Journey For Justice Dec 16th, Day 16: Yuma to Calexico ICE Detention Prison

ICE has this giant barbed wire/tall fence surrounded detention prison in Calexico, CA. I refuse to call prisons 'centers' - they're not. They are prisons.

Journey For Justice Dec 16th, Day 16 Cocopah Nation land

We leave this border crossing point and drive back down the 'wall' to another spot where the Cocopah land begins and the vile 'wall' ends.

For the Cocopah Nation was strong enough to fight and keep the government from building the wall through their ancient land.

The governor of Arizona had the unfuckinbelievably brilliant idea to place a double high wall of shipping containers along the border when tRump was unable to finish his malevolent steel and barbed wire wall.

At a cost of over $100 million the shipping containers were placed both on what they 'thought' was the edge of the Cocopah Nation land to connect with the finished wall. The nation sued, claiming it was indeed on their land. So now they're being removed at an additional cost of $76 million And there's another section of this shipping container wall that was additionally placed through the Coronado National Forest, which is federal land and without the permission of the feds. Now all the shipping containers are being removed and sent to a prison - fancy that.

Can you imagine the cost in damage to Mother Earth the heavy equipment needed to both transport these containers, place them, let alone pick them up and stack them on top of each other let alone put fuckin barbed wire along the top???

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.