 I think Laura is here, she's here, she's coming here, okay, are we in an order you want us to be or is that okay? Captain Debbie and Laura to be there and then we'll come and see who you're right and right where they are. Okay, leave them up here. I will leave them up there. Can I take one? Yeah, okay. Speak in the microphone like as if it was on, it's not on, but so that people can hear online we need it on. Yeah, because normally I leave one, people leave both right now and then I'll take it down myself. Okay, so I will just introduce you. Welcome everyone. Hello everyone, welcome back. We're happy to have you here. Yes, the microphone is only a prop inside this theater space, but it is actually being used for our live streaming. So that folks whoever's tuning in can hear us, we will be speaking into the mic. So we will make it available to the audience when we have audience ask questions. So I'll stand next to Mark over there and I'll hold the mic and so please come up and ask questions at the microphone. So let's get started. Thank you for coming back. I'm happy, so honored to have this panel here today. I'm very excited to have our esteemed panelists and our moderator, Anna O'Leary, Dr. Anna O'Leary, head of the MAS department at University of Arizona. I can't believe I just said a professor from that other school. Sorry, of course, the University of Arizona. Thank you, Milta, and thank you very much everybody for attending today's event. I'm very happy and very proud to be here. I'm very honored to have been asked to come and moderate this panel. So my role is to help with questions, introduce the panelists and try to keep us into an important dialogue that we will have in response to the play that we just all saw. So we have four panelists and we have Catherine Gaffney to my left from No More Deaths. We have Debbie McCullough from Tucson Samaritans. We have Laura Bellos from Friends, Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. And we have Rocío Calderón from the Casa Mariposa Detention Visitation Program and Cecilia Valenzuela G for the same program who will help translate some of Rocío's comments. So again, thank you very much for your kind attention. And I'm going to ask the panelists to take just two to three minutes to explain to the audience their work or involvement in these organizations and perhaps just connect with what we witness here today in the play. And we'll just go ahead and once we get to the four panelists, then we will open this up for discussion and we will welcome questions, your thoughts and comments at the end of our introductions. So we'll start with Catherine first. So my name is Catherine Gaffney. I've been a volunteer with No More Deaths since 2009. No More Deaths is a humanitarian aid organization based in Southern Arizona. Our mission is to end the death and suffering of migrants and refugees crossing the US-Mexico border. And so we have a bunch of different projects that attempt to do that. Many people might know about our Desert Aid project where we go out and put water gallons and food on the migrant trails that cross through the desert. And we also give first aid medical assistance to people we meet in distress. And then we do a bunch of work on the Mexican side in different shelters assisting with phone calls, first aid documentation of abuses by people coming out of Border Patrol custody. We also are part of the Keep Tucson Together Legal Clinic, which meets every week in Tucson. It does free legal assistance, trying to stop people's deportations so that we can prevent people from having to cross through the desert by getting them relief before that happens. And we also do abuse documentation. And unfortunately, most recently we've been waging a legal defense campaign for our nine volunteers who have been federally indicted for felony and misdemeanor counts, all related to giving humanitarian aid to folks crossing. And it's a very direct connection with the sanctuary movement and with everything we saw tonight. The founders of No More Deaths are also some of the founders of the sanctuary movement. And I would say watching the play so many of the debates that Milta and Mark brought alive that were internal to the sanctuary movement are still very much internal to No More Deaths debates about tactics and privilege and legalities and how to make change. So I think it all feels very fresh. Thank you, Catherine. I'm Debbie McCullough with the Tucson Samaritans. Very much like No More Deaths, we go into the desert. We send a team into the desert every day. We start at Southside Church is our home. And we go out with water, medical supplies and food, walking the trails, looking for people who are lost and left behind. I think one of the operating principle is to be a helping hand in the desert in any way that we possibly can. The situation that we face right now is that so for so many years that you hear this, oh, the number of people crossing is dropping. The border patrol is out there. We encounter people just about every week. There is an encounter. There are people out there. And this year there were 122 deaths in the desert. So the deaths are not dropping significantly. As the number of people crossing drops, the number of deaths are staying about the same proportionally. So it's still very shocking and the work needs to go on both through No More Deaths and through Samaritans. So however, we can go forward. I do want to bring up one more thing that in terms of what's different right now in the last few weeks, certainly it's become a little more known among our groups that there is a militia group in the town of Eravaka that is really causing a great deal of concern to the residents of Eravaka. So a way of being involved if you can't hike trails or really participate in the active way in terms of hiking or walking drive to Eravaka, just be around, be witnesses to this group that's out