Alvaro Enciso's Desert Monument to the Dead
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
It starts with a dream that becomes a dot. A red dot, representing a GPS coordinate on a map transformed into a hole, not too deep, cut into the earth with a pickaxe and shovel, then filled with moistened gravel and quick-dry cement into which Tucson, Arizona-based artist, Alvaro Enciso, plants a simple cross of rough 2x3inch pine strips painted a vibrant color and secured at the midpoint with a red dot made from metal trash he’s harvested from the floor of the vast Sonoran. Since the October 1, 1994 launch of Operation Gatekeeper, the Sonoran desert, one of the hottest places on Earth in ..read more
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Dora Rodriguez Lives to Tell the Tale: How Deterrence Emboldens Organized Crime
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
On Monday, May 23, 2022, as the world awaited the long-fought for lifting of Title 42, the United Nations dropped the bomb that there are now more than 100 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. That means 1 in every 100 people on the planet right now has been driven from their birthplace by war, conflict, crippling poverty, weather-related disasters, etc. Eighty percent of these people are in the Global South.  Title 42, an obscure public health provision under the US Centers for Disease Control, was invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020 in the guise of controlling COV ..read more
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Who Gets Welcomed? Who Gets to Move?
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
We begin the second season of Witness Radio with a mind-blowing treat. Witness Radio Executive Producer Camilo Perez-Bustillo and I join Nandita Sharma and Reece Jones to explore the question:  From the war in Ukraine to the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond: Who gets welcome? Who gets to move? We conclude with ideas about how to create a more inclusive world, one better able to confront such challenges as climate change, global pandemics, capitalist greed run amok, and the hardened, racialized borders throughout the world that have given rise to violent exclusionary tactics. Our conversat ..read more
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Title 42 ReCast: It's Biden's Legacy Now
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
How hard is it to welcome immigrants with dignity in the US? To bring order, fairness, and humanity to an immigration system built on foundations of white supremacy and racial exclusion? Very hard. Especially when immigration is a voting issue for only one party.  The use of Title 42 is the perfect example. An obscure public health order, it was brought out of obscurity two years ago this month by Trump & Co, ostensibly to stop Covid-19 at the US Southern border but really to stop people, most egregiously those seeking protection.  Now the reason for the expulsion of more than 1 ..read more
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A Tale of Two Presidencies: Proof that #ImmigrationISaBlackIssue
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
The past two years have brought the world changes never imagined: a global pandemic; the lockdowns and the losses; the border closures and the politics of avoiding illness, even death. But throughout it all, there is one thing that hasn’t skipped a beat: the US Deportation Machine.  This episode's featured guest is Thomas Cartwright, a member of the leadership team of Witness at the Border. Tom dedicated his time during the past 24 months of the global pandemic to collecting, compiling, and communicating data that the US government would prefer you did not know. When Trump strong-armed th ..read more
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Is Family Separation What We Voted For?
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
Witness Radio's Sarah Towle and Camilo Perez-Bustillo kick off a second season with reflection on the Biden administration's one-year record on border and immigration, framed through the civil rights legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They start with the question, What would Dr. King have said about one of the greatest human rights crimes in recent US history: family separation? A civil rights lawyer and human rights scholar, Camilo was at ground-zero in El Paso, Texas when the practice of separating migrating families was piloted by the Trump administration before being rolled out across t ..read more
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Remain in Mexico or MPP 2.0: Can Inhumane be Less Inhumane?
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
The Grand Finale of Witness Radio's Inaugural Season A cruel, anti-asylum Trump-era policy is back under a president who promised a more humane border: the Migrant "Protection" Protocols, which never protected anyone at all. Biden maintains that his Remain in Mexico program, or MPP 2.0, will be a gentler, “lite” version of his predecessor’s policy. But can Inhumane be less Inhumane? That is the question Sarah Towle, Host and Director of Witness Radio, asks    Charlene D’Cruz, Lawyers for Good Government Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, American Immigration Council, and  Yael Schache ..read more
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What's a Migrant's Life Worth?
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
In December 2018, Heads of State and Government met in Marrakech, Morocco under the auspices of the United Nations to adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, placing migration and refugee matters squarely on the international agenda.  Camilo Perez-Bustillo, the Executive Producer of Witness Radio, was there. In remembrance of both International Human Rights Day (Dec 10) and International Migrants Day (Dec 18), he sat down with Sarah Towle, Witness Radio Host & Director, to discuss the tragic migrant deaths in Chiapas, Mexico, the unresolved humanitarian ..read more
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The WRAP: African Asylum Seekers’ Tell-All Tale of ICE Torture
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
Following two ICE-Air mass deportation flights to Cameroon tracked by Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border in the fall of 2020, I couldn't escape the rumblings of attorneys and advocates for the roughly 80 individuals the US government went to extraordinary lengths — and taxpayer expense — to return to a country wracked by protracted violence:  When “Ray” protested being returned to certain harm, he says the ICE Military “bagged and tied” him to force all others to comply. “Godswill” states that he was “stuffed into a sack” by ICE Special Forces and carried onto the plane like trash ..read more
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Kidnapped by Uncle Sam!
Witness Radio: A Podcast About Immigration
by Sarah Towle
1y ago
In a month that history will remember for the US welcoming Afghan refugees fleeing political chaos, violence, and persecution while expelling Haitians fleeing all these things and more, we perhaps lost sight of the nearly 13,000 children still being held captive by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Hidden from view by US government contractors in retro-fitted big box stores and "shelters" -- aka kid's jails -- many of these were separated from their families at the US border as an unintended consequence of first Trump's, now Biden's, invisible border wall: Title 42.  There ..read more
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