RACHEL REYES: Welcome to CMSOnAir – the podcast on migration and refugee issues brought to you by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. I’m Rachel Reyes, CMS’s Director of Communications.

In this episode, I speak with Joanna Williams, Director of Education and Advocacy for the Kino Border Initiative (known as KBI) – a binational organization in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico that works with migrants, educates communities, and advocates for just border and immigration policies. In her role, Joanna serves as the primary coordinator of the educational and advocacy programs offered by KBI in the United States, and helps develop and realize the organization’s advocacy policy and plan. Now here’s my conversation with Joanna Williams.

Thank you, Joanna, for joining us. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person, finally and to talk more about your work and the Kino Border Initiative. So, to start our discussion: Could you introduce the Kino Border Initiative and its mission?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: Thanks so much for having me here. It is great to be in New York. It is a lot colder than in Arizona. We are the Kino Border Initiative. We are a binational organization. We are part of the [Catholic] church and we are run in part by the Jesuits, as well as the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist. And we work in three different dimensions. So one dimension is humanitarian aid. We try to provide basic services to people in Nogales, Mexico — oftentimes food, clothing, medical attention. With other groups we help with access to phone calls. And then we also work in the dimensions of education and research and advocacy because our goal as an organization is to not exist as an organization and in order to do that we need to change hearts and minds and structures in society on both sides of the border.

RACHEL REYES: Can you tell me more about KBI’s activities to provide humanitarian aid, education, and advocacy?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: So in the humanitarian aid component, we serve three primary groups of people: one, are people who’ve been living in the United States and they’re detained ­— maybe in their homes or on their way to work — ­­and deported back to Nogales, Mexico. When they arrive to our aid center, this is the first time that they have been in Mexico for, on average, twenty years. Then, we also serve a group of people who have just now tried to cross the desert. They tried to get into the United States, they were detained by Border Patrol and then they were deported. And they are in Nogales oftentimes without very many resources as they have spent a lot along their journey and sometimes their belongings aren’t returned to them. And then we also serve people who are coming up from Central America and are trying to seek asylum in the United States. There are hundreds of people now who are stranded on the Mexican side of the border — not just in Nogales, but in other sites as well. So people have these basic humanitarian needs. People have to eat. There is oftentimes medical concerns, either from people who have tried to cross the desert — the heat exhaustion, or the blisters on their feet — or sometimes more chronic concerns for those deported from within the US. So we rely on volunteer nurses and doctors to assist with those needs. And then try, to the extent possible, meet other forms of humanitarian needs. Really, as an organization, try to let ourselves be guided by what is the reality of the people that we are welcoming in our doors. The comedor is our main humanitarian aid space. It means dining room in Spanish and our hope is that people would walk in and feel like they are at home in a place of a dining room area and that together we can figure out what is the best way to move forward on the humanitarian aid front.

And then we also work in education and advocacy. Some of what that looks like: we receive immersion groups from different parts of the United States to visit the border and to listen to the migrants and understand their reality. Just last week, for example, the faculty of Fordam University came down and visited the border. We also do education on the Mexican side of the border because oftentimes people in Mexico also have a variety of perceptions of migrants. We want them to understand their humanity. Just in a couple of weeks we are going to do a forum on asylum so that people in Mexico can understand when they hear the news about caravans of people, and we want them to understand better why are people coming up and what does the process look like on either side.

And then we do advocacy on either side of the border. On the US side we have been doing that in collaboration with the Center for Migration Studies, so we are really excited and later on, I think, we will talk about our “Communities in Crisis” report. There are different opportunities in which the knowledge that we have at the border, then, can be used to impact policy.