there bringing a lot of fear to people. And I can go into that with more detail when we go a little further. So I'll pass you on to the Florence Project. Thank you. Hi, my name is Laura Bello. I'm an attorney with the Florence Project. And the Florence Project was born about 30 years ago, right about the same time that the events in the play were happening. It was started up in Florence, the prison town about halfway between here and Phoenix, in response to a lot of the Central American refugees who were fleeing from that violence. There are immigration detention centers there in Florence as well as in Eloi. And as you may or may not know, there's no right to counsel in immigration removal proceedings. So if you are detained and you are trying to fight an asylum case, you don't have the right to a public defender. So the Florence Project is really the only free legal services provider that serves detained men, women and children in the state of Arizona. So we started about 30 years ago providing very minimal services and then grew from there. And now we have a staff of about 75 and we serve detained minors as well. I work specifically with detained minors here in Tucson, unaccompanied kids who have crossed the border by themselves. And we saw this summer how that population shifted from unaccompanied kids to kids who were separated from their parents. So a lot of the themes that go across the play in terms of Central Americans fleeing from violence as well as families trying to stay together really are very much current and we see them playing out on a daily basis in our work. We are glad to be witnesses to this work and to be fighting against deportation cases on an individual basis. And we also do our best to raise these cases to national attention in the media as well so that way these stories are told on a broader scale. Thanks. Buenos tardes, mi nombre es Rocío Calderón. Good afternoon, my name is Rocío Calderón. Vengo en representación de Casa Mariposa. I am representing Casa Mariposa. Casa Mariposa es una organización de voluntarios. It's an organization of volunteers. Es un programa de voluntarios que hacen visitas al centro de detención de Eloy. And these volunteers do visitations at Eloy Detention Center. Tratamos de que no siga el aislamiento con las personas. We try to break the isolation that these people feel over there. We bring them friendship, support, both spiritual support and emotional support too. In some cases, economical support. We sometimes get involved with the paying of bonds. El programa se mantiene gracias al apoyo de la comunidad. And this program is kept through the contributions and support of the community. Together with the Florence Project and the Church of Shalom Menonite and other members of the community. This is a blessing to be in this place. And be able to participate like what they did to me. I was two years in this center of detention. Mariposa gave me so much support. He wouldn't leave me alone and he accompanied me in my fight, in my struggle. Until I won my case. They continue on my side. And with that example, I do the same thing and I go to the same detention center to help other people. In that time that I was there, I saw the need. And the meaning of one visit. It's very emotional to know that somebody that doesn't know you can come and visit you or write you a letter. Or when you go to the visits and they give you a hug. One word of support has a lot, a lot of meaning. Thank you. My name is Cecilia Valenzuela-G and I'm also a visitor at Iloi Detention Center. I am originally from Chile. What I wanted to say is something, I wrote something just to talk about hope a little bit, which is a topic and a theme that touches me a lot when I go there. I started visiting Iloi because I wanted to be involved with the children in the schools whose parents were deported and they were alone. I used to teach bilingual education at Davis Bilingual School and they had many families there and they kept asking us what to do about this situation. And so I started going to Casa Mariposa and I encountered this issue of hope a lot and it has been a theme for me. So I'm going to read a little bit that I wrote. It's very short. In the gap between fear and the unknown, which these people feel all the time, hope lives and when we arrive we also embrace it. Hope becomes, as the book, one in says, not just for the future but it's a life today. A defiant living hope. Not a fleeting emotional reaction to fear but an audacious act. That's when our hearts meet. We sit next to the other person, looking into each other's eyes across the wooden table, listening with live ears, sharing the present moment and we together feel the dance of hope at least for a moment. And that is a gift for us. The visitors of Casa Mariposa, the true gift of shared humanity, a vulnerable and also transformative. Well, thank you Catherine, Debbie, Laura, Rocío and Cecilia. And so we would like to open up to the audience questions, comments, either directly to anyone in particular or the panel in general. You've seen a play such as this, I'm sure, might cause some anxiety, you know, concerns. And I think this is a good way to process a lot of the information that we saw and we have a panel of experts that might be able to shed light in terms of our concerns and our questions. So with that, I'd like to see if there are any questions out there of anybody who would like to ask of the panel or make a commentary with respect to the play or the work of the panelists. Something that some people might want to think about is, you know, it was mentioned when the panelists just mentioned a while ago that we have a current situation in our borders with more detention, especially women and children. And so we are at perhaps another crossroad in this historical development. And I would maybe ask if you have any comments or observations in terms of how different