Beyond the Wall: Seeking Shelter in the Age of COVID-19

This month, Mario Moreno, WOLA's VP for Communications. interviewed Joanna Williams, the Director of Education and Advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative. The Kino Border Initiative (KBI) is a binational organization in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. KBI works in the area of migration, providing direct humanitarian assistance and accompaniment with migrants.

They discuss what is happening at the border, how shelters and service providers are adapting, and the repercussions of the virus and government actions on migrants and asylum seekers.

Beyond the Wall is a bilingual segment of the Latin America Today podcast, and a part of the Washington Office on Latin America's Beyond the Wall advocacy campaign. In the series, we will follow the thread of migration in the Americas beyond traditional barriers like language and borders. We will explore root causes of migration, the state of migrant rights in multiple countries and multiple borders and what we can do to protect human rights in one of the most pressing crises in our hemisphere.

Sign up for updates here: https://www.wola.org/beyondthewall/signup-beyond-wall/

Music by Blue Dot Sessions and ericb399.

Transcripts are generated using a speech recognition software and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro clips (00:01):

The countries of the Northern triangle -- Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala -- are facing a set of conditions that are forcing many families and children to migrate from their community. They're saying "we're here in the shelter, I'm afraid to put my kids into school" Crimes, corruption, poverty and inequality. And they don't have a lot of hope because we know that most people get turned away. These issues are forcing many to seek protection and opportunities elsewhere. What do we project as a country with how we're treating these people, many of which are seeking protection? Barbed wire on the top of the fence...It looks like world war one out there.

President Donald Trump (00:32):

Someone at border crossing comes in, you say sorry, we're taking you back. That's if we're nice and I want to do that.

WOLA Expert Quote (00:37):

Say you've been kidnapped in a Mexican border town, you may feel so unsafe there that you're willing to run the risk of all the insecurities that led you to flee your home in the first place. But is that really a choice?

Mario Moreno (00:49):

Hi, my name is Mario Moreno. I'm the vice president for communications at the Washington Office on Latin America. On March 20th in response to rising concerns of the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States and Mexico agreed to temporarily shut down their shared border to all nonessential travel, a category that was determined to include all asylum seekers. This move fundamentally ends the right to asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border, but more importantly, it raises clear concerns for migrants who have already been waiting months in dangerous Mexican border towns to present their asylum claims or to attend their asylum hearings. This raises several key questions worth exploring. How will the closing of the border exacerbate the dangerous these migrants face and could this action put them at severe risk? Should covid-19 spread on the border to seek answers to these questions and explore these issues? I talked with Joanna Williams, the director of education and advocacy at the Kino border initiative, an organization that provides direct humanitarian assistance in accompaniment with migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Joanna Williams (01:59):

So the Kino Border Initiative. We're a binational organization