Cracks in the Walls: Global Perspectives on Migration
Presented by guest hosts Michelle and Daniel, Cracks in the Walls: Global Perspectives on Migration brings together eight individuals active in migration struggles around the world (Mexico, Haiti, U.S., and Europe) for a discussion on root causes of migration, current and past repression, and, most importantly, impactful approaches to solidarity and resistance.
Participants are:
Juan Carlos (he/him) – (Translating for Vivianne.) Director of “Tijuana: Ciudad de Migrantes”. https://youtu.be/kGjR8_ZVfnA?si=Uk3Aocc56FgJSmxQ
Michelle (she/her) – Filmmaker/writer, free clinic herbalist/nutritionist, teacher, and activist based in California. www.underexposedfilms.com
Daniel (any pronouns) – A member of the solidarity movement at the Polish-Belarussian border.https://nobordersteam.noblogs.org/ Fundraising: https://zrzutka.pl/rab8e2
Vivianne (she/her) – Activist and Social Work student. Community worker within the Haitian community in México. Haitian Bridge Alliance: https://haitianbridgealliance.org
Diana (she/her) – Mexican Psychologist and activist. Working at Refugee Health Alliance: https://www.instagram.com/alianza_para_la_salud
Edin/Andrea (they/them): Independent artist and rebel. Collaborator with Enclave Rabia Caracol and its various projects. Enclave Caracol: https://www.instagram.com/enclavecaracol
Also: https://www.instagram.com/tijuanacomidanobombas
Marie (she/her) – Activist from Germany within the noborder-movement and civil SAR (Search and Rescue). Links: https://resqship.org/ + https://alarmphone.org/ + https://captainsupport.net
Anne (she/her) – Activist of the Seebrücke and the #FreeHomayoun campaign, based in Switzerland. https://www.freehomayoun.org
Some ways to act in solidarity with migrants in the U.S.(from an outside source): https://crimethinc.com/2025/02/11/eight-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice
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Credits:
Michelle (host, producer, sound editor), Daniel (host, co-producer, co-editor), Elia Ayoub (episode design), Rap and Revenge (Music), Wenyi Geng (TFTT theme design), Hisham Rifai (FTP theme design) and Molly Crabapple (FTP team profile pics). Episode photo taken by Michelle.
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
For us, networking is a very important way of taking action against repression. It is only through exchange with those affected and activists that the systematic patterns become visible at all.
Michelle: Hey, my name is Michelle, and it’s an honor to be hosting this guest episode for The Fire These Times with my friend Daniel. Today we’ll be having a conversation on migration, in which seven of us will be sharing perspectives and experiences from Mexico, Europe, and the US, reflecting on various contexts and struggles faced by migrants, refugees, and those acting in solidarity.
This dialogue is just a starting point for us to expand connections and opportunities to learn from each other. With the international onslaught of repression and fascism, it is imperative that our resistance is also global—that it includes bridge-building and the exchange of lessons and tactics learned locally, with an examination of their global interrelation.
We want to be clear that there are many important voices that are not represented today, and that hopefully this conversation can be expanded by other geographic perspectives in the future. We are going to be speaking in English, for the majority of the participants—but one person joining us will be speaking in Spanish and will have translation right afterwards.
We’re going to go ahead and start with introductions, if everyone can take two minutes to share: first, whatever name and pronouns you’re comfortable identifying yourself with; second, where you are based; third, context and/or groups you are working in or have worked in; four, communities you are part of or collaborate with most closely; and five, anything else you want to briefly add about yourself.
I am Michelle, she/her, based in indigenous Ohlone territory of Huchiun, or what is now called Oakland, California. I am a filmmaker, teacher, and herbalist/nutritionist. I worked for fifteen years as an integrative health provider at a multilingual free clinic for immigrant communities here in Oakland. I got to know our comrades who are participating from Tijuana through volunteering at a migrant clinic and shelters down there.
My last film was on immigrant and refugee experiences in the healthcare system and the importance of culturally responsive care, centering healthcare providers who come from the communities they are serving.
Currently I teach English to immigrant and refugee students at an adult school, and coordinate resources including legal referrals and know-your-rights trainings. I also collaborate in some loose collectives that are developing mutual aid and resource-redistribution responses to the current crises.
I got to know Daniel from Poland a few years ago through an event we did looking at both inspiring resistance in Ukraine and the racism of how Europe embraces white Ukrainian refugees while excluding Syrian, Afghan, and other refugees from around the world.
Daniel: Hello, my name is Daniel. I’m involved in the solidarity movement on the Polish-Belarusian border. I am part of the No Borders Team collective, but also I am collaborating with other anarchist and leftist groups in Poland and in Europe.
No Borders Team is a collective that started work in 2021, when the eastern corridor from Belarus to Poland was widely opened. In the very beginning it was focused on direct humanitarian aid in the forest on the border. People on the move faced a huge amount of violence from Belarusian border guards, but also in Poland their rights weren’t respected. Humanitarian aid was banned by the state in Poland, so all help was in the hands of local people and grassroots groups and some small NGOs, and we managed to create together a quite good working network since that time.
I mean “good working” in terms of the amount of people involved into the movement—but No Borders Team’s activity is not only direct aid. One of our main goals is to change the narration of migration, especially in Poland—because it wasn’t present in public debates of the last years—but also we just want to point out that racist migration policy is a result of capitalism and has systematic causes; it’s not like some bad individuals are responsible for the suffering of millions of people, but it’s a more systemic thing.
That’s why we run some social media and a blog site, and we spread information about migration, because in Poland this topic is really not well known. Other than this, we organized some solidarity pickets in front of detention centers in Poland, for example in Przemyśl or in Lesznowola (close to Warsaw).
Andrea: Andrea, I use they/them pronouns. I am an artist and community-active individual based in Tijuana, Mexico, working directly with LGBTQI+ folks here in my local area, and actively at the cultural center Enclave Caracol, which is located on the northside in Tijuana, which provides a safer space for queer folk here in the City of Death. Because it is close to the physical border, we work in the shadows of the structural and systematic limits that it gives us.
I live and organize with people from the houseless community, working closely with LGBT folks in the streets, and migrants coming both from the south and the north in the States, as well as with people who have been deported. I’ve been working actively at this for the last almost eight years.
Diana: Hello, my name is Diana. I am from Mexico; I am a humanitarian psychologist who works with people on the border between Mexico and the United States. I provide mental health services: I assist children, some adolescents, some entire families, single women, and men with their needs as refugees in Mexico—people seeking refuge in the United States, internally displaced people from Mexico, homeless people, and deportees.
I am also a professor at a university in Guadalajara, where I lead online groups for Spanish-speaking women living in the United States: along with a group of psychologists, I hold workshops to support them in the process of seeing a new country.
Vivianne (translated by Juan Carlos): Hello, my name is Vivianne Petit Frere, I’ve lived in Mexico since four years ago. I started my journey in Brazil and I went through ten different countries trying to reach the American dream. When I arrived to Mexico, I was disillusioned and I felt the need to help, so I started as a volunteer and a little later I became a community organizer in the Haitian Bridge Alliance organization, where I support Haitian migrants and francophone African migrants with integration and defense of their rights.
Juan Carlos: My name is Juan Carlos Gazca, I’ll be serving as Vivianne’s translator today. I have a degree in international relations, and I study migration studies—I’m making my specialty in international migration and interculturality. I’m the director of the documentary Tijuana: City of Migrants, and it’s a pleasure to be here.
Marie: I’m Marie, and I use the pronouns she/her. I’m based in Germany, and I’ve been a no border activist for around six years now. I started out within the no border movement on land, trying to support people on the move through the area’s grassroots organizations and anarchist groups, but also with NGOs—for example doing human rights monitoring in the Aegean, or trying to document and expose police violence and border violence at sea.
Then I gradually moved on to search and rescue at sea, where we stand in solidarity with people on the move who cross from countries like Libya or Tunisia by boat to reach Europe. Unfortunately, many people have died and gone missing on this route, and there is a rather large movement trying to prevent that from happening.
Anne: I’m Anne, I use she/her pronouns. I’m an activist based in Switzerland, and my main organization is Seebrücke, a European movement that does public relations on the topic of sea rescues, and we also try to get Switzerland to accept more refugees.
One of our current campaigns is #FreeHomayoun, where we are fighting for the acquittal of Homayoun Sabetara, and all migrants who are criminalized for smuggling. Through that campaign I am connected across Europe, and there are many organizations working for freedom of movement on the same issues and struggles as us.