or in what way is this a worse times or different times and what in terms of the community we might expect in terms of responding to what we're currently seeing, the crisis on the border. Yes, Miss? What would you attribute the fact that there are more deaths and less people crossing? The question was to what do we attribute the fact that there's more deaths even though there has been a decrease in people crossing. That really goes back to the border patrol strategy of prevention through deterrence, which has been in place for 20 years, which is basically the idea that if you make the act of crossing the border so miserable and so deadly, it will deter people from attempting. And what we know is that that's not true because people have life-or-death reasons that they're undertaking this journey to begin with. So rather than deterring anyone, what it does is cause increased deaths. And even in my time in the last nine years working with no more deaths, I've seen a massive increase of military-style border enforcement in Aravaka. I've seen the way towers and helicopters and ATVs, I mean any kind of military technology you can think of, is being deployed on the border by the border patrol. And what that does is shift people into the most dangerous parts of the desert and makes the journey longer and longer, also through checkpoints, which, you know, formerly, and even in the days of sanctuary, as you can see in the play, they, folks were, together in the country, folks were crossing the line, but then driving to Tucson. And now there's a system of checkpoints that would make that effectively impossible because you have to walk anywhere from 30 to 80 miles before you could get past the checkpoints and get into a car. So that's obviously a really big difference. I just wanted to add that the other thing that has changed over the last several years, as that number has decreased, is the situation on the Mexican side of the border. It used to be that they were brought right to the border and began their journey there. Now people will walk more than, often more than two or three days to get to the border to begin their journey. And people are taking the, in the early 2000s, when people crossed, and the Devil's Highway was written by Luis Aurea, because of the horrors of the death in the far western end of our state, the people stopped using that section. Now where the students were, where the young Norma or deaths people were arrested, was in that area because people are going through that. And it is extremely deadly. So they're taking more and more risks because of the militarization of the border. I'm just interested in hearing any updates that the kids have or that any updates there might be with the parents and the kids situation? Also, is there a way that you could speak up a little bit more so the folks in the back can hear you? Yeah, sure. Thank you. So the question was if there's any kind of update on family separation and the status of kids and families and re-niting those families. Sure, so the vast majority of kids and parents thankfully have been re-unified thanks to Judge Sabra's order that came out of the California District Court in an ACLU lawsuit. There are still a number of children who have not been re-unified with their parents and those are the cases that are the most troubling and the most worrisome. I think that the government executed this, I wouldn't even call it a plan, but they executed this mess without any kind of tracking system or without any kind of way for parents to know where their children were or for children to know where their parents were. So there are a number of kids who are still in detention either because their parents have been deported already and we definitely saw parents who were saying in Eloi and Florence they're saying the government has told me that the only way I'm going to see my child again is to sign this paper agreeing to waive my right to fight for asylum and taking deportation. So a number of parents have been deported and then the government has also said that a number of parents are ineligible. Some of them are because parents have abused or abandoned or neglected their children in some cases but in a number of other cases it's because of something very old and very minor. So an old conviction for assaults that had nothing to do with child abuse or other kinds of criminal activity that would certainly not prejudice any of us who are parents and having our custodial rights being taken away but in these cases the government has said because of those old convictions or older courts those parents are ineligible. So we are still working with a number of kids who are separated from their parents and we are still working with a number of parents who have been separated from their children but thankfully most of them have been deported. Is there another question out there? This one over here. I was wondering about being in Eloy or Florence in one of the detention centers and since I was participating in the visitation program the question is directed to Rocio. Some people find it so incredibly difficult to stay there that when they are eligible to either continue staying in the detention center or when they need to be deported they will be deported because they cannot tolerate staying in the centers any longer. How did you survive for two years without going mad? At the beginning I wanted to escape. I didn't think I could take this. But I looked around and I saw other people that were also mothers. They were not delinquents, the people that were there with me. And they were the ones who gave me the strength to fight my case. I knew I had a truth behind my case. My daughters were in Bolivia. It was a very difficult decision because my daughters were in Bolivia. I contacted them. They gave me their support. They said, mommy we will continue ahead. We are going to give you support. That gave