RACHEL REYES: Over the past few years, immigration to the United States has often focused on the US-Mexico border – including debates over the need for a border wall, separations of immigrant children from their parents, and many more contentious issues.  How have things changed at the border since President Trump took office?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: The first change that we saw very dramatically, almost immediately as soon as President Trump was inaugurated, were the effects of the end of prosecutorial discretion. So for the last years of the Obama administration, we still received people who were deported after having lived in the United States, but it was a comparably low number and they oftentimes had some sort of criminal record or had only recently been in the US. And all of a sudden, in the beginning of 2017, we started to see a dramatic increase — more than double the number of parents of US citizen kids were deported. I will talk a little bit more later on about the report, but the effect when people arrive in Mexico, then, is that they do not have a place to call home. I remember talking to a woman just a couple of months ago, who was deported from Phoenix, who had lived thirty years in Phoenix, and she said: “well, I’m theoretically from Chihuahua, but I don’t have any family, I don’t have anywhere to go to in that space.” And so we really had to reshape the way that we think about our work because we have oftentimes seen ourselves as more of a transition place, so somebody who crossed the desert and then was detained and deported, they might be moving back on to Southern Mexico to go back to their homes. And now we are receiving people who do not know where home is. And we have to think about, how can we help people reintegrate into Nogales, Sonora and how do we accompany people through this deep emotional pain of family separation. So that’s one dramatic change from 2016 to 2017 and on.

And then more recently, since mid-May of last year, what we have witnessed is more and more asylum seekers that are stranded in Nogales, Sonora. We have always received people seeking asylum in the US but it has been a pretty small component of those that we serve. In mid-May of last year Customs and Border Protection started to tell people that they were at capacity and that they had to wait in Mexico for their turn to present at the port of entry, which theoretically or legally, when somebody arrives at the port of entry and says that they are afraid, they should be processed into the asylum process, but instead they are made to wait in Mexico. Now, we have people waiting almost two months in Nogales, Mexico. There are the needs of legal orientation. The humanitarian needs, obviously, are still prevalent. We have had more families. We never served that many women and children until this moment. Now the majority of the people that we are serving are women and children.

RACHEL REYES: And are most of these families from Central America?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: Actually, a large portion of the families are coming from Southern Mexico. I think that is something that the US public does not realize. There is certainly a lot of violence in Central America and reasons and push factors that force people to leave there. But the state of Guerrero, in particular, in Mexico has become incredibly dangerous — in part because of the demand for drugs in the United States. So now, heroin is manufactured in Guerrero and, as rival groups fight for that territory, they have displaced entire towns with the violence. I remember talking to one mom, who was coming up with her kids, who said literally “bullets were flying on the street as I was trying to get my kids into the bus to come up to the US.” Violence is not just an issue of Central America but certainly an issue of Southern Mexico, and in particular in Guerrero recently. I think about 50 percent of the people we are serving who are asylum seekers are actually Mexican.

RACHEL REYES: Do you think the intense focus on Central American migrants has affected or detracted from other populations such as migrants from Southern Mexico?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: I think in general the structure of our asylum system is making most people suffer, and it is hard to control what are the degrees of suffering of different populations, but I can say that it is incredibly difficult for Mexicans to win asylum. They are much less likely to be represented by attorneys, so a lot of the legal support that has been built up — the legal infrastructures — focus more on Central Americans. It is incredibly difficult for them to prove that they cannot live in some other part of Mexico because that is one of the requirements for asylum. I think that it is not a recent trend. I think the asylum system in general is designed mostly for people to fail, and very particularly also for Mexican asylum seekers to fail.

It is an interesting tension to experience at the border. We have a partnership with the Florence Project, which provides legal services and legal orientations, both in detention and also through our partnership in Nogales, Mexico. The people that I encounter in Nogales, Mexico have so much more faith in our government and our system, than I do sometimes. They think “well, I am going to go court and it is going to be fair and they are going to see the proof that I am bringing and I am going to get a fair day in court.” On the one hand, I could be cynical about that and say, well actually the court is designed for it to not be fair. You are not going to be represented and the government is going to be represented. They are going to have an attorney. But it is also a good reminder for me of what if I could have a little bit more faith in our system because our court system could be fair, our immigration courts could be reformed. There is a strong tradition of due process that we can revive here in the US and so, in part because of that, I remain hopeful and I want to see how we can move forward and take the faith of the asylum seekers that we know and use that to motivate research and advocacy.

