'When did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?'
The U.S. government leaves it up to humanitarian aid groups to provide food, water and dignity to migrants at the US-Mexico border.
An image from the border keeps coming back to me every time I get hungry and open the refrigerator.
I was volunteering in October at a processing station for migrants in San Diego, a makeshift collection of humanitarian organizations with tents and tables in the parking lot of a city transit station.
The U.S. Border Patrol had been (and still is) dropping off busload after busload of migrants from all over the world who had made it to Tijuana or another border city and crossed over to be vetted and released to sponsors.
It’s up to the aid groups and volunteers to take care of everyone from there.
On this particular day, fellow volunteer Nina Wickett and I were helping make and serve food — peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, mainly — as the migrants came through the line. Most of them showed remarkable patience despite their obvious fatigue, hunger and need of a shower, plus whatever trauma they had fled at home and endured on their journey to the border.
They came from Sudan, China, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and too many other countries to list.
When a volunteer from one of the humanitarian organizations arrived with a large tray of chicken salad, still warm under the aluminum foil, we could offer something more enticing than PB&J.
We quickly started scooping large spoonfuls onto paper plates, as other volunteers poured coffee and handed out energy bars, bread, bananas, whatever had been donated that day.
We were going through the chicken salad so fast I was afraid we would run out — the line of migrants never seemed to end — so I started reducing the portion size. As I handed one man his plate with a modest serving, he looked at me and rubbed his stomach. I shrugged my shoulders and tried to give him an apologetic look, nodding toward the line behind him.
He just stood there, not moving, and promptly shoveled the chicken salad into his mouth with the white plastic teaspoon we had given him, spoonful after spoonful. I have never seen anyone eat so fast in my life.
I can’t imagine the degree of hunger he must have felt, how many days it had been since he’d eaten anything but the measly granola bars given out by Border Patrol.
So we can add hunger to the list of cruelties and indignities doled out by the U.S. government to human beings in the name of “deterrence,” a flawed and fatal policy that the ruling class hides behind while migrants die by the hundreds.
And let’s not forget thirst, hunger’s more insidious companion.
On this same border trip, after our group of Border Kindness volunteers finished dropping water and supplies in the desert, we received an update from the deepening crisis in Jacumba, not too far from where we had placed water along known migrant routes.
The hundreds of migrants being dumped in the desert by Border Patrol — and given food, water and shelter by humanitarian aid groups — were running out of water. They were beginning to fight over the remaining supply.
The next day, volunteers — paying upwards of $7 for a gallon of gas — drove back out to the desert with more than 500 bottles of water they had purchased.
“There were about 300 people out there who got water for another day,” a volunteer wrote me.
It is unconscionable that the U.S. government not only allows this day-to-day survival that is dependent on the kindness of strangers, but embraces it.
They know that the humanitarian aid groups, many of them led by young volunteers, will step up and refuse to let these migrants die. Our elected officials cannot say the same.
I wish I could force just one of them — preferably a MAGA Republican who claims to be a Christian — to work in that food line and look a hungry migrant in the face, or spend a night in the desert huddled under a tarp, burning empty plastic water bottles (and breathing those fumes) to stay warm.
Maybe, just maybe, they’d find a shred of humanity within, buried under all that hypocrisy and willful ignorance.
The headline come from a Bible verse whose message is that followers of Christ should “welcome the stranger.”
Jim, Your descriptions are amazing and powerful. Thank you for sharing these sad, sad circumstances.
This passage of Matthew’s demonstrates the difference between calling one’s self a Christian and following the teachings of Christ. (I think Christ would not have been much interested in the former). His message here is simple and clear, and I think largely without metaphor: feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked and visit the sick and imprisoned. While the Beatitudes, which Matthew relates earlier, are largely comforting and encouraging, Matthew 25 has a sting for those who decline to feed the hungry, etc: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” I personally don’t believe in an afterlife of heaven or hell, but I think that those are of our own making, and here on earth. Keep carrying the water and welcoming the strangers, Jim!