Michelle: Thank you so much, everybody, for being here with us today. It’s amazing to have so many different perspectives brought to the table.
As far as where we’re coming from: we’re all anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical in our preferences for organizing; a lot of us identify as anarchists, and we’re trying to create this space to have a dialogue about how those who are coming from similar perspectives in the world can be working towards addressing issues around migration.
We have a general umbrella in terms of what we’re going to be trying to cover, in three main areas:
We’re going to start with looking at the root causes of migration generally, trying to encapsulate what would bring people to move from the place that’s home, with respect for remembering that in most cases nobody wants to leave their home, and it’s generally pretty serious conditions that cause people to do so—we’re going to be looking at Haiti through the eyes of Vivianne as a case study for what is actually going on there now, and what brings so much movement from the country.
Then we’re going to look at the context for current state repression, at borders and in the daily life of immigrant communities in the locations that we’re based.
Then we’re going to close with focusing on solidarity strategies: what are our ideas? Both existing practices we’ve seen that have been particularly effective, as well as things we might propose working towards, again with an intentional focus on autonomous groups and individuals (many of us are in positions where we also either collaborate or work for NGOs, for nonprofits, but we all recognize the limitation of that structure, and in addition do work and position ourselves outside of that).
We see that root causes of migration, globally, for the most part, are connected to colonization and forced displacement. There are various reasons why people may be forced to migrate. A lot of times that falls under the umbrella of the impacts of imperialism and settler colonialism, different types of war, other forms of violence; economic oppression (people don’t have the resources to survive where they’re at); more and more, we’re seeing the outcomes of environmental devastation putting people on the move; also identity persecution, which can take many different forms, and political persecution.
Daniel: As we’ve already mentioned, most people would prefer to stay in their homes, if they had decent conditions there. But it’s also very difficult to identify a boundary where people are forced to migrate. The obvious examples are open armed conflicts and threats to life, but even here it is all the decision of individuals. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, we could see hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing Ukraine, but also we could see movement in the opposite direction: many Ukrainians who were returning to their country to support family and friends.
Also in areas devastated for years by wars, some people are choosing to stay and risking their lives. Just as they have the right to decide to stay, the same right to self-determination applies to those who decide to leave.
However, the situation is not always so clear as in war or direct religious or national persecution. Many regions in the Middle East or Africa have been devastated by years of colonial exploitation. Living in such places where it is impossible to cultivate the land, where there are no jobs or a functioning health system—all of this kills more slowly than bullets, but it is still violence and oppression.
Diana: We must also add significant violence that is generated against the LGBTQ community—that is super important to say, for me.
Michelle: Thank you, Diana.
We are going to turn now to Vivianne to offer us a more in-depth look at what’s going on in Haiti and how that has forced a massive amount of migration. She’ll be translated each time by Juan Carlos.
Vivianne: Speaking of causes—what causes migration? Haiti was first a Spanish colony; after that it became a French colony from 1697 until 1803. Those were four centuries of systematic stealing of our agricultural and mineral resources. Haiti didn’t mess itself up; it was a result of all the foreign intervention and foreign powers messing with Haiti.
In 1804, we decided to be free. But this freedom wasn’t complete, because it came with a set of imposed conditions. We didn’t have the human resources or our own structures, and being free—we didn’t know how to read or write, and all our institutions had been manipulated by the colonizers. Since then, Haiti has lived in chaos. Jean-Jacques Dessalines was murdered—he was the leader of our independence—and since then we have faced division, struggles for power, constant instability, and a deep structural vulnerability.
Our elites from foreign origin and white skin—they didn’t consider themselves part of the people but as superior to them, and they didn’t have any sense of belonging. This has created a system that excludes others, fomenting instability to distract and to continue stealing. Without mercy, they kill or exile those who oppose their regime (may they be journalists, presidents, activists, among others).
Haiti has been historically a country that has been oppressed economically, without the necessary resources to develop its people and its community. Also, we are an island that is really vulnerable to natural disasters. Among all these factors, there is a deep wish for survival that comes from us, and the only option is to migrate. Sometimes we migrate even though we don’t want to, leaving behind children, wives, husbands, family, memories, and having to start from zero all over again in different places with different languages. That is not easy for the migrant or for their family.
All these frustrations and this emotional baggage that we carry sometimes makes us stay in a defensive posture, and this drives us to our limits.
Michelle: This is something we see globally: in so many cases where people are forced into migration, the countries that then want to close their borders to people are actually the same countries that have contributed to the conditions that make migration necessary.
Vivianne: Instability has been a constant in our nation. The coup d’etats, the political crises, the violence, corruption, and the lack of an effective government have keptHaiti in a perpetual state of vulnerability. Every time we try to move forward, we see ourselves being dragged back by a system that keeps weakening us.
Haitian immigration proceeded in three big eras: the first one is since the decade of the eighties, Haitians started migrating in search of better opportunities. This was because of extreme violent conditions and repression under the dictatorship of Duvalier, who governed Haiti for almost three decades. During this time, the country experienced an environment of oppression and fear which led thousands of Haitians to flee, especially to the United States, France, and other Caribbean countries.
This migration wave continued in its second stage after the fall of the Duvalier regime in 1986, which started a period of even more uncertainty, where Haiti was experiencing intense political chaos with many failed attempts at democracy, coup d’etats, and an international embargo that lasted from 1991 until 1994 which deepened the crisis even further and gave origin to the phenomenon called “boat people.” This started to intensify since thousands of Haitians confronted these dangerous journeys by sea, fleeing this instability.
Then in the third stage, after the devastating earthquake of 2010, the migratory fluxes started to take a new direction: searching for work and stability, a lot of Haitians directed to South America and especially to Brazil, where a lot of employment options appeared in construction related to international events such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games.
Nonetheless, since 2008 since the arrival of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States, since he was the first Black president, this generated a change in the hopes for a new direction of migratory politics. This, along with the discourses of inclusion and human rights, led to an increase in migration to the Mexican border and attempts to enter the United States. This is what gave birth to the first big wave of migration in 2016, when thousands of Haitians arrived to Mexico and they were stuck in migratory limbo, looking at the American dream arriving in a neighboring country. But it didn’t turn out that way.
Michelle: As many people know, Obama was known as the deporter-in-chief, because despite the promises and hopes that Vivianne has explained, he ended up deporting more people than any president prior to him.
Vivianne: Before, Haitian migration was mainly composed of men who were traveling alone in search of better quality of life for their families. Nonetheless, after the 2010 earthquake, this dynamic changed: women who were alone and complete families started to migrate as well. In this new context, Mexico offered regular migrants the possibility of also applying for family reunification, which benefited a lot of Haitian parents.
After starting this paperwork and this process on Mexican territory, many of them were able to cross to the United States, which gave origin to the phenomenon of unaccompanied minors who arrived to the Mexican borders looking to reunite with their families. Although Mexico was offering th possibility of family reunification, the minors who were traveling alone faced a lot of really difficult situations because of the cultural and linguistic barriers.
Since many of them arrived without the necessary documentation or the company of their parents, this placed them in a really vulnerable situation, especially with migration authorities and the Mexican organization DIF (Integral Family Development). Many of these children suffered bad treatment since the system was not really prepared to address their situation in an adequate manner.
Michelle: Thank you so much Vivianne and Juan Carlos.
Daniel: Thank you very much to Vivianne for her story and giving us a view about Haiti.
Now we would like to focus on the current situation. We will start in Europe. What we can see is the global narration of states changed in the last years. Migration was a positive thing, at least in part of the propaganda of the European Union, this idea of “open borders”—of course borders weren’t open for people, but more for money and business, but also businesses in Europe need people to work, so that’s why this whole idea of open borders from the state was created.
For many people it was easier to get to Europe and get legal work here and legal status, but as we can see, the nature of capitalism is making the story not so simple, because you cannot grow forever. So at some point when the economy of Europe had trouble, then all this racist propaganda appeared.
For us it’s not super strange, because we more or less know how the propaganda works, but for people living in the European Union it was quite a radical shift: one day they are saying We will make open borders and we can travel wherever we want, and what we have now in Europe is like war propaganda: We need to buy more weapons and close our borders.
