Editor’s note: Five additional portraits are below McLaughlin’s essay. By BILL McLAUGHLIN Many years ago while working on environmental issues and getting quite angry at the political and corporate entities that were contaminating the air and groundwater in the rural area where I was living, an experienced activist and dear friend gave me some advice …
By JIM McKEEVER If you had the opportunity to provide comfort to a child, or a family, sleeping outside in the cold, you’d do whatever you could, right? It’s what any decent human being would do. Not the United States Border Patrol. Here’s what’s been happening for weeks now at the US-Mexico border in Friendship …
By JIM McKEEVER I won’t give you their names, but names shouldn’t matter anyway. They are voices at the other end of a phone call, faceless men ages 18 to 48, who tell me their stories in 60, 90 minutes. We say good-bye, I wish them luck and I have no idea what happens to …
By JIM McKEEVER The Facebook message from Julie at Minority Humanitarian Foundation arrived on a Wednesday afternoon. “Hi Jim and Nina would you be available/interested in driving to Calexico tomorrow to pick up an asylum seeker? His wife just called us and he is being released today. … we were wondering if you could pick …
By JIM McKEEVER What must it be like to give up everything you have, especially if you are forced to flee your home and travel thousands of miles, protecting yourself and your children from harm? Each day asylum seekers from various countries, as well as detainees released from a Texas immigration detention center, are dropped …
By JIM McKEEVER I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. — Matthew 25:35. On April 15, the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University hosted a dialogue, “Immigration Challenges and Choices: People, …
soy de aquí y soy de allá I didn’t build this border that halts me the word fron tera splits on my tongue from “Where You From?” by Gina Valdés By DENNIS HARROD Hope is the last thing you’d expect to find in the faces of people trapped in the border city of Tijuana. They’ve …
By JIM McKEEVER A character in Linda Britt’s play, “American Dreams: Immigration Stories,” delivers a searing monologue challenging the sanitized view of American history, its omission of brutal European colonialism and the centuries of suffering it caused people of color who were here first or brought here to be enslaved. The character, a young woman …
Sense of Decency 