It’s the end of September in a midterm year during which climate change has become unavoidable and undeniable, so naturally American elected officials are stepping bravely up and … fearmongering about asylum seekers again.
This time, a caravan of people allegedly left from Honduras on September 20, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
So first of all, I think we should take this caravan news with no more than a single grain of salt, as this administration has shown every single day since it took power over this exhausted, fucked up country that it is perfectly willing to manipulate narratives and circulate outrageous lies in order to harm members of what it has designated as “out-groups.”
So it may or may not be true to begin with, because why would anybody just believe what DHS or ICE says? Those entities are full of amateurish, clownish, cowardly liars, whose lack of charisma is only matched by their cruelty toward the defenseless, because they are too frightened of those who actually can defend themselves. They could have just made this shit up out of whole cloth. It wouldn’t be the first time!
In fact, I was there when these caravans really got going. I mean that I was literally present, because I was one of the very few reporters for many years who covered the US-Mexico border from San Diego-Tijuana, and as one of the apparently vanishingly few people paying attention during this time in history, I am in a good position tell you what their deal was to begin with.
Gather round, kids, and let old Uncle Brooke tell you what really happened!
The History Of The Way Of The Cross Caravans
Many years ago, all the way back in the 2010s, there were many discussions about how to get (white) Americans to care about the plight of Dreamers and the more recently arrived, as well as the people outside the country who were either trying to get to the relative safety of the United States or rejoin family members there.
Back then, I just knew in my heart that the indifference and outright hatred were born of ignorance, and all I needed to do was properly educate the people around me in order to get them to care about such things as climate change and how it might affect refugee flows. (You can laugh at my past naivete, it’s fine, everybody does.)
Because there was a culture of Americans ignoring what happened just south of the border, people who cared about immigration knew they had to do something eye-catching that would get covered — such as a mass march to the border crossing followed by a mass application for asylum.
The efforts were led by groups and individuals who thought that a good way to get this coverage would be to tie it to another journey, that of Jesus Christ’s on the way to be crucified, and they called it “Via Crucis,” or “The Way of the Cross,” which had a double meaning — that of the cross on which Jesus Christ suffered and the act of crossing the border itself.
It was a way to weave religious connection into a then-nascent movement to bring attention to the refugees and asylum-seekers who were walking with hope to the border to apply for asylum there.
This is important, because it was always tied to a certain time of year for that reason: Easter. The Via Crucis movement was one of rebirth and regeneration, offering a sense of springtime and hope.
That is, until September 2018, when mysterious posts and flyers in Spanish began to appear in Honduras and El Salvador, offering hope to the hopeless and telling them to head to the border immediately.
And fucking Facebook promoted it.
Everyone sort of assumed Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the volunteer group that had been a large part of organizing the previous Via Crucis events, was behind it and that it was on the up and up, but it wasn’t. Pueblo Sin Fronteras said that it had no idea who was behind the march.
Soon, thousands of people, including many children, had shown up in Tijuana, thin and hungry but bright-eyed with hope, and were crowded onto the beach in Playas there, camping on the sand and pushed up against the bars of the border wall, where kidnappers and murderers stalked them and children began to disappear. No one seemed to know why they had chosen this time to arrive, nor exactly who the organizers were.
All anybody knew was that it was now November, and that it was a really weird time for everyone to roll up like this, and they had all seemingly been told somewhere along the line that they were guaranteed entry into the United States if they just showed up on foot. This may seem like a bizarre thing to fall for, but if you had to step over bodies every day just to walk to the bus stop to get to work (as many people have told me they have had to do over the years), you might fall for some absurd hopemongering too.
But they did not receive asylum en masse. They were not welcomed here. They were met by lies, and violence, and teargas shot over the border into Mexico by the United States.
Some people did make it into the country later, after the chaos, but still more did not, and many people were disappeared, forever.
And during and after the fact it became impossible to ignore that it appeared, very strongly, as though desperate people had been fed bad information in order to try to get them to the United States border for photo ops for MAGA racists.
Border Violence
I will never forget the night in 2018 I went to visit that caravan. (Border reporter, remember?) I hung around for hours speaking to people, and happened upon a place by one of the shelters where little kids were making signs with donated cardboard and tempura paints that said things like, “Honduras, we love you, but our future cannot be with you.” Their plan was to march straight to the border wall and present the signs to CBP agents before applying for asylum there on the spot.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked one of the men in the group. “I mean, given the anti-immigrant sentiment of this administration?” He spoke native-level English with a Southern accent, because he had grown up in Tennessee and had his own business before he was abruptly deported “back” to Honduras, where he had only spent the first few months of his life. He told me he was trying to get back to Tennessee to get to his American-born wife and kids. I don’t know if he ever made it.
“Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?” he replied. “We’re obviously a peaceful group. Look at all these little kids. They’ll see the signs they’re holding and know that our intentions are good.”
I bit my lip but said nothing more. I couldn’t bring myself to dampen the buoyant hope I saw everywhere. They were all excited and chattering about their plans for the next morning. They invited me to return to witness their march to the wall, but I had a horrible feeling about it and so I did not go.
I saw what came of it the next day. Remember this? I had sat with those girls and their mother the night before. The United States saw the children and simply teargassed them.
And that was what became of the Way of the Cross. This well-intentioned, once well-organized event had been turned by the Trump administration into an opportunity for disinformation, and fearmongering, and anti-immigrant lies. So why should we believe them at all now?
Today’s Caravans
So, that was 2018. Now, eight years later, at another midterm election turning point year, here we are all over again. It would almost be laughable if it didn’t shred so many lives. But perhaps this time, people might see the lies for what they are. Even that absolute dope Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t falling for it this year!
You don’t actually have to hand it to MTG, but she is correct on this one.
In a future piece we’ll talk about another piece of this, how this border fearmongering intersects with climate change, climate disinformation, and how we’re pretty sure Americans have not grasped yet how different the world already is, and how much more different it is going to be moving forward.
For now, we’ll just let Marjorie Taylor Greene have her stopped-clock-twice-a moment and hope that if even she sees it, other people will too.
OPEN THREAD.
OH FOR THE FUCKING LOVE OF GOD!!!
THIS FUCKING SHIT?? AGAIN??
FUCKING AGAIN???
FUCK!!!
Lee Atwater must be so jealous, looking up at this from Hell.