I will start with a bit about what is happening in Poland. The topic of migration in Poland is quite new, because for a long time Polish people were migrating to the West looking for better jobs and a better life. But this changed in the twenty-first century when Poland went to the European Union and Polish society got more and more wealthy. In 2015, when the Balkan corridor was open, there was a whole story with relocations, but Poland didn’t take any migrants at the time—the state already started some anti-migrant propaganda in a really bad way.
This same thing came back in 2021 when the eastern migrant corridor from Belarus to Poland was opened widely. For people who don’t know, in the middle of 2021 the Belarusian regime and Russia organized some flights for people from Africa, the Middle East, and different countries, and they provided them, for a lot of money, with travel to Europe. This was a fake story, because the border between Poland and Belarus is permanently closed. These people paid a lot of money, and they came to Minsk, and they went to the border with Poland, so then the soldiers took guns and told them, Now you need to go or we will shoot you. In 2021, thousands of people tried to cross the border, and of course the response of the state was super harsh.
I will tell now about some strategies, because we can see that police states use the same things in the last years, and also other countries in Europe do the same strategies against migrants and against the solidarity movement.
For example, the first thing that the government did when people started to come massively from Belarus was make an “emergency zone” on the border: it was a strip on the whole border, a few kilometers wide, a zone that no one can access. In the beginning, local people were helping refugees, because the border area is forests and swamps, so it was really hard to survive there if you don’t have food, if you don’t have good clothes. A lot of local people and some solidarity movements tried to help, but after that the government closed it and it was forbidden to go there. It was guarded by military and police. So the whole solidarity movement went underground—if you gave someone a glass of water, you were a criminal.
This strategy of an emergency zone started in 2021, but it’s now 2025 and we still have it. We have a new government, but they are using this the whole time. Normally in the Polish constitution, you can do this for one month; after that you can make it two more months, but you cannot make it more. The first emergency zone was for one year, so it was super anti-constitutional, but no one in government cared about this. Now we have a new government, and it seems like a lot of months we’ve had a new emergency zone. It’s much smaller than the first one, but the amount of violence inside it is the same as before.
Another part of the strategy is you make an “exclusion zone”—no media, no activists can go in. Of course a lot of activists like our collective and a lot of different groups were going there anyway, but for mainstream media it was impossible. So no news from these areas. In this way you can cut off all information on what is happening to migrants.
A second strategy—Poland shares this with all countries in the European Union—is the cancellation of human rights (that’s how I call it). We have some fundamental roles that were established in the Geneva Convention after the Second World War: all my life it was said that these laws are irremovable; they are fundamental. But now a lot of the things written there are canceled. When you hear politicians, they are saying, This convention was for peacetime, and now we have wartime.
It’s another shift that is shocking, especially for liberals and all the people who believe in governments, that even the most fundamental thing can just be canceled in one year. One law that was canceled in Poland recently is the right of asylum. This is also in the Geneva Convention, that everyone who feels insecure in his country can apply for asylum in another country, and this country needs to review this application—of course it doesn’t mean that it will be a positive verdict, but at least they need to review it and provide some safe space for this person for this time.
Of course this law is not perfect, because it was connected with detention centers; most of the time, in Poland at least, in the last years, when someone applied for asylum, the state locked him in a detention center which looks like a prison, and conditions there are even worse than in prison. And of course most people don’t get asylum, so they get deported or they stay illegally after this. So we don’t like how this asylum law works, but anyway it was an attachment point for people on the move. At least when they were in the forest and their life was in danger, they could ask for this, and at least for the next month or two they can be in a safe place, and after that they probably get deported.
In different countries there is anti-migrant propaganda, which is also connected to the previous two points. Like I said in the beginning, migration was shown before as a kind of chance, and people were encouraged to migrate, and the European Union myth is based on open borders and Schengen, where everyone can go freely—and now it’s closing. For example, the German-Polish border: these two countries are in Schengen, but Germany is making border controls again. Not permanently, but from time to time, and it looks like borders are not going to be as open as before.
It’s also not comfortable for people from Europe, so we also have this crisis; capitalism is permanent economic crisis. We have huge inflation in Poland, and I guess in different countries it’s also not so easy. So to keep people’s minds away from it, the governments are making this anti-migrant propaganda.
Michelle: There were several themes that came up for me in what you were saying that those of us in the US and Mexico can relate to, in terms of this process of dehumanization. It seems like governments need to use propaganda that undermines the humanity and the stories and experiences of the people and their migration processes.
The other thing is the scapegoating. It seems that globally, governments are scrounging to deal with their own internal failures and have increasingly been using the scapegoating of migrants.
Anne and Marie, do you want to chime in more about the situations you’ve seen in Europe and in the boats before we shift to other continents?
Marie: It’s been really interesting what’s being said, and maybe I can also give some examples from the perspective of solidarity at sea, within the search-and-rescue community.
For a little bit of context, it would be interesting to know that this is a relatively young movement, roughly ten years old. The Mediterranean sea has always been a place of migration; throughout history people have traveled across the Mediterranean sea for various reasons, and only within the last couple of decades it’s become a restricted place where imaginary lines called borders were drawn and movement was really restricted.
It was around 2013 when migration started picking up: people leaving from countries such as Tunisia or Libya, and then going mostly to Italy, or also to Greece. This route became one of the most deadly routes of migration in the whole wide world. Many people disappeared without a trace. The official numbers say around thirty thousand people have died on this route since 2014—and these are only the numbers that we know of. These are the official documented cases, but there are so many more invisible deaths and missing, because of the so-called “invisible shipwrecks.”
What happened was that search-and-rescue was something that governments were responsible for; there were areas called “search-and-rescue zones,” they were divided between different governments, and it’s their responsibility to conduct search and rescue operations. They started drawing back more and more, closer towards the coast, and leaving bigger and bigger areas uncovered. Then Italy, who was leading the biggest mission, called Mare Nostrum, then terminated it because other countries refused to support it financially. And suddenly nobody really was doing search-and-rescue in the central Mediterranean.
Of course there was search-and-rescue for privileged people, white people in coastal areas—but not for people on the move who crossed on sea-unworthy boats. At that time, then, several groups started organizing. Among them were really big NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders (MSF), but then also solidarity movements of grassroots organizations got together and built up rusty buckets—really old ships; one of the first ships was a fishing vessel that was nearly one hundred years old—and people who were not really used to doing this got together—doctors, seafarers, activists, anarchists—and tried to prevent this from happening, and standing in solidarity with people on the move.
That proved to be really efficient, but still not enough. As a movement, we thought we would hopefully cease to exist, that there would be no need for us, that state actors would pick up their work again and do what needs to be done. Ideally, we would move on to an even better stage where there would be safe passage and freedom of movement, that people could just move freely from the country of their origin to the country of their choosing.
How wrong we were! It’s been ten years; there is still civil search-and-rescue going on, more than ever. State actors have withdrawn, completely. There are some maritime search-and-rescue coordinating centers that don’t even pick up the phone anymore, or that block numbers where they know it’s connected to people fleeing on boats. What different governments have done is try to stop the solidarity movements in different ways. We’re looking at ten years of repression, and I can’t really name everything, but it’s the blocking of ships, and then the criminalization of solidarity.
One of the most recent things is the distant ports—when there’s a rescue being done, there are now laws that force us to immediately ask for a next port, and by international law, this would be the closest port possible. But what Italy (for example) is doing is assigning us ports that are sometimes over one or two thousand miles away. That means we need to travel with people who just survived horrific journeys, who a lot of times have been fleeing for years and years, and have escaped torture camps in Libya, and sometimes have been really close to death—rescuing these people, we need to bring them to the next safest port, but then we get assigned a port which is sometimes five days away. This also then takes the boat from the area of operation for ten days.
Just as an example, imagine that you are in New York; you get hurt and call an ambulance, and the ambulance is sent to Chicago. This is what’s happening there on a daily basis.
There was also a time when there was the criminalization of people in solidarity crews. There was a famous case in 2019 where the captain Carola Rakete was not allowed to an Italian port on the small island of Lampedusa; they had over fifty survivors on board, and they had been waiting for over two weeks, and the condition of the people was constantly decreasing (Diana, as a person who gives psychological support to people on the move, can also say a little more about this, how incredibly stressful that is). There were also people trying to commit suicide.
