Texas Border Business
He Ain’t Heavy — He’s my Brother
By Eliza Alvarado
Last week Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi joined Congressman Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX), Congressman FilemonVela (D-TX), Congressman Steven Horsford (D-NV), Texas State Senator Eddie Lucio, and Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Executive Director Sister Norma Pimentel to discuss the humanitarian crisis on the border.
Leader Pelosi made the following remarks:
“What we just saw was so stunning. If you believe, as we do, that every child, every person, has a spark of divinity in them and is therefore worthy of respect, what we saw in those rooms was dazzling – a sparkling array of God’s children, worthy of respect. So we have to use, as was said this morning, the crisis that some view as a crisis – and it does have crisis qualities – as an opportunity to show who we are as Americans: that we do respect people for their dignity and their worth; that we know how to get the job done, that relates to, again stopping trafficking.”
“I’m a mother of five. I have nine grandchildren. I wish that I could take all those children home with me. I don’t know if it’s – what the rules about it are. I wish that you could all see what we saw today, and what Congressman Vela and Congressman Hinojosa saw yesterday in McAllen. Perhaps the most tragic image I will take home with me – and I wish I could take him too – was the little boy who is infected with a virus and then in isolation all by himself. That’s for his safety and the safety of others.”
For those of you who don’t live in the cities with the influx of immigrant refugees arriving daily it may be easy to read the statistics and shake your head in disapproval of the lack of action in the region. It takes a couple of minutes to blame republicans, democrats, congress or the President, then for the most part you forget and move on to the next topic.
However, for those of us living here it has been a very difficult situation to process. Understand this — there are human beings in a warehouse where they lay on the ground jammed packed against one another — some without even a blanket. There are thousands of children crying at the top of their lungs scared to death because they have been abandoned and don’t know anyone or anything around them. There are women having their babies and elderly sitting in the corners crying with shame about their state of being.
Unlike Leader Pelosi we can’t fly back home with bad memories — we are home… and we have to be here every day to be witness to the hundreds of thousands of human beings begging for help. It is heartbreaking to see this day after day. I can’t explain how a parent lets their child risk their life to travel here; I don’t know how to justify spending money to provide them with their basic needs. I don’t have those answers — but I know that when I took the facility tour I wanted to throw up in disgust with the way human beings were herded like cattle.
This is not a publicity stunt or an attempt to request federal funding to make the region rich — we are already the poorest county in the country. This is reality, we need help — we can’t just sit here and listen to excuses about how or why we need to proceed.
I consider myself rational; I understand the argument that our own citizens aren’t being taken care of. I understand that the veterans in this region are the most ignored and have the longest wait time for medical services of the county. I get that…. I get that we have thousands of people that are unemployed and that need benefits.
But ladies and gentlemen I also happen to believe we live in the greatest country on this earth and that human beings whether they are native or immigrants should be treated with dignity and respect and helped if they are suffering.
We are better than this, we need to help them — they aren’t animals that can be euthanized because of overcrowding or lack of funding. I am glad for those of you that don’t have to wake up with the weight of this crisis, but I do, and my parents were immigrants, and this is personal.
They ain’t heavy — they are my brothers. Please, let’s help them.
Dr. Eliza Alvarado is a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project at Texas Woman’s University. She recently graduated with her Ph.D. in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Dallas.
