What we saw at the border: Jesuit high school students from Oregon share their stories

A bit h/t to my brother and classmate Deacon Bill McNamara, who noticed this in his local paper.

From The Oregonian: 

We are a group of 10 students from Jesuit High School. We recently went on a service trip to the United States-Mexico border. We visited the Kino Border Initiative, serving meals and offering hospitality to migrants at a place called the Comedor, or dining room, in Nogales, Mexico.

We were fortunate to hear the stories of many who had either been recently deported or were planning to cross the border. Outside the Comedor, we experienced other elements of migrants’ journeys. We walked across the desert near Arivaca, Arizona, where many immigrants cross into the U.S. We saw clothes, toothpaste, foot cream and other belongings left behind as they crossed the desert. We spent one day in Tucson, where we watched so-called Streamline group hearings for undocumented immigrants arrested by Border Patrol. We witnessed a family being separated and other harsh realities that undocumented immigrants experience when they are convicted.

This detail stood out for me:

We expected to meet migrants from Central America and Mexico, so we were surprised to meet a man who spoke perfect English — without any accent. He introduced himself as Ulysses. He told us he was brought into the U.S. as an infant and was raised in Chicago. He went to college and, ironically, become an engineer who worked on night vision goggles, a tool used by Border Patrol agents.

Ulysses said that one day, on his way home from work, he was pulled over by a police officer who said he hadn’t used his turn signal. Immediately, Ulysses was deported to Mexico, a country linked to him only by birth. He could hardly speak a word of Spanish. Attempting to cross the border back into the U.S., he was forced to pay drug cartels thousands of dollars to pass through their territory — only to be caught once more and taken to a detention facility. His greatest fear? Dying in the desert and leaving his children fatherless. So, he gave up his dream of returning to the U.S., hoping his family can join him in Mexico instead.

Read it all and see more pictures here.