Carola at one point just went into the harbor, against the orders of the authorities, and then she was arrested. That created a huge media outcry, and got quite a bit of attention, and the solidarity all across the countries was quite big. But it also then created this legend that there’s a really highly criminalized field of activism—which is actually not true. There’s no white people in prison for this kind of work at the moment. There is repression, and sometimes people suffer consequences when it comes to their career or things like that, but at the same time what is incredibly invisible in Europe is that all along the borders (especially along the Mediterranean but also on land), prisons are full of people on the move.
We’re talking about thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. For each boat, there’s at least one person arrested as the boat driver, and therefore as somebody who “facilitates smuggling.” These are people who actually seek asylum themselves. And we have outrageous cases. Just recently we had a sixteen-year-old minor in Greece who was supposed to go to prison for 4,670 years—I think you need to let that sink in. This is a child who fled from a war-torn country. He actually did get sentenced to 280 years.
There was also a case of a shipwreck in Pylos. It was quite a big shipwreck; there were seven hundred people on it who were crammed in horrific conditions and they’d been at sea for over a week, and then the boat started sinking and they called the coast guard. The coast guard ignored them for over twenty-four hours, and when they realized that they couldn’t get rid of them, they actually turned up with their ship—this has been proven—and they tried to tow them to Italian waters so the Greek coast guard wouldn’t have to deal with them. By this, they made the boat capsize, and six hundred people died.
None of the coast guard officials have been held accountable, but nine people from the few survivors that actually made it were then imprisoned, and were threatened with charges of several hundred years, and they tried to make them responsible for the deaths of all these people.
This is a constant thing that is developing. There are repressions against solidarity, mostly privileged and white solidarity structures, but what is really happening is that it’s an essential part of so-called “border protection” that people on the move are strategically and systematically imprisoned and criminalized.
Anne: Through these cases of criminalized sea rescues, we learned that thousands of migrants in Europe are also criminalized as “smugglers.” We wanted to know more about this, and we looked for people who were affected and were willing to talk about it, because in general the treatment of migrants in Europe is quite invisible. The system of camps and prisons isolates people, and there is relatively critical media coverage of the issue.
That’s how we met Mahtab Sabetara, whose father was sentenced to eighteen years in prison in Greece as a smuggler. He had no legal way to get to Europe, where his children live. He was stopped in a car with seven other people, and criminalized as a smuggler, when he himself was a refugee fleeing Iran. After we heard that story, we started the campaign #FreeHomayoun, fighting for his acquittal.
We started to inform ourselves and to network, and we learned that Homayoun is really not an isolated case. All across Europe, migrants are criminalized as alleged smugglers, for entering the country to claim asylum, and then disappearing into prisons. In Greece, for example, at least one person from every arriving car or boat carrying migrants is arrested and charged. As a result, these people are already the second-largest group in Greek prisons, with sentences up to hundreds of years. That’s really crazy what’s going on there.
European states claim they are concerned about the safety of migrants, and therefore acting heavily against smugglers, but in fact they are making the way to Europe extremely dangerous by not providing resettlement programs, by building walls, and by using border violence. It is almost impossible to cross the European external border without assistance, and at the same time the states criminalize that assistance.
The responsibility is completely reversed—it is not the state that is judged for not helping people, but there are parents who are held responsible for the deaths of their children at sea. This happened again this week near the Greek island of Lesvos, when the Greek coast guard tried to push back a boat, causing it to sink. Among the passengers of that boat was a family; twenty-three people were rescued but three children and four adults drowned, and one child still remains missing. As usual in Greece, one man has been arrested and charged with smuggling for allegedly steering that boat. This man, now in custody, lost his wife and child.
This case is so brutal in many ways, because in principle no one should be criminalized for steering a boat—but the man is also being used to cover up a deadly crime committed by the coast guard which led to the death of his family members, and for which he is now being blamed.
Just to add some other aspects: imprisonment is not the end of problems and repression. With a conviction, it is really difficult to get asylum in Europe, so many people are forced to leave Europe again. And even if they are allowed to stay, they have to deal with the traumatic experiences of migration and imprisonment. This includes, for example, living in uncertainty for years, not being allowed to make decisions in that time in prison, and having no control over their own lives.
To come back to the #FreeHomayoun campaign, Homayoun Sabetara’s sentence was reduced in the appeal trial from eighteen to seven years, so he was allowed to leave prison after three years—but now he has to stay in Greece, which is not the country where his children live, so is not the country he wanted to go to. There he has no social network he can use. He has to go to the police station every month for the next three years. He describes that situation as being still in prison, just in a larger one.
He’s not allowed to work, but he has no financial support from the state. He still does not know if he will get asylum. So Greece is doing everything to force him to leave the country again. That is how the European states want to prevent people from coming to Europe and to force those who have arrived alive to leave again.
Michelle: Thank you to Daniel, Marie, and Anne for sharing that update on the current situation around people on the move in Europe.
Part II
Michelle: I’m going to do an overview of some of the most recent developments that have been happening in the US, repression-wise, and then we’re going to switch over to how that’s been looking across the border in Mexico, as far as the impacts.
In general, there’s been a lot of global media coverage in terms of the disturbing developments in the US under Trump in the last couple months. Obviously, the US gets a disproportionate amount of attention globally, as it causes a disproportionate amount of damage, but as we have listeners from all over, I’ll just do a quick update on some of what we’ve seen here.
These attacks on immigrant communities in the US and globally are nothing new. Nor are they particularly partisan. As many people know, Obama ended up deporting more people than any president prior to him. And likewise, Biden topped Trump’s numbers from before that in his first term. While clearly the rhetoric and threats under the current Trump administration—along with what we’re seeing more visibly in terms of actual deportation activity—is terrorizing communities, it is also important to see the non-partisan long-term trends that have been gravely impacting people’s lives here for a very long time. In fact, Bernie Sanders even said the other day that the one area he agrees with Trump is in his focus on stifling immigration. As far as I’m concerned, none of them are getting anything right.
Some specific developments that we’ve had lately in terms of legal changes and repression activities:
Trump had a very public collaboration that was agreed upon with El Salvador’s president Bukele, where Bukele agreed to house migrants in private Salvadoran prisons for money. A few weeks ago, 238 Venezuelans were sent there. This seems to overtly fit the definition of what gets called “human trafficking.” Bukele was agreeing to receive migrants from the US and house them indefinitely in very dire conditions in private Salvadoran prisons so that he could make money.
Similarly, we’ve seen people sent to the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay that was used for twenty years for folks related to the “War on Terror,” and is now being used to house migrants who are being shipped out of the US. Due to its remote location, there is very little access for lawyers or any kind of support once people are sent there.
We’re also seeing the re-establishment of family detention, where entire families are being incarcerated. We’re essentially seeing families disappear once that gets enacted.
One of the most recent things that is really ominous is a potential collaboration with the Internal Revenue Service, the tax collection agency in the United States—for decades, people who are undocumented have been strongly encouraged to pay taxes, so people are essentially contributing to public funds and receiving no benefits in return. That has been sold to people as a “pathway” to help with legalizing their status eventually: they’ll be positioned much better if they’ve been paying taxes for a certain number of years.
Paying taxes involves revealing your address, revealing all kinds of personal information—and that information has been collected by the IRS but never, until the current time, been shared with other agencies. Now the agreement that’s being worked out is that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) will have direct access to all of the Internal Revenue Service’s information. This sets a horrifying precedent, because it reveals everybody’s locations, personal details, and information in a way that has never previously taken place.
What we’re hearing is they’re very close to solidifying that agreement, and for anyone who has been following what Elon Musk is up to, getting hold of all kinds of information through Social Security and other places.
Finally, we’ve been seeing the revocation of visas and green cards, followed by ICE detention and deportation, to criminalize students who’ve been protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To date, there’s been at least seven somewhat high-profile students and scholars of color from various countries who’ve had their visas revoked and are being detained. This is a direct attempt at criminalizing particularly people of color who are students in this country raising their voices against the genocide. Again, the precedents around this are a first in terms of revoking people’s legal immigration status.
Personally, in the Bay Area, while it feels like while we’ve been slightly less impacted by the visibility of ICE in our communities, we are seeing that presence more and more. But it has been more obvious in other parts of the country. One place we’ve been seeing it flare up is directly at immigration courts. We have immigration courts in San Francisco and Concord that are both nearby, where people are showing up for their standard immigration hearings and are subsequently not granted the status approval that they previously would be, and then are unexpectedly and immediately arrested and deported, arriving back in their home countries as soon as the following day.
