The border violence against Haitians reflects US racial ideology
Al Jazeera
It is not a coincidence that Haitians have the lowest asylum acceptance rates in the US and are deported en masse.
Travelling on a dirt road in the Sonoran Desert, all my friends and I could see was mountains, cacti, and dust. It was 2004, and the eight of us, college students with radical political ideas, were coming back from an alternative spring break trip to the US-Mexico border. We had spent the week in Nogales, Mexico, linking up with pro-migration groups, speaking with Central American asylum seekers in broken Spanish, and sleeping on the floors of community halls.
On the way back, we decided to take the desert route of the coyotes, the people who smuggle asylum seekers across the US-Mexican border, which is how we ended up enjoying the landscape of the Sonoran Desert. It was all going well until a jolt and a flat tire left us stranded in the middle of nowhere. None of us knew how to fix a flat tire.
Ours was a righteous spectacle, a group of eight university students who were willing to journey on the unpaved road from Mexico to the US but lacking the skill to do so. Luckily, a coyote, driving a van full of asylum seekers, stopped, fixed the tire without saying a word or asking us for anything, and got on his way.
