over the world - everywhere we have or are invading: Pakistan, India, Columbia, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Sri Lanka, Dominican Republic, Peru, Honduras. My comadre, a nurse, finds the coldest womyn & children & begins taking off her layers of shirts and sweaters to pass on to them. I wish I would have thought to layer up like that.

She even wraps her red coat several times around a young, skinny shivering girl before putting her back into her mother’s arms: her coat that she's worn every day of our Journey.

We take plastic garbage bags and collect empty water bottles and breakfast bar wrappers and any other garbage folks hand us. Then, as the sky begins to lighten we go to another part of the wall bordered on the u.s. side by fallow fields where a handful of other refugees from Russia are being processed by a few agents. We pick up trash on this side also, as the local farmers will complain trash is being blown onto their gmo fields.