Again, this can include entire families who are suddenly disappeared without any notice. Some folks who I don’t know personally but am in community with had that experience, where a mother, partner, and a child showed up for their hearing, and with surprise even to their attorney, were not granted status and were arrested—and were in Guatemala the next day. So things are shifting and changing very quickly.
[This is future Michelle chiming in about a month later, on May 8, for an update since I had last recorded the information about the situation in the United States. The first thing to note is the speed at which a lot of the repression towards immigrant communities is escalating, and the complete dismantling of so many structures in the United States as an intended part of fascism’s encroachment on life here.
I’m going to name a couple of the most recent egregious measures that have been taken, because it’s probably impossible to encapsulate all of them. Comparing what I recorded a month ago to some of these updates gives a sense of where things are at.
The first thing to note is that while there are a lot of horrible measures being declared by the Trump administration, a lot of them are tied up in court. As much as ICE are actually following through on a lot of these threats, they are not necessarily legal and they are still being contested, with some victories in holding them off. That is important to note.
For instance, the Alien Enemies Act, which is an obscure eighteenth-century war powers act that had been used to deport Venezuelans to El Salvador as I mentioned in the last announcement—it’s been rejected that they can use that. It’s still already happened, and people have been unable to bring back the people who have been taken out of the country. But it is not deemed legal how it happened. That’s still being contested.
Likewise, further plans that Trump had to revoke the TPS (temporary protected status) that granted two years of safety to Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans in the United States have also been blocked by the courts. It’s not clear how that’s going to play out.
One of the biggest things that has happened was an announcement that they were going to reinstate the CBP One app, which was the Customs and Border Patrol application that had been used to revamp some of the asylum process, and it was complete chaos. It resulted, now, in them reopening the app with the announcement that nine hundred thousand people would need to self-deport and register that they would do so on the app.
Recently, as in a couple days ago, they announced there would be a $1,000 stipend and travel assistance to any of those people who chose to self-deport. I’ve been working with a student who received the email that went out to so many hundreds of thousands of people, and the language on it is horrifying. It shows up in your inbox saying that your time in the US is up, and this created panic in many communities. It is still unclear how that’s going to play out.
Likewise, in my last update I had said there were seven student visas that had been revoked; at this point, that number has drastically climbed to the low estimate being fifteen hundred, up to certain estimates of around five thousand student visas related to protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, where people who were here on student visas have had those visas taken away as a result. Again, this is totally unprecedented, and a number of those folks have been arrested and sent to immigration detention centers.
We have seen in the last couple days a judge blocking intended administration flights to send a number of Asian migrants to Libya and Rwanda. As we know, Libya’s record around migrant detention and torture is horrifying, and this is a first that the country would be sending people abroad in that way, just like what’s happening with Latino immigrants being sent to El Salvador. So far, a judge has blocked those flights, but it’s not clear what’s going to happen.
Another high profile case related to the deportations to El Salvador that happened a couple months ago is Kilmar Abrego García, who was deported from Maryland and had very clear legal status and protections here, and was “mistakenly” deported but they have refused to bring him back.
In the last couple days, there was a DACA recipient who had received permission to leave who was deported upon his return. So we’re seeing explosions undermining people’s rights in every direction, and it would be fairly impossible to encapsulate all the updates, but I wanted to highlight how much has changed in the last month and how much worse things have gotten.]
I’d love to turn it over now to Andrea or Diana or Vivianne to talk a little bit about how this is looking on the other side of the border.
Diana:From Tijuana, the first month is super weird. I have a lot of feelings for that situation. Since the interaction between the president of Mexico and the president of the United States, there has been a strong crackdown on people coming to the border. In the airports and bus terminals, there has been a lot of guarda nacional—maybe Juan Carlos Gazca can help me describe these persons in Mexico.
Juan Carlos: The guardia nacional, or the national guard, is a new institution that was made in Mexico by the previous government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It’s a new institution in between the police and the army, but its members come from mostly the army, so at the end of the day it’s the army, just with a different name and with uncertain lists of activities they can handle.
Sometimes they are given police enforcement activities; they have been given construction activities for some of the president’s projects—for the airport, for the train, things like that. One of the most important features is the one Diana means: they were given the authority on migration matters.
When Trump started this set of negotiations on migration with Mexico, he kept saying “Mexico is going to pay for the wall.” In the end, there might not be a new physical wall on the border between Mexico and the United States, but there is a new wall on the southern border between Mexico and Guatemala, and that is the guardia nacional.
Andrea: Here in the city of Tijuana, violence in the city has a long history. More recently we have seen the effects of the Trump administration and the decisions you just mentioned, such as the appearance of the new national guard that only solidifies the militarized border here on the Mexican side.
For a more clear example of my own experience, and from the daily struggle, that is the constant deprivation of people’s liberty while moving within the city—especially those without government documentation within this “hot spot” in the city where people are always on the move:
Here, people who fit a certain racialized profile are illegally stopped and robbed by the police without any consequences to the violators. Now with the added militarization of the borderland in the last few months by the Mexican government, military and Mexican national guards persecute and jail migrants in “shelters” where they are literally locked in cells. While doing all this, the state claims a “humane” migration policy, even calling it a “new humanitarian Mexicanism.” But this is not less than a disguised armed anti-migration force.
Daily we see cases of people being picked up by police-marked vehicles made for kidnapping people by the dozens—poor people, including migrants and deportees—in the name of this fake fairy tale called the “fight against narcos.” Most of the time they are taken in for hours, and sometimes they are taken and never seen again.
That is the violence that is lived on the streets here in the city on the micro scale, you could say. On a bigger scale, in a bigger frame, the violence and oppression of the military and national guards can manifest in them being physically aggressive to the migrant community, to migrants and poor people trying to physically cross the border. Their violence extends to a point of killing without any consequences, not even outcry from the public. Last year, a report from Punto Norte shows the national guard killing and burning the bodies of young migrants trying to jump over the wall.
This shows the intentions of the state are not only to harass the people but to stop migration by any means, even lethal force—once again going against the pro-humanitarian migration campaign held up by the Mexican state that locates itself (or tries to) away from our neighbors up north, but it is not. It has become an extension of that very same American anti-immigrant strategy that the Mexican government is using for its economic and political benefit when dealing with US foreign policy, kind of a chess game where the lives of humans—migrants, LGBT people, queer people, and poor people—are the pieces of the game to be lost or won.
This is a direct manifestation of the militarization and action of the police here right next to the physical border.
Vivianne (translated by Juan Carlos): The Mexican people and Mexican society are ready to interact with Haitian people, but institutions are the ones that are not acting accordingly yet. In my experience as a migrant and as a community worker, I can repeat that the Mexican people are ready to live alongside the Haitian community. With time, more intimate relations of friendship and intercultural exchange have developed.
More than racism, what I have perceived in a lot of cases is classism. In Mexico, the color of the skin goes to a second degree, after the status or resources that a person has. So I would say it is not color, it is social condition that still marks these barriers.
Nonetheless, this social openness contrasts with the institutional response, which is still deficient, especially for the migratory fluxes from Haiti. I’ll give two examples. The first one is about the National Institute for Migration, that has never hired anyone to properly translate from Haitian creole to Spanish—which has caused enormous difficulties to get access to legal procedures for a lot of people. Even though this clear lack of infrastructure is present, the National Institute for Migration has received at least 16,919 Haitian people between 2020 and 2021, with Chiapas being the state with the highest number of migratory processes being held.
This big difference between social solidarity and institutional indifference shows that a will to integrate exists at the base of society, but the state hasn’t modified or adapted either their policies nor their bureaucratic system to the reality of an Afro-descendent, plurilingual, and socially excluded population.
The second example is racial profiling. In my personal case, having lived in Mexico for four years and having this temporary residence permit, whenever I’m in an airport arriving to Mexico I’m asked many questions on what I’m doing in Mexico, why I have this residence permit; I’m always interviewed in these aspects. I see that in other situations, people with white skin color are not asked even though they might have some illicit things going on—either being on substances, or paper issues.
But in my case, as soon as they identify me because of my skin color, they begin questioning everything. Just when they hear my accent they know I’m not an American citizen. I sometimes see that people with a lighter skin tone don’t get bothered as much in the airport, but in my case, even though I have all the documents and proof, I still need to give a long explanation of what I’m doing here.
Michelle: Thank you so much, everyone, for outlining the repression that’s happening. We can see a lot of global trends.