me strength. In the beginning I felt so lonely. I didn't have a lawyer and I didn't know anybody. And then I met Casa Mariposa and the Florence Project. They gave me the strength also to continue to fight my case. Also my faith. I was always able to keep my faith and the hope. I tried to do something useful. I tried to transmit to other people the peace that I was feeling inside. Because I felt peace from God who gave me that peace. And that's what motivates me now to keep helping those people. Because I know it's very needed and it's humanitarian. What happens to the children whose parents are deemed unfit? What is going to happen to those children? It's a very good question. The question is what happens to the children whose parents are deemed unable to reunify with those children? I don't know. I think that it's extremely concerning to us because the government has, if they can't reunify with those parents the government has essentially created orphans within the United States. A lot of the kids that are still detained have ways to fight a legal case but the question is who's going to take care of them? And even though they might have extended family here in the United States, that's not a parent and there's no basis for taking that child away from that parent other than the government's decision to separate those families. The lawsuit that's going through the California court system, there is a proposed settlement that might give some parents the ability to fight again a case for deportation if they can show that they were coerced into leaving the country. But I think that's still very much an open question that's very, very worrying to a lot of us. Details, but just off of that question, in the foster care system here, if a parent is TPR or terminates parental rights, then those children are put up for adoption. Is that what's going to happen with these children? So the question is, is there a possibility that these parents who have been deported or are deemed ineligible could face a severance of parental rights? I don't know. I think that there's still a lot that remains to be settled. I think that there's a small number of those children who perhaps their parents are unable to parent them and the child is afraid of returning to that parent. But I think in the majority of those cases that we saw this summer, it was a family unit that was coming together. So I think that's still very much waiting to be settled. I know Texas had proposed an amendment to the basis that it has for severance and saying that the detention of a parent is not a basis for severance. I don't think we have anything similar here. But I think there's still so much uncertainty with regard to what will happen to these children that that's still a bit down the road. But I think it really is a result. The uncertainty is certainly a result of the lack of any kind of planning that went into the execution of this plan. And the kids and the parents are truly the ones who have suffered as a result. I recently met some women in Nogales at the Commodore that had been deported from Florence and they asked if I could share what happened to them because they thought if more people know maybe something could help. But they said the most humiliating thing that happened to them was being stripped, searched when they brought the detention, and the other things when they were released is that they weren't given any of their things back and they were giving none of their money back and they were given tickets to Puebla and they lived in Guerrero and they said how are we supposed to get home? And all I could think of is that it's part of the deterrence. Is that how they go back and tell them this is how they're going to treat you? Maybe they won't come. For children, family and detention, for some of the children, some educational opportunities are being offered but that's not the case. I'm just wondering if you had any update on that and also who is delivering it for those children who are going through some kind of school experience. The question is who provides school for detained kids? If a child enters as an unaccompanied child and also in the family separation is separated from a parent, they're generally placed with the Office of Refugee Resettlement and then in smaller shelters and the shelter provides schooling for those kids. It's certainly not a system where they're earning credits toward a diploma but there is schooling provided within the shelters. I have to share that TUSD is working with Southwest Key Facility to provide education for those children. I understand that they are 12 and older and it will be happening in one of the empty schools right now. The Board has to vote finally for that but that conversation has been going on. I would like to take just a point of privilege to ask a question of the panelists and maybe food for thought for the audience. In thinking or reflecting on the sanctuary play and that historical development, what has changed in our world is another sanctuary type of movement possible. People who are coming to the border, it's different. The context of the 1980s was the wars in Central America and US intervention which created those bloody wars and we've moved beyond that and now women and children coming to the borders are primarily saying that they are trying to flee the violence caused by gang violence, some of which we as a country are responsible for by sending deportees who hadn't had a chance in the United States. I don't know if we are at a moment where we have to decide, people of conscience decide as to what type of underground railroad exists if in fact is that possible. What are the circumstances that would keep us from doing something of that nature or maybe it's just not possible. I'll throw that question out there for the audience to think about and also invite a panelist, our panelists to maybe shed some light or some of their