Aug. 11, 2008 issue
A 75-mile walk in migrants' shoes
By Cathryn Clinton Mennonite Central CommitteePage:
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TUCSON, Ariz. — The stretch of desert between Sasabe, Mexico, and Tucson is one of several areas in the Southwest called a migrant trail because so many use it to cross the border.
Participants in a Mennonite Central Committee delegation walk along a migrant trail from Sasabe, Mexico, to Tucson, Ariz. — Photo by Tim Hoover/MCC
Thousands of migrants have traveled this trail since the early 1990s. An estimated 4,000 have died crossing since 1994, the year border security increased.
An 11-member Mennonite Central Committee delegation walked the 75 miles from Sasabe to Tucson in “Migrant Trail: We Walk for Life” May 28-June 3.
The Migrant Trail Walk Committee and other organizations, including West Coast MCC, sponsors this event, now in its fifth year, to call attention to the human rights crisis on the border.
Shalom Mennonite Fellowship of Tucson provided lodging for a three-day orientation for participants given by West Coast MCC and MCC Central States. Then the MCC delegation joined a group of 65 walkers from a variety of religious groups and humans rights organizations.
“We were told that there could be around 2,000 people in the desert at any given time, but they were only whispers to us; we only came across a handful,” said Esther Harder of Mountain Lake, Minn.
Harder, who had just finished a four-year term as an MCC worker in Uganda, said the Migrant Trail group gave water and food to several exhausted migrants.
Migrant men spoke of leaving behind two women too frail to keep going. Members of the We Walk for Life group searched but did not find them. No one knows what happened to them.
Participants carried white crosses with the names of people who had died trying to make the crossing.
The identification with migrants began when participants submitted their passports to a lock box in order to walk undocumented.
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