Now we’re going to shift gears to something a little more inspiring, which is the ways that people have been autonomously trying to fight back against this. As we said earlier, a lot of us are doing so, sometimes in collaboration with nonprofits or NGOs when those resources are necessary, but sometimes that’s happening in smaller collectives in forms of solidarity and mutual aid.
There is a lot that we’re scuffling to figure out in the midst of these changing times, and trying to figure out, by building these international relationships, how we can make some of our movements stronger in the face of repression.
Vivianne, do you want to chime in on what you’ve seen and experienced?
Vivianne: In my role as a community organizer in front of all the decisions from the state—whether Mexico or the United States—since December 2021, I started as a volunteer in Tijuana, and since then I have provided orientation and defended members of the Haitian and francophone community.
Today, I am no longer a volunteer but an organizer in this community work, and my work consists of implementing strategies of solidarity, and being a bridge between the community and institutions. I’ll describe some of the actions that I have made in critical moments marked by migratory politics in Mexico and the United States.
For starters, with exemption 42 under Trump’s government: I identified all the persons in vulnerable situations—may it be persons who were sick, with different capacities, pregnant women—and I was providing humanitarian assistance and aid. I was also enrolling them into waiting lists to make their crossing process easier.
Regarding education, I was part of the know-your-rights program, so I secured translation of all the contents of know-your-rights workshops about rights and duties. I translated to Haitian creole, providing real access to the information.
Later on, in the transition after exemption 42, I acted as a mediator between the Haitian community and diverse institutions, promoting social and labor inclusion through different workshops and community orientations. Then, when the CBP One application arrived, I provided information and orientation around how to use this app—not only in Tijuana but in Mexico City as well, which was another place you could get your appointments for this app. To do this, I was in coordination with different attorneys from the organization.
When the CBP One app arrived, it came with a lot of malfunctions, so I dedicated myself to gathering evidence on all the technical problems the app was going through—especially that it didn’t work properly on darker skin, and sometimes you needed to take pictures and it would only work at two in the morning or something like that. This different evidence and proof I was gathering was a key element in the following legal actions and suits that happened against this app, that ended up in modifications being made to the system.
Regarding campaigns in public health, I coordinated and mediated implementation on health campaigns at strategic points where the Haitian community was concentrated, collaborating always in the preparation of these campaigns and translation for the events.
In humanitarian aid, every fifteen days I participated in the distribution of economic aid to different shelters that hosted Haitian people who were in vulnerable situations. After the CBP One app was suspended, I dedicated myself to gathering evidence of every appointment that was canceled by the app, so this could back all the public and legal complaints that were made against this app.
On violations to human rights or institutional abuse, I always take the role as a speaker on media or with reporters for different organizations, to always try to communicate and speak up about what’s happening, against authorities or promoting alliances with other organizations. Right now I’m still working with an organization as an advocate for human rights and the Haitian community in general.
Some limitations that I have encountered through my work and different challenges that I have faced have to do with instability in institutions. The constant changes of directives in key institutions such as the National Institute of Migration or Integral Family Development have challenged the continuity of previous agreements. Every new functionary needs to start from zero, and I need to go back again and explain and generate trust and restructure the previous agreements, so it is really difficult to have continuity in the process.
Also there is excessive bureaucracy in the institutions. The administrative processes tend to be slow, complex, and really inaccessible sometimes. This bureaucracy acts as a barrier that prevents us from taking urgent action or implementing programs with agility, especially in crisis contexts.
A key element that I feel needs to gain strength is the attention and inclusion of the Haitian community in Mexico, to recognize the value of Haitians’ work in Mexican society. The Haitian community has demonstrated itself to be a resilient labor force, always willing to integrate and support. Nonetheless, the handiwork of the Haitian community is sometimes overestimated in the public discourse, like they are really hard workers but at the same time it’s undervalued in terms of workers’ rights and just salaries, or even stability and recognition in enterprises.
There is a contradiction in the practical usage that talks about Haitian efforts, and low interest in institutions to generate fair conditions—from one of silent exploitation to one of just economic inclusion and fair treatment, with formal contracts, with access to social security, with opportunities for entrepreneurship and professional mobility. It’s not just about integrating them as cheap workers, but as citizens with proper prospects of life.
Michelle: Thank you so much, Vivianne.
We’re going to shift gears a little bit to look at some of the types of solidarity that have been happening in the healthcare sphere. In particular, as was brought up earlier, something we don’t discuss enough is often the impact of stress and anxiety on people who are dealing with situations of migration.
Diana, as a psychologist do you want to chime in on some of the work you’ve been doing?
Diana: The people’s mental health, especially in recent years, with this shift in population which has seen more families—women, children, and adolescents—here in Mexico, organizations working on the border between Mexico and the USA don’t know a lot about how to work with that population. A lot of these years, people know how to work with men and adult people, but now the young people really don’t have a lot of tools or strategies of support.
A lot of families and women come to the clinic where I work, and just say the physical problems that they have. They are adult people, you know? But nobody sits down and asks the children, How was the travel? How are you?—all these things. It’s interesting, because for all the organizations here in Tijuana, I am the only psychologist who attends to kids from zero to eighteen years old—for free. I’m the only person who attends to that. A lot of organizations, universal organizations, work with children, but only eleven to thirteen and older, not to the young. It’s interesting to see that, and the demand of the people here on the border.
I worked in the past in Guadalajara, more in the center of Mexico, and the people really don’t ask about mental health service a lot, because people want to go to the north, to the border, and cross. But when the people come to Tijuana and need to wait a lot of time to see what happens with the individual cases for their families, the people need a psychologist!
And not just a psychologist—all the services for mental health, like psychiatrics, or for example something like herbalists is something that can help with mental health service. It’s super interesting, because for example for the Haitian people, they need some natural service that can calm the stress or anxiety or depression or something like that, and it’s help for the people—but you need to have more tools, not just a psychologist for that situation, you know?
It’s really interesting to my way to see the mental health from the people. And from my experience, it’s not just from the people to migrants, it is from the people who work for the migrant people—you know? All of you, and me. And it’s a mental health service, because it’s a lot!
Something that I think has helped in Tijuana is being able to unite and communicate among organizations with our strengths, needs, and actions, so we can strengthen ourselves in the fight. Also, uniting as organizations to file complaints and demands with the Mexican government and society—our so-important issues of violence help strengthen our voice. Being able to be like, migrants having organization, and activists who flow with the needs and don’t force necessity into the actions you take—because otherwise you won’t be attentive to the reality of the migrants’ situation, which changes daily.
I feel that, like everyone else in the world, there are things that we always need to improve and take care of. I believe that our borders are not stronger than our humanity. Migration should not be a problem to be solved, but a story to be heard, a life to be accompanied, and a dignity to be defended. Thank you.
Michelle: Thank you, Diana, that was beautiful.
To comment on the part you brought up: I had the privilege of meeting Diana and her colleagues at a clinic called Refugee Health Alliance in Tijuana a couple years ago. As she was mentioning, I was able to bring down a bunch of herbs that were donated by different small companies or individuals in the US who harvest herbal medicine. In the last fifteen years in migrant communities I work with here in Oakland, I’ve found that for a lot of people, on the topic of mental health—at our clinic we had a medical doctor, a therapist, and then myself doing nutrition and herbal medicine, so working a lot with trauma, working a lot with anxiety, insomnia, stress, depression.
Having that opportunity to take some of that medicine—which in many ways is indigenous to the communities that we’re serving—across the border and collaborate with comrades in Mexico was great, and Diana and I were able to work together at the migrant shelters, and, even in a minimal way, were able to help people to decrease anxiety, decrease depression, and—pretty much ubiquitously—to sleep better (because the journey, the trauma, everything takes a toll on your ability to sleep and rest, and that in turn makes everything more challenging).
We were able, through the help of places like Herbalists Without Borders, to get a bunch of essential oils, as well as donations from Five Flavors Herbs and other places, to have tinctures I prepared for sleep and stress that we brought down. And we found that in particular the essential oils were really helpful to people, becuase it was something they didn’t have to take internally, if they had any discomfort using teas or other remedies, and it was something that felt familiar to a lot of people and took the edge off.
Obviously it doesn’t resolve the larger structural issues in any way, but in a certain sense if there is a way to provide any kind of lessening of the stress and pain, it makes people that much stronger for dealing with what they’re up against.
