The death this week of 53 migrants in a trailer in San Antonio (Texas) “was a matter of time and can be repeated,” he assures Efe Jenn Budd, a former US Border Patrol officer who now advocates for immigrants and recounts her drama in the book “Against the Wall” (Against the wall).
After After spending six years as an immigration officer, acknowledging that he was a racist and denouncing threats from his former colleagues for exposing irregularities within the institution, Budd collects in the book that he presented these days the disappointment of his career with the uniform.
It includes, among other things, its rejection of the “dissuasion” strategy, which consists of forcing the migratory flow to seek the most inhospitable and dangerous routes to enter the United States.
“Many activists and defenders of migrant rights have been warning us that what happened in Texas could go through the heat of this summer, the blocking asylum requests, by Title 42, and closing ports of entry, forcing people to seek routes dangerous”, lamented the now activist.
Budd refers to the validity of the Title 42 that expels immediately to immigrants at the border, activated by former President Donald Trump, who excused himself in the pandemic to do so as part of a hard-line immigration policy that he maintained during his four years in office.
The activist says that while the Border Patrol in Texas calls for migrants to refrain from putting themselves in the hands of smugglers or coyotes, that agency “knows that the deterrence strategy will inevitably lead to the death of some of the people who cross”, mainly in search of asylum.
“They know that migrants, because their need to cross is big, the closure of the border was not going to stop them, nor Title 42, nor the heat, so for both the agents and the defenders of migrant rights, a tragedy like the one in San Antonio was something of time and of course it can be repeated”, because the summer is just beginning, he reiterates.
Forty-eight corpses of migrants, mostly Mexicans, were found Monday night inside a trailer and around the abandoned vehicle, according to updated information from the Department of Justice (DOJ).
They were overcrowded, without air conditioning and without ventilation.
Other 5, of some 16 who were found alive have died so far in Texas hospitals, according to the DOJ, which reported the arrest of four men, two of them Mexican.
In “Against the Wall,” Budd reflects on his years of patrolling throughout the mountainous Campo, California region east of San Diego, where migrant victims often perish. more from extreme weather, some due to sunstroke and others due to hypothermia or frostbite.
THE PROFESSIONALS
She says that in her service, in which she became in charge of intelligence, she went from being “an idealistic young woman who wanted to be a civil rights lawyer , a recruit raped by a Border Patrol officer and then an agent who experienced first-hand the reality at the border.”
“In Campo you had to wait about three hours for them to arrive. pick up the detained migrants, there were hours that I talked with them, I knew their stories, the reasons why they crossed the border despite that inhospitable climate and terrain”, she recalls.
The former agent recalled , as he writes in his book, that detained migrants often had university degrees, several with postgraduate degrees, many with command of the English language, who were fleeing violence or threats for having revealed corruption; many others were people with clear grounds for seeking asylum.
Budd says that the title of her book, whose cover shows her near the border fence, is due more to the wall she found inside her, the wall of denial, of unconsciously trying to close her eyes and the understanding to what he saw as a Border Patrol agent, until he left the position in 2001.
“I left because They threatened me with death because I tried to denounce what was happening in the Border Patrol, and because I faced my own racism, my own discrimination that led me to ignore what was happening,” he acknowledges.
He says that the burden emotional was so great that he tried to take his own life.
“Border Patrol strategies are racism, they can be called by other names, or say it is law enforcement, but ultimately it is racism,” says Budd, who often does work volunteer garlic for organizations like Al Otro Lado, on the border with Mexico.
He maintains that the Border Patrol was founded by former members of the Ku Klux Klan and children of American confederates, “and that is the mentality that continues until now”.
Reports that the worst of the migration control policy at the border began a few years ago 35 years, and later took shape with border operations, the construction of the first wall and the deterrence policy.
However, “definitely the worst period of the Border Patrol began with Donald Trump”, he declares categorically.
You may also be interested in:
–Why is the road where more than 50 Immigrants in Texas?
–Go up to 53 number of migrants killed in abandoned truck in Texas; 40 of the victims are men
–Trailer driver in Texas in which the overcrowded 50 immigrants died was on a methamphetamine “trip”