RACHEL REYES: So you mentioned that since May 2018, people seeking asylum in the United States have been told they have to wait in Mexico for their turn to present at a port of entry. In late January 2019, the Trump administration implemented a new policy (which it calls the Migrant Protection Protocols and others call the “Remain in Mexico” policy). Under this policy, when nationals from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador present themselves to Customs and Border Protection agents to apply for asylum in the United States, they are given a US immigration court date to start their asylum case and then returned to Mexico to wait. How has this new policy affected your work? And what kind of issues do you anticipate with further expansion of this policy?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: Yeah, it’s is a complicated reality and it is really important to make the distinction between these two policies. The one policy, we call “turn backs”, is when they are being told to wait for their turn to just be initially processed into the port of entry. And that is that approximately two months wait that I am referring to in Mexico.

Now, at certain ports of the border, particularly San Ysidro, which is in California at the Tijuana border, some of the asylum seekers who are processed into the port, as you mentioned, are then returned back to Mexico waiting for their court dates in the US. It has not been implemented, yet, in Nogales. Right now, it’s just San Ysidro and then the next site will be El Paso-Juarez. But we are deeply concerned about it, just from what we have witnessed and how the rollout has been in Tijuana. There is no way to keep asylum seekers safe as they are waiting in Mexico.

In essence, what this policy would demand is a refugee camp in Mexico and nobody is putting in the resources, or the infrastructures or the thought to actually construct that. There is the basic humanitarian needs component, there is safety.

And then we are also deeply concerned about access to due process. What we have seen in Tijuana is that the few legal services organizations that existed — like Al Otro Lado — have already been overwhelmed in just trying to give some basic orientations. But when you are returning somebody to wait for their court date in the US, then they need a lawyer who is willing to prepare their entire asylum case. And that is a stretch in Southern California — to have that many resources. It is impossible in Nogales, Sonora because we are not even located next to a city that has large resources of immigration lawyers. We are an hour away from Tucson, which has a few overstretched immigration attorneys. So, to ask an attorney to prepare a full legal case for a client who is in Mexico, is just not practical because they are not attorneys who care able to do that and it is not something that can be done remotely. Because asylum is so complicated, because people’s trauma is so layered, it is really important that attorneys be present in person and they are not able to travel in Mexico. And the other dynamic we are seeing is that the US government and the Mexican government have been harassing attorneys and journalists as they have crossed the border, so adding extra impediments to that kind of legal representation. In many ways, we just see it as impractical: from a safety perspective, from a humanitarian aid perspective, and especially from a due process perspective.

Right now the policy has been challenged in court and we are waiting to see whether the judge will have a decision on that and issue a preliminary injunction. But I think it is really important that we not just wait for the court process. I think it is critical that we as an American public address this issue as something that is not in line with our values. And I think it is critical that the Mexican government speak out more forcefully. Because the Mexican government has said that they are opposed to the policy but they are taking actions to make it possible to implement it because they believe that this is just a temporary policy. And what we are seeing is, this is a long-term policy from the US perspective. This is where they want to move in migration. And the Mexican government needs to hold a firm line and say that this is not in Mexico’s interest.

RACHEL REYES: What are the risks people face by being required to remain and wait in Mexico?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: Compared to other parts of the border, Nogales, Sonora is slightly safer but that is all in relative terms. What we have been concerned about, as there are more and more people who are in Nogales, it just exposes folks more to violence by organized crime, especially when they are in unstable shelter situations, so not in the more traditional shelters in town. As they are moving into different places, there is not that safety like in an institution as it were.