I’m going to turn it over to Europe. We’ll switch gears to some of the things that you all have found effective and inspiring in fighting back against the repression, and then maybe we’ll shift back to Mexico and the US briefly just to add a few more thoughts about solidarity over here.
Daniel: It’s really cool to hear all these inspiring things, and examples of self-organization. I believe that difficult times create strong connections between people, because when we are alone, we are easy targets.
What was especially inspiring for me in the struggle in Poland was that, like I mentioned before, we managed to create quite a good working network in a really short time. Of course, the solidarity movement existed in Poland before, but compared to the scale of what happened in 2021, it was really small.
There is one fact also that can be really optimistic nowadays: that anarchist and grassroots strategies in organization are spreading, even within people who never called themselves an anarchist or leftist. Especially in post-Soviet Europe, to be called “leftist” is a big offense.
Back to the thing I want to say: we could see during the lockdown in 2020, when COVID started, the movement took an important part in supporting people when the state made a lot of prohibitions but failed totally with helping citizens. So many initiatives were created in a totally grassroots model—a lot of them were started by anarchists, and people joined massively. In the squat where I was living, for example, we even created a little factory and we sewed masks, because the state couldn’t even provide this.
Again, a year later when the Black Protest against the anti-abortion law became a huge demonstration in all cities in Poland, police often used violence—so knowledge of Anarchist Black Cross and other grassroots organizations was priceless for demonstrators. Again, one year later, when thousands of people on the move needed help in the border forest, it was no-borders tactics that work best.
All these big NGOs didn’t know how to handle things, because the state illegalized almost all kinds of help. Also the narration that they are using now, they took totally from the no borders movement. There was one funny but significant scene at the beginning of this, when a politician came to the border and all media of course gathered around him—but he didn’t know what to say, because he didn’t know nothing about migration, the causes of things that were happening, or what soldiers were doing, so he was trying to ask anarchists the whole time what he should say.
It sounds a bit ridiculous, but how I see it, in this way we can distribute our ideas really widely. What we have heard since forever is that our ideas and strategies are utopian and have no chance to work. But in more and more years, we can observe that these tactics and ways of organizing work better than classical hierarchic models.
In this way we could also make some ties with local communities of the border area. This region is called Podlasie, and it was always considered one of the most conservative ones—but at the same time it’s one of the most multicultural; it is the only place where Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims have lived since hundreds of years in Poland. For sure, conservative, but also sensitive and aware of injustice and human harm. They don’t calculate if it’s forbidden or not if someone needs help—they will do it.
And because we are in large part working class people, and not big NGO workers that despise Polish rednecks, we could talk with them normally. Of course, active locals are the minority, because most people prefer not to see or do anything—but still I felt that the trust for police is not as big as in other parts of Poland.
Of course, we are facing really difficult, dark times now. We have a war behind our eastern border, in Ukraine. Solidarity is called often “treason” by rightwing politicians, and rightwing politicians are getting more and more attention because they know how to play with people’s fear. For them, all activists on the border are Putin agents. As the No Borders Team we also organized humanitarian convoys, together with Operation Solidarity and ABC [Anarchist Black Cross] Galicia, to Ukraine. We could really see that for the same work we were doing in Ukraine, we were called heroes, but for what we were doing on the Belarusian border we were called traitors. That’s how the fascist logic works, but we don’t care.
Marie: Within the no border movement in Europe, and probably many other places, we’ve learned how important it is to connect the different struggles and to learn from each other. For example, I’ve had the privilege to be on ships together with people from the US who were doing search-and-rescue in the desert between Mexico and the US, and I learned a lot from them. Or from the Anarchist Yacht Club—people from the US coming over and supporting in search-and-rescue.
These moments are really inspiring, and also we have different layers of solidarity, and it’s incredibly important that we work together. Daniel mentioned an “alarm phone” structure in Poland, and there are several of these structures that have been implemented. For example, the first one was for the central Med, and it’s an activist network of people who provide a number that can be called by people in distress, and who then try to pressure authorities and the public to launch rescue missions—which has been an amazing tool, and really effective, and has developed into an amazing tool of documentation and really effective solidarity.
Another thing that went quite well within the search-and-rescue movement or structure has been just staying flexible. Because the state comes up with new repression, governments change laws. We live in a pretty fucking daunting time, with fascism on the rise, and it’s not easy to keep up the spirit. But if we keep flexible—for example, at times we worked with bigger ships that were able to withstand longer standoffs, and were able to stay out in the area of operation for longer, and currently, because they are a lot of times blocked by governments, right now really small ships, even sailing ships, have proven to be some of the most effective assets.
Another aspect we need to remember is that we have to be kind to each other, and also to ourselves. Burnout, and what Diana mentioned, this high level of stress, is taking a toll on individuals in the movement. Self-care and mutual aid is a revolutionary act that we need to continue to make it in the long run.
Anne: For us, networking is a very important way of taking action against repression. It is only through exchange with those affected and activists that the systematic patterns become visible at all. This allows us to see that the criminalization of migrants is taking place in a similar way throughout Europe.
In these networks, resources can be shared and donations generated, and joint strategies can be developed, and experiences can be shared. To give an example on the legal level, in the beginning there were hardly any successes at the legal level, but today there are regular acquittals for people who’ve been charged with smuggling. That exchange and cooperation have led to the system no longer being untouchable, and that’s very important.
Also, personal victories such as acquittals are crucial as they give hope and resilience to those affected. We supported Homayoun Sabetara through his entire traumatizing time in prison, and gave him hope to keep going until the next trial, and to still believe in an acquittal. We have heard from a great many people that this has motivated them, and that they now also want to show more resistance for their relatives, and that they no longer accept the sentences.
To sum up, I would say that effective solidarity combines direct action, resistance on the legal level, public awareness, and direct support of affected people, so we can combat systemic injustice. All of these things strengthen the no borders movement and motivate more people to take action.
Michelle: I feel inspired just by hearing you all talk. As you all mentioned, centralizing the role and voices of people who are directly impacted seems like one of the most crucial things. We’re really grateful to have Vivianne here to talk about the work that she’s been doing, and I see similar work happening in the United States, particularly among the Latinx community organizing to prevent a lot of what ICE is trying to do.
I’m going to talk for just a second about some of the specific ways that’s been happening. There’s been a lot of work around know-your-rights and making sure people who may be approached for deportation by ICE and during ICE raids are very aware that they do have rights, and that regardless of your status in this country, you currently still have rights to not talk to and not engage with ICE.
Doing workshops that are led by lawyers, but also peer-to-peer workshops—at the school I work at, we’ve been organizing those, and also as individual teachers working directly with our students. But even more important is the role that community members have taken in going door-to-door, handing out leaflets. We have what’s called “red cards,” which are small pocket-sized documents that have your rights laid out clearly, generally on one side in English, then with an explanation in people’s first language on the other side. They can tangibly hand those cards to immigration officials, or put them up in their window during a raid, to make it very clear they don’t intend to cooperate, they don’t intend to speak.
At that point, without having a specific warrant, the ICE officials have no legal jurisdiction to enter people’s homes. That doesn’t mean that they always follow those rules, but at least having a leg to stand on and say, Fuck off, we’re not participating in this is extremely important.
For instance in Chicago, there was a really important Latinx and immigrant community-led move to make that education ubiquitous so that nobody was working with or collaborating with ICE, and it was so successful that the Department of Homeland Security actually said, We’re having trouble doing our job in Chicago because there is so much community resistance to collaborating with ICE in any way. That is certainly a model that can be followed, and needs to be followed, and is being followed by other cities; it’s something we’re focusing on here in the Bay Area as well.
In collaboration with know-your-rights, we also have rapid response networks where people can call in when they see any ICE activity, where people can inform each other, where the people who are taking the calls on the rapid response hotlines can put people in touch with legal representation and potentially even get folks out to accompany people who are feeling insecure or unsafe. These working collaborations have created somewhat of a pushback, though again, there is certainly a sea of repression there. But that type of effort has been inspiring.
Among anarchists and other more autonomous folks, there has been wheatpasting of know-your-rights information and other information around cities, just making some visibility about the fact that there is not tolerance for that behavior. Other things that have been happening are mutual aid and resource redistribution to help cover people’s bail expenses, to help cover people’s daily needs. We’re also trying to do more of that and catch up on how to create trust, because a lot of people feel so unsafe right now that it’s sometimes difficult, or there’s stigma in asking for help.
