By JIM McKEEVER I spent the last two weeks of May at the US-Mexico border in Texas, volunteering with the humanitarian organization Team Brownsville, welcoming asylum seekers. In those two weeks, we welcomed hundreds of men, women and children, providing food, clothing, hygiene supplies and occasional assistance with transportation to other cities. The need is …
By JIM McKEEVER It was a few minutes after the pizza joint opened at 11 a.m. on a dreary Monday morning in Middle America. I pulled the rental SUV into a parking space in the the empty lot, transferred a $5 bill from my wallet to my front pocket and pulled up a photo of …
By JIM McKEEVER The woman eases herself into a chair across from a man in the waiting room, sets her walker aside and goes into detail about her many surgeries. “I’ve been cut 24 times,” she says, launching into a laundry list of diseases, including diabetes, renal failure, fibromyalgia. She says she is 57, grew …
By JIM McKEEVER Mexicans can be heroes again. A U.S. District Court judge last week overturned a 2021 U.S. Customs and Border Protection policy that had stopped Mexicans from crossing the border to donate plasma. In May 2021, I noticed long lines outside the three plasma donation centers within a few hundred yards of the …
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 