"THERE IS NO MERCY"
As the Coronavirus Descended on the Border, the Trump Administration Escalated Its Crackdown on Asylum
for The Intercept
Ryan Devereaux
September 5 2020, 7:00 a.m.
SHORT WALK from the border, in the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora, sits a modest building packed with long, cafeteria-style tables. The comedor, as it’s known locally, is clean and inviting, with space for up to 60 guests. The walls are decorated with hand-painted images of Christ and his apostles, done in the style of a children’s book. Tucked away in one corner of the room are medical supplies, stacked and organized in plastic bins. Sister María Engracia Robles Robles, a nun with the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, floats from the kitchen into the common area, serving hot breakfast and lunch to anyone who needs it.
The comedor was born out of work Robles and two other nuns began in 2006. At the time, Arizona was the epicenter of migration along the border and the site of a major humanitarian crisis. While people headed north were dying in the desert in record numbers, a growing deportation machine was sending a steady flow of survivors to Nogales. The nuns began feeding the deportees out of the trunks of their cars. In 2008, they secured the property where the comedor now stands. Officially run by a coalition of organizations known as the Kino Border Initiative, its first iteration had no walls. There was no relief from the desert heat. When the monsoons came, the nuns walked through standing water to serve food.
In years past, the guests were almost all recently deported Mexican men. That’s no longer the case. Sitting in the corner of the comedor on a bright, clear morning in late February, I watched as a long line of families from Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries in Latin America and across the world walked through the front door. They filled the benches, packed shoulder to shoulder. Many came by bus from Ciudad Juarez, crossing contested cartel territory where a Mormon family was massacred just a few months prior.
Once the parents and kids were settled in, Sister Robles went around the room asking them what they were thankful for. As I scribbled a man’s answer in my notebook — to be with his daughter — a little girl in a pink jumper handed me an empty tube of Chapstick, then a tiny figurine of a woman in a green dress, then a broken blue crayon. She smiled as she shared her treasures one by one. The girl and her sister were from Chilpancingo, her mother later told me, a Mexican city in the state of Guerrero, not far from the town where 43 students were disappeared by police in 2014. It was the violence, the mother said, that caused them to leave.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/05/us-mexico-border-coronavirus/