So really building relationships—and again, the importance of that work coming from impacted communities themselves as the leaders in it so that trust is there and so there’s a sense of empowerment, because it’s certainly about solidarity and not charity in any way.
Court accompaniment is another thing that can happen, since we are seeing these disappearances where people show up for what should just be a standard procedural hearing an end up getting deported—having some kind of record, some kind of videotaping on phones when these things are happening. When people are afraid to leave their homes, supporters can go grocery shopping or perform other daily tasks, help do childcare or petcare in case of emergencies, day-to-day tasks that become more difficult in the face of the escalating repression.
We will link to something in the notes that was published by Crimethinc. that provides a nice synthesis of a lot of different areas that people based in the US can look into for providing solidarity if they are able to.
I also want to recognize NorCal Resist up in Sacramento and La Resistencia in Seattle, who have been organizing to shut down the Northwest Detention Center, and their protests can often give a sense of solidarity to those who are imprisoned even if the center remains open, because people inside the detention centers can hear people on the outside. NorCal Resist has been doing a lot of different angles of support. Again, a lot of these groups may not always have exactly the same values or approaches, but oftentimes they have more resources and potentially more capacity, and at times a longer-standing relationship with the community. As was mentioned by our comrades in Europe, it’s important to find ways that we can overlap and work together when that’s possible, to make the resistance stronger.
Another thing is simply storytelling and media-making as a tool for people to be able to amplify their experiences from their own words, from their own perspectives, as we are seeing demonization in certain media outlets that fail to tell the human story behind what people are experiencing.
I’m going to pass it back to Andrea, because we’d like to hear more about Enclave Caracol as an amazing autonomous space that’s been around for years in Tijuana, doing a lot of really important work. In fact, some of the clinics down there—Refugee Health Alliance, and El Otro Lado, who does really important legal work—both of those, that are now NGOs, originally started out of Enclave Caracol when they were more DIY exercises. I’ve seen your herbal medicine room there, and it’s very impressive.
Andrea: Adding to the conversation on effective solidarity strategies: on this side of the border we have Enclave Caracol, located a few blocks from the physical border wall. Here, individuals come together to create a safer meeting point in the city. Here, all kinds of folk can come together and be themselves—many of them migrants who have just arrived in the city; others who just happen to have been deported a few days ago; but most of us looking to reconnect with the city and survive in this chaotic environment.
In that way, the building provides food, connectivity, and a physical place for dissonant dialogue to happen. Enclave has become a hub for resources needed by the local community, in relation to education, recreation, and community organization—and many other amazing things that the state will not provide. We have been able to do so by creating alliances with many organizations and NGOs and individuals who are active in the community in the area to distribute tools and goods for free (and sometimes for a low, accessible cost).
The space is here to be used actively in the resistance, whether for resting, connecting to the internet, or even partying—whatever the community needs, the space is always changing and open to be used, and is available for that through horizontal organization. Thanks to being an autonomous space, we are able to address the specific needs pointed out by individuals in the city, such as linking people with specific health services (abortions, gender-affirming therapy, access to AIDS medication, and other stuff) all the way to providing a place for gathering for LGBTQI+ individuals, without any real limitations on what we can coordinate with or for, other than our own abilities, resources, and collective values.
That’s thanks to community organization, unlike many other NGOs or active organizations here in the area whose own funding limits their margin of actions, and are mostly based on bureaucracy. Like many other self-organized and -maintained spaces, here at Enclave the struggle is always constant—lack of hands, lack of funds, lack of energy—but we’re always motivating people to come to Enclave and see how you can add to the work and the coordination and organization being done here.
As always, the space is open to change, and to make the change we want to see in the world happen. Like Michelle mentioned, the space has hosted legal clinics, spaces for medical services, spaces for individual therapy; it has provided spaces for information specifically needed by the LGBT community here in Tijuana, and information on what to do in case of being detained by the police; we provide food with Comida No Bombas every Monday and Wednesday; and we provide a space for the community with things such as dance classes and theater classes. We have an open cafe with an accessible price for people who come by who are not able to afford coffee in any of the other shops in the area.
To make the story a bit clearer, it’s a four-story building that we have here in Tijuana Zona Norte, which is a “hot” (as in violence and crime) area. We work toward creating a space where people from all backgrounds and all forms can come and be their happiest and fullest selves, where we can actually push forward to the outside world the change that we need.
Enclave can be all that and everything—it’s open to whatever the community needs. We just ask folk to come in and be part of this. Come to Enclave Caracol!
Michelle: Thank you Andrea. I have to say that having had the opportunity to spend a little time down there, I was very inspired by Enclave. I can’t remember if you mentioned this, but the bikes! They have a whole bike library that gets bikes fixed, gets them given out to the community. For me, this melding of the work of autonomous people, anarchist people, and all of the migrant and deported communities—
That is something we should distinguish. There is a multi-directional flow of people coming through Tijuana: there are the people who would be arriving at the border with the intention of trying to cross into the US, but then there’s also community that has been deported from the US, who’s living in Tijuana. That’s more from before, because something we didn’t really go into was that between these discussions, and also having the opportunity in California to fairly easily get down to Tijuana, we were looking at trying to solidify more of our communication to provide resources and support if a lot of people were now going to be deported to Tijuana—but really what’s happening is that you guys haven’t seen an increase in numbers, because deportations have been (as we said earlier) to prisons in El Salvador, to Guantánamo, but also, for people who are Mexican and being sent back to Mexico, they are being taken to either Tabasco or Tapachula for the most part.
Both of those places are more dangerous, with less resources, and much harder to get transportation out of. So this seems like part of the whole regime of making people’s lives more difficult and the whole process more painful. For us, it’s revisiting how we establish more connections in places where people are physically arriving at this point.
Back to the more inspiring: I don’t know if you folks in Europe remember, but many years ago I had the opportunity to visit EKH [Ernst Kirchweger Haus], which was a squat in Vienna which had a really cool model, where on the first floor was an anarchist library, an anarchist kitchen, a concert and activities space—but on the floors above, there was housing for migrants who had no place to stay and who needed safe and protected housing. That was probably in 2001 or 2002, and for me that was really inspiring, because we don’t have as many spaces like that in the US.
When I had the opportunity to go to Enclave, I had that same feeling, particularly as we have a devastating problem of people who are unhoused, and we’re in a huge housing crisis, so trying to look at what creative ways all of these things can be addressed.
Marie: If there are listeners who are interested in learning about squatting as a measure to create space for people on the move, there’s also quite a bit of knowledge to be found in Europe. There’s been great projects in the Netherlands, in Austria, all sorts of countries. There’s also programs of sharing that knowledge, how squatting can be done quite efficiently.
Michelle: And that’s so much a part of where the idea for this conversation came from, between Daniel and I. There’s just different tendencies, approaches, tactics, and strategies that have happened in different places. Traditionally in the US we haven’t had as much success in that realm, though certainly some. But we can learn from each other, and I think now is the time when we have to be globalizing even more these conversations.
It is now incredibly late in Europe. A little less late in the US and Mexico, but we’ve been here for a while. Thank you so much to everybody for this conversation. We really hope this relationship between the eight of us will continue, as well as grow into more connections between people trying to do similar work and fight back against borders and repression against human beings around the world.
Daniel: Thanks again for joining us. It wasn’t easy as we are in different time zones, so we really appreciate it. Like Michelle said, oppression became global, so our struggle also needs to be global. Learning from other strategies and other problems that we are facing is crucial to understanding the world, and is especially significant now when changes appear so fast.
I have in my mind that we just started this discussion, and we needed this to get to know each other better, and to learn more about us—and anyway, we can start to think about more specific podcasts or publications in the future. For me personally, I was a bit confused following really contradictory news from the Americas, so I really appreciate that I can now hear from people that are directly involved there in the solidarity movement with people on the move.
In the same way, I hope we also put some more light for people from outside of Europe about what is happening here. So let it be a good start for the future! And last but not least, I would like to thank our listeners. If you managed to stay with us until now, that’s amazing. Thanks.
Michelle: And thank you so much to Elia and the rest of the crew at The Fire These Times for helping us distribute this. I encourage everybody to check out the rest of the amazing podcasts on The Fire These Times and all the other ones offered by From The Periphery, as there’s really essential information that we can learn from each other.
Wishing everybody all the best in these really intense times.
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