Immigration

As we pulled into El Paso after finishing up at Guadalupe, we were driving west on I-10, and I looked over to my left.  I had heard that El Paso had some pretty sketchy parts of town, but I was unprepared for what I saw:

I couldn't believe the people of El Paso would let anyone live like that.  After all, it looked like the slums and ghettos that we had seen in Central and South American countries.  And then it hit me.  This wasn't El Paso; this was Juarez, Mexico.  And even more unbelievably, I saw what I had only heard of: the Wall.

Yes, "the Wall" that had been hotly debated during the 2016 presidential election; "the Wall" that then Candidate Trump promised he would build; "the Wall" that had been through various designs to come up with the perfect solution to keep the Mexicans out of the United States.  I could hardly believe my eyes.

Well that night, we went out for dinner, and everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) was in Spanish.  In fact, it was funny for Hannah to translate the names of street signs on I-10--"clown" street was the funniest one.  Menus, restaurant names, posted instructions--all in Spanish.  And that night, after watching TV, I left the local news on, and the headliner story was about the workers who, a day after Biden was sworn in, hadn't shown up to continue work on building "the Wall"....and nobody knew the reason  behind it.  The second story of the night was the refugee center on the border between Juarez and El Paso that was filled to the brim with refugees from all kinds of countries, seeking asylum in the U.S.  They said 50 people are admitted every 20 minutes, many of them children.  In fact, this is one of the centers where Donald Trump ordered children to be separated from their families with their parents being denied entrance to the U.S. and deported back to their original countries while their children were put in homes all over the U.S.

I could hardly believe that any of this is real.  It's one thing to watch a segment about it on 60 Minutes, or to hear it discussed at a presidential debate, but to have it only feet away from where we had been driving?  As I told Hannah, I can't even imagine living in Juarez and seeing the restaurants, and hotels, and the University of Texas right across the valley, and know that the safety of that situation can't be yours.

The next morning, we wanted to take a tour of some of the Spanish missions in El Paso, and we drove for miles along the border, seeing the endless miles of "the Wall" that had been built.  While I understand that our country can't take a flood of undocumented immigrants through our borders, it sure is sad thinking of  how close the opportunities and freedoms are for a people who just so happened to be born on the wrong side of the fence. I don't know what the solution is, but it sure was heartbreaking and eye-opening to see the reality of what is happening.