observations in terms of our current situation of migrants from Central America fleeing their places of origin to come to the United States. It was only a few years ago when we had Rosa Robles here at Southside and that sanctuary event was very public and the publicity really helped us but now we cannot go that way. The government right now has increased, I don't know what word to use but the oppression is so much more dangerous that it's underground. It is an underground type of thing. We have this Southern Arizona Sanctuary Coalition in place right now organizing many, many churches that have people in sanctuary and these people are in hiding right now and that is the only solution right now that I know that it's viable at this point because of the danger of the situation right now. No more death sponsors keep Tucson together, the legal clinic that Margo Cowan who was, I'm not sure which, I mean I can't remember, she was Carol in the play. She continues her amazing work and it is a free clinic, legal clinic. We have, I don't know, hundreds of clients right now and we need volunteer lawyers, we need volunteers. It reminded me that the play was so familiar because when I started volunteering there, it was okay, I'll do this real easily. Now I'm pretty much, this could absorb my whole life because of the need and the bonding out of people who the bonds can be phenomenal, $16,000 for a family, everything that courts started out saying a $1,500 bond would be the maximum for a poor family and then the Trump administration knocks that down. So it feels like, as Margo said to me the other day, it feels like we're trying these cases in Session's living room because every time we bring up something, something else is countered but as Cecilia said, we have to maintain hope because we are the, we're the front lines here and it is so empowering to the people that we work with to have that moment where somebody cares enough to come out every Thursday night at Pueblo High School, the first and third Saturday of the month here at Southside Church, just to be a presence in their lives and say, hey, we care enough, we're going to accompany you through this horror and hope that the political situation changes at the next election. So if anyone's interested in helping out with that, where would they go to find out more? So they, we have a keep to sign together. You can come to Pueblo High School every Thursday night at 5.30 and just say you want to volunteer. We'll find a place you can, you can shadow people for several weeks. We'll find a place. You don't have to be a Spanish speaker. If you are, that's very helpful but you don't have to be a Spanish speaker. So any Thursday night, you can also no more deaths or there's a web, there's a Facebook page for keep to sign together. You can contact no more deaths. You can contact two sons Samaritans. The other part is you can just come here to Southside Church the first Thursday Saturday of the month. There's a training on October 20th. That'll be at noon October 20th. There's a training for here in the church. I was just going to, before we get to the next question, I think this is a really interesting moment thinking about political strategies of visibility and publicity. And I think it's really interesting that the sanctuary play starts with the movement being underground and then we see the decision to go public. And no more deaths was always public. I mean we started, although border residents have been giving humanitarian aid since the beginning of the border crisis, no more deaths was always public and above ground. And what we've seen in the last year under Trump is last June, Bird Camp, which was our sanctuary and Aravaco was raided by 25 border patrol agents who took away migrants receiving medical care. And now not only are they arresting people that we are very publicly trying to help but they're also going after our volunteers. And I think it's interesting because I don't know if the right response is to become less public or not. I think that's really up for debate. I think what's different under Trump is while these policies that are targeting undocumented people have been in place for a long time and we're very strong under Obama, Trump seems very willing to go after the activists. But the downside of going after activists is that they're activists, so they're going to speak up and fight back, right? So we'll see. I think we'll see where it goes. So much of, I think, the undocumented movement in America too has been around politics of visibility, has been undocumented unafraid and I think this is just a moment where that's really challenged. But I also wanted to put in a small plug around the question of visibility. We're handing out yard signs that say humanitarian aid is never a crime. We're trying to get those plastered up all around Tucson so that the judge and the jury and the prosecutors who are going after volunteers know that this entire community stands with the values that everyone deserves food and water, everyone deserves medical care when they're in distress, and that doesn't matter what your paperwork is. That's a shared value. So we did, there are still some outside. Probably people didn't want to take them on their way in and sit with them, but they're free and please take one and put one in your yard. The trials are going to be coming up in November and December possibly, so we really want to get that community value out in public right now. It's very important. So what are we asking those people that are running to represent us? So with the focus, our shared humanity, we know how that can be a sustained coming up. So I'd be interested to hear what are the conversations that people folks are saying or could talk about to foster participation at whatever level and in whatever form that could happen. I think it's a great question. I think that my question for anyone running