By Danny Gonzales-Hyde, Staff Writer
Over the course of the past few years, the tension surrounding the United States' shared border with Mexico has been the center of much dispute. With this in mind, a group of Regis students organized a trip to Nogales, Arizona to learn more about immigration from Mexico and the issues surrounding the border. Along with these intentions, the trip was in memory of Jose Antonio, a 16-year-old boy shot 10 times by a border patrol agent. Jose was waiting for his brother on the Mexican side of the wall when he was shot by this border patrol agent who fired his weapon 17 times at Jose who was unarmed. During the trip, the group of students attended a vigil held by Jose's mother and grandmother for the 10th anniversary of his murder, who are fighting in the US courts in hope of getting justice for Jose. This was one of the many experiences that the group experienced over the course of the three-day trip. Other activities included going to a local market where artists sold their work, attending community events protesting the border, and a variety of other educational experiences centered around the border.
When I attended the trip debrief on Friday Oct. 20, it quickly became apparent that the trip was emotional for everyone involved. This emotional weight started right away when the group witnessed an arrest by border patrol as they were arriving at their motel. Despite the emotional weight of the trip, the students who I spoke with after the debrief spoke of it highly. They stressed the value of experiencing what it's like in a border town, along with hearing the stories of those most affected by the division it makes between communities. One such instance of this was them seeing families talking with one another through the chain link fence that divides the two countries. They also expressed their hope for Regis to continue this trip as a way of spreading awareness of the issues surrounding the border and its effects. The group communicated a few ways in which they hope for the trip to improve, such as providing emotional support after the trip as well as making the trip more known to the student body. This trip is just one of the ways in which Regis students have been working towards justice along the border and the treatment of Latino communities in the United States.
It is also worth noting that the students who went considered the trip a continuation of their work, as they do a range of different kinds of advocacy work around the border and its detrimental effects on migrant communities. I asked one of the students to provide a short description of their work in their own words:
Alondra Gonzalez - When coming to Regis I realized that I could finally start doing more work with my education surrounding since it’s a space for more open conversation. In high school, I had to seek out school resources since much of the work I did back then was around school to prison pipeline. I started doing more work around these issues with USRA, focusing on what Regis needs to do better for mixed status students and how we help as a student body. Ever since I started working with the CSL office, I’ve become a part of organizing the yearly vigils we hold at the GEO detention center around immigrants' lives lost during their journey and in detention. During the spring semester, I volunteer with servicios de la raza with the youth leadership program, and we discuss issues around identity, race, and immigration. In specifics to knowing their rights and any other questions we feel like our places of public education systems can’t answer. I want to do much more work surround immigration, so I feel like a lot of the work I do now is just a small step in the right direction