The other concern that comes from overcrowding is medical issues. This is something we have seen reported a lot on the US side — challenges with access to medical care in Custom and Border Protection (CBP) custody. But the problems actually in some way start from the overcrowding in Mexico. We do have volunteer nurses and doctors. We try to treat medical issues as they come up but because there are so many people in small places it is easier for diseases that would have otherwise been controlled to spread and so now there are more people who are going into CBP custody who are sicker than they otherwise would have been if they had just been processed the first day that they arrived in the city. Now, instead they have been in Nogales for a month and a half and got chicken pox and now Custom and Border Protection has to expand more resources to provide medical attention. It is a policy that is creating, by Custom and Border Protection delaying people in Mexico, they are creating more work for themselves and creating these medical needs that we have never seen. It is pretty unprecedented in Nogales to have so many people in medical distress.

RACHEL REYES: Recently, two Guatemalan children – 7-year-old Jakelin and 8-year-old Felipe – tragically died while in the custody of US border patrol. Both children were from indigenous communities which are often overlooked or forgotten in national narratives about immigrants to the United States. Could you tell me about your experience or encounters with immigrants and asylum-seekers from indigenous backgrounds?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: It has been a growing reality, actually, over the course of the last several years. This has not been recent that indigenous communities have been fleeing because oftentimes we hear from people that people are targeted specifically for being Indigenous. There is a dad and his son, who was eighteen, who talked about having to flee because the gangs told him that because he was indigenous he was trash, he was disposable. There is specific violence targeted at them.

And many of the people in indigenous communities, they have lower education levels. They have not had the opportunity to attend school and they have not learned another language other than their original language — for example, Mam or K’iche’ or some of the more common languages in Guatemala. And there is no robust access to interpretation. When we have talked to Customs and Border Protection, they insist that “if somebody asks for an interpreter then we will provide them with an interpreter.”But we have never actually heard of anybody who has gotten access to an interpreter within custody. This came out in really dramatic terms with these two kids who died because if somebody had been able to communicate with the parents in their own language, then they might have been able to avoid what had happened. Instead, what Custom and Border Protection does when somebody comes in, the officer or the agent will just say, “well can we proceed in Spanish?” And somebody who speaks an indigenous language, who has already been marginalized in their community because they speak an indigenous language, does not even know that they have a right to insist that they receive communication in their language. They just accept that “there is no way that I will understand, or will be able to communicate and I will just get through as best as I can.”

And I think it is hard for us as an organization. We feel very inadequate in this response. It is one thing for us to — we do criticize the government for not having access to interpreters but we also do not have access to interpretation. We struggle when people come and only speak indigenous languages to try to explain to them what they are going to face in the process, give them the kind of legal orientation that they deserve to receive. When we do not speak the language, we know that we are not doing an adequate job of communicating — whether that is drawing pictures or trying to find other forms of communication. We really need to work more on language access, both within the government but also within NGOs.

RACHEL REYES: Let’s now turn to the report. The Center for Migration Studies was honored to collaborate with the Kino Border Initiative and the Jesuit Conference’s Office of Justice and Ecology on the report, “Communities in Crisis: Interior Removals and Their Human Consequences.” This report examines the characteristics of deportees and the effects of deportation based on interviews conducted with deportees at KBI’s migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora, and those affected by deportation in Catholic parishes in Florida, Michigan, and Minnesota. Could you explain the purpose of the report and describe some of the key findings – especially those that most surprised you?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: We were also honored to work with the Center for Migration Studies. We really admire the Center for Migration Studies and just the scholarship here that very much made this report possible. I think that part of the motivation for the report is that we were seeing people arriving separated from their kids and we had the sense that this is a growing reality. We wanted to understand: what is the scale of the impact on families and on communities in the US? And it was striking to us that the report found that on average people lived in the United States for almost twenty years before their deportation and in particular, that 78 percent had US citizen kids. So 78 percent of the people arriving deported after having lived in the United States left their children behind. Their children were born in the US.

And they were also people who were really well integrated into the labor market. The vast majority were employed and they had worked almost ten years at the same job. So, it is not this kind of turnover that we would imagine. I think when people have a picture of immigrants they often think about day laborers. But really they were people who were working very consistently at a single construction company, or in a single restaurant over the course of many years. The moment of deportation is devastating to all of those community and economic ties.