for federal office because they're the ones who get to call the shots in terms of immigration decisions and support the right of asylum seekers to come to the United States and pursue their claims, especially without having the coercive factor of immigration detention. And as Rocio eloquently discussed, this detention being detained is a force that pushes against you every day. And we see clients give up on their right to fight asylum because they have other things that demand their time. They have families. They can't be detained for that long. They're not the ones that are in the position of asylum seekers and demanding that those people have the right to pursue their claims while not being held in federal detention is extremely important. I want to just put a little plug in also for all of our community members who are in detention who are not seeking asylum. Many of our clients are people who have been here for 10, 15, 20 years, since they were three months old and now they're in the 40s. Tinted windshields. Things hanging from their what do you call it, their review mirrors. And those are some of the people that we work with trying to get their deportations canceled. Under Obama, if they didn't have a long court record, they were canceled. Rosa's case was closed. That's not happening and Session has said that everyone who has a closed case should be reopened just automatically. So although the asylum situation is heartbreaking, we are losing members of our own community. And could I just add to that that although immigration and refugee status has always been under the purview of the federal government, what we've seen since 2005-2006, lots of state houses are proposed and passed anti-immigrant laws and also municipalities as well. So we can support those leaders at the municipal, county level, city level, state level that are more sympathetic to the immigration issue by supporting them and voting for those particular members of our community, leaders of our community also asking some of those local members as to how they might vote or what they think about some of the possibilities of say for example using a 287G program in which local police are involved in the policing of local areas. So I think those are, I think we're at a point where federal and state and municipal and county are coming together and being very polarized but as citizens I think we have the right to ask of our leaders where they stand on local issues in terms of things that might make it more difficult or easy to police immigrants, stopping people suspected of being undocumented because they look like undocumented immigrants so I think those are also important electoral and political actions that we can all take as voting electorate. We have time perhaps for one more question from the audience. A lot of no more desks. What that relationship has been like and what kind of support or opposition you're getting there. We just had a huge victory with the rejection of operations stone garden funds by the Pima County Board of Supervisors Pima County Sheriff's Department and I believe it's the first ever example of a county sheriff turning down federal funds that are very generous to the Sheriff's Department but come with the contract that you must enforce immigration which Sheriff Napier has said you know I think and I apologize if I get any of the local politics wrong but I think when he ran he said no we want trust from all our community members documented and undocumented but then to turn around and take these federal funds that are a binding contract to enforce immigration law is really in contradiction of it so that was a huge victory and that came from community organizing in a mass in a really effective coalition so I would say yeah get out and vote but hold the people accountable because otherwise you can't trust them for a minute right and then I think the other thing to mention is Nomor das and other allied groups including Aguilas del Desierto Armadillos Busqueda in San Diego and other groups up and down the border do a lot of search and rescue cases for missing migrants and generally you know where civilian humanitarian aid groups we have nothing like the kinds of resources that a Sheriff's Department would have but we get missing migrant calls because the border patrol unit that those calls get referred to when someone gets lost in the desert has been basically totally ineffective and unwilling to go out and search for people so unfortunately we as you know semi trained but basically a ragtag volunteer crew go out and do those searches and there are some county sheriffs that are more cooperative and supportive but it is really striking actually just today I was hiking up to Romero pools and there is an individual who got sick and needed to be medically evacuated and I think we saw 10 different cars probably 15 people show up and get them out and you don't get that response if you're a migrant and that's just I mean not only is it completely immoral it should also it is also completely illegal to treat people that unfairly under the law so I think but yeah and I think just the relationship with the Sheriff's varies by county a bit it certainly politically varies between Santa Cruz and Cochise and Pima I just agree with that yeah well I think I think there is nothing more to add on behalf of Borderlands Theater Mark and Milta I want to thank everybody for coming thank you very much for your questions your concern and just by virtue of you being here as a concerned citizen I think I think the struggle as we all know is ahead of us we're in for the long run and I think together as a community as people of good intention and good heart we'll have to see this through one way or the other thank you very much for coming and thank you very much for our panelists for their time and for this thank you very much have a great week everybody I lost track of the time okay