Before we worked on the report, people expressed to us some of that economic anxiety but then to find that when people were deported they had an average of only $142- in their pockets with them – that is not even enough to buy a bus ticket to Southern Mexico. It is barely enough to eat for a couple of weeks in Nogales, let alone rent a place.

And especially that 74 percent said that their spouses did not have enough money to support their children. Because so many of the people who have been deported were so well integrated, they are working, then when they are deported that is removing that source of income from the family. The person who arrives in Mexico now is in need of economic support but the family in the US no longer has enough to pay for the rent or pay for the car or any of the other expenses that come up as their spouse struggles to take care of their children.

Especially revealing to me was this lack of identification with Mexico. So 45 percent said that they only identified a little or not at all with their country of birth. It is interesting for me — I was one of the ones who was doing the interviews — and I would ask people: “Do you feel Mexican, or do you feel like you are American?” And they would say: “I do not know if I can feel Mexican because I have not been in Mexico for so long.” So, that very strong desire to return to the US is well justified. In the report we see, of course if you have your family, if you have your community, if you have your job in the United States, and you do not identify culturally as Mexican, then how is it even possible to integrate into Mexico?

In many ways, the report put numbers and statistics and understanding to some initial observations we had and has helped us reflect more deeply on a) what is the effect of our policy in the US and how we in the United States are actually harming our own country in our deportation policy. We are setting up kids for failure by taking away their parents. And b) we need to be more and more creative from the church perspective, the civil society perspective, of how do we support families in the United States and how do we help people who arrive in Mexico to start to integrate or start to think about next steps.

RACHEL REYES: So what key recommendations would you highlight from the report?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: Overall, we need to overhaul our immigration system in a way that respects human dignity and family unity. Particularly, catching up on some of the family visa backlogs; providing a pathway to citizenship for people in the United States who do not have documents. But even short of that, I think the report pointed to several different opportunities.

We urgently need to reimplement prosecutorial discretion. There were challenges with prosecutorial discretion but certainly the last years of the Obama administration were less damaging than these first years of the Trump administration have been because of the end of prosecutorial discretion. So, reimplementing prosecutorial discretion and using alternatives to detention instead of detention itself are crucial. Right now, we just published this report, and I think Immigration and Customs Enforcement was detaining about an average daily population of over 40,000 people. Now they are detaining 50,000 people on any given day. So, we are expending a lot of resources to hold people that have deep community ties in detention instead of in the community.

And from the church perspective, the report also makes recommendations to churches and local communities. And, another piece that was striking to us was the role of the local police; that 65 percent of the deportations started with interaction with police. It is really important that police revamp their own policies and restrict calls to immigration enforcement. We saw this just last week in Tucson that a family was pulled over by the highway patrol, and then border patrol was called and within 24 hours the dad was deported back to Mexico. And that was just a family on their way home in Southern Tucson. And the churches can respond. Churches oftentimes see ministry more from a pastoral perspective. They will make sure to provide the sacraments, baptism, first communion. And what we saw through this report, and it involved a lot of interviews in parishes, was a really deep need for churches to look at their ministry holistically and think about access to attorneys, think about access to social services. How do we come around these families who are being torn apart by deportation and to make sure that they know that they are critical members of our community? There is a lot that we as churches, and particularly the Catholic Church, can do on this front.

RACHEL REYES: I expect that advocating and aiding immigrants from a conservative state like Arizona can be challenging. Can you describe some of the public opposition or support KBI has experienced?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: In some ways I think that this is a moment of moral reckoning for people. We have seen a lot of folks come out of the woodwork who do want to be supportive and want to take action because they are starting to realize what this country is doing to human beings, and saying “well, I do not want to be a part of this.” We do see an outpouring of support both on the advocacy front as well as financial support for KBI so that we can function and continue to serve meals.

But I think sometimes people in Arizona in particular, but also in other parts of the country, they want to support the humanitarian aid, saying it is great that you are giving a plate of food, but then become concerned about the policy recommendations because they do not want to be too political. Our belief is that policy is — even the word policy comes from this idea of humans gathering into a polity, and so there is no way to support human dignity and not then make some sort of political declaration. It does not have to be partisan, but action in support of other human beings is inherently political. We see that the advocacy that we do naturally flows out of the humanitarian aid that we provide.

Sometimes it is a process of bringing people along a little bit and understanding that I cannot sit here and listen to a dad’s story of being separated from his kids and give him a plate of food and say that that is it. Because that plate of food is not what he needs. It is one piece, one very, very tiny sliver of what he needs in that moment. That is really where the opportunities for growth come in.

I think that most people in the United States and in Mexico, when faced with a human being, want to be able to provide something or be generous. But it is starting to help people understand that that generosity is not just needed in the moment but is also needed in our policies and in our systems.

RACHEL REYES: So looking forward, what are KBI’s next steps? For example, what policies do you plan to address, what research would you like to pursue?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: We have great hopes of future collaboration with the Center of Migration Studies. I think that this report will continue to be useful. It is a really great resource for conversations locally and federally. We want to continue to think about the role of the asylum system, some of the dynamics that we are seeing right now at the border with “metering” and “Remain in Mexico,” and how the danger in Mexico is affecting asylum seekers. In particular, an area that I think has been under-researched is the asylum seekers who are coming from Mexico — so the push-factors of violence and how that is connected also to US policy regarding drugs and guns. That is maybe an area for future collaboration given the folks that we are receiving right now in the comedor.

RACHEL REYES: KBI is also working to open a new migrant outreach center. Could you tell me more about the plans for this new facility?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: Many, many years in the coming. So we have been working on this for years and years, trying to acquire land, trying to find a place to build. We finally are working on the remodel, hopefully opening maybe late this year. It is just going to be incredible. Right now we have our comedor, our dining room, but that will have a much larger space for dining, as well as a shelter, as well as actual private offices in which an attorney could actually meet with somebody, or a psychology could actually meet with somebody in privacy. I think people will just feel more safe, will feel more dignified, they will feel more at home hopefully in the space of the shelter. It is going to be a big undertaking. We are still working on raising money for the construction and thinking about how will we even staff this space but I have great hope for how people will feel, the migrants will feel, when they walk in and know that they are not just crammed into a small space but they have a place with a little bit more dignity and home.

RACHEL REYES: Do you have any final comments you’d like to add to our conversation?

JOANNA WILLIAMS: I am just really grateful to be here in New York. Sometimes we can feel very isolated at the border and knowing that we have partners like the Center for Migration Studies, knowing that people around the country and the world are concerned, that gives us hope and makes us believe that we can make a change here.

I am hopeful that we can have a little bit more dignity, more family unity. I hope that we can provide better opportunities for people in Nogales as well. Really, my hope is that people would not have the need to migrate, that we would be able to address some of these challenges so that people can stay in their own home communities. I talked to so many people. I am remembering a woman from Honduras who just came this year who said, “I never had an American dream, I never had the intention of going to the United States and I never even understood why other people did until I was forced to.” So, the goal here is not to create more American dreams. The goal is that people can be able to stay in their own communities.

RACHEL REYES: Thank you so much, Joanna.

JOANNA WILLIAMS: Yeah, thank you.

RACHEL REYES: To stay connected with the Kino Border Initiative, visit them at www.kinoborderinitiative.org. There, you can also read, watch, and listen to moving migrant stories, as well as support KBI’s work under their act section which provides advocacy suggestions and an opportunity to donate. Follow Kino Border Initiative on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

CMSOnAir’s theme music is provided by Danny Duberstein and The Music Case. To download the Communities in Crisis report and get more information on CMS’s research, publications, and events, visit us at cmsny.org.