Migrant Trail Walk Honors Those Who Died on US/Mexico Border
On May 26th, 43 people embarked on the Migrant Trail, a 75-mile walk through the desert in solidarity with people who have died crossing the border.
By Todd Miller (The Border Chronicle)
HAVANA TIMES – The annual Migrant Trail began Monday with a solemn ceremony to remember and honor the people who have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The walkers gathered in a circle in front of the towering border wall next to the Sasabe port of entry. The wall was so high that the painted-black plate metal at its top wavered with a breeze as the late-May Arizona sun blazed down on the gathering. For the next seven days, 43 people would walk 75 miles, from the border to Tucson.
The annual walk, which started in 2004, has always started at the onset of summer’s most brutal heat, a time when crossing becomes more deadly along what attorney and legendary rights champion Isabel Garcia, earlier at a press conference in Tucson, described as “the most fatal border in the world that is not at war.” During the ceremony, the smell of burning sage filled the air as longtime walker and Sasabe native Natividad Cano blessed the participants as she moved around the circle. Most participants also held white crosses, etched with the names of those who had died crossing the Arizona desert since last year’s walk. The ceremony established a tone of reverence that has become a fundamental part of the walk. Garcia captured this reverence at the end of the press conference when she recited the Navajo prayer of harmony, balance, and interconnectedness, In Beauty May I Walk.
Some crosses bore the exact names and ages of the deceased. Others simply said Desconocido or Desconocida to describe the many people who were never identified, like a Guatemalan man whom Border Patrol found in heat distress laying under a bush near Sells, Arizona, on June 27, less than a month after last year’s walk finished. They transported the man to Tucson and then to intensive care, but he died the next day. That man’s story has now become a common summer narrative in Arizona—not reported by any media, not mentioned by any politician—and one of thousands of people who have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since the mid-1990s. Globally, 2024 was the deadliest year on record for people migrating. According to the International Organization for Migration, there were 8,938 known deaths of people crossing borders, also an undercount, as the same deterrence policies that have been an integral part of U.S. border policing for three decades proliferated around the world, making crossings perilous over both sea and land. “The tragedy of the growing number of migrant deaths worldwide is both unacceptable and preventable,” said IOM deputy director general for operations Ugochi Daniels. “Preventable” was the same word that the Migrant Trail Walk organizers used as the walk began.
During the ceremony in front of the wall, a Border Patrol vehicle rumbled up a dirt road along the international boundary as if to inspect the walkers. It idled momentarily before turning around. From where we stood, we could see Baboquivari Peak, a beautifully chiseled mountaintop that is central to the Tohono O’odham creation story and often used as a landmark for border crossers. Just on the other side of Sasabe was the grassy 117,464-acre Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge, home to a wide variety of bird species such as summer tanagers, vermilion flycatchers, and gray hawks. The walkers would spend three days on this refuge.
I was there only for that day, but I took in the smoking sage, the surrounding mountain ranges, and the vast high-altitude desert. This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to, and I felt fortunate to be there again. Although I would not be walking the seven days, I have completed the full walk four times, including the first one in 2004, that seemed like a lifetime ago.
To get a sense of how long ago 2004 was, consider that it was one year after the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, “the largest, most important restructuring of the federal government since the end of World War II,” according to journalist Roberto Lovato. This restructuring included the formation of Customs and Border Protection (the nation’s largest federal police force) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, agencies that seem like they have been around forever but didn’t exist in the 20th century.
In 2004, the alarming rise in deaths in the Arizona desert was still new. That first year, there was a prevalent thought that if we could do something dramatic to illustrate the border policies, we could create enough pressure to change them. There was no way this deadly policy could possibly continue if people really knew what was happening.
But as we set foot on that first walk, the opposite took place; there was about to be a flood of money into border and immigration enforcement unlike anything seen before. In Sasabe, that first year, the border was marked by only a cattle guard that went up to my waist. There was no Border Patrol substation, which is now the biggest building and institution in Sasabe, and fewer agents, who were half the force they are now. There were no surveillance towers up the road, designed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems with the same high-powered cameras tested on Palestinians. There are now 50 such towers across southern Arizona. That year was the first year (at least that we know of) that drones flew over the borderlands, drones sourced from Elbit Systems but soon thereafter from the San Diego–based General Atomics, using Predator Bs, which were also deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first wall in Sasabe wouldn’t come until 2007, via the Secure Fence Act, as all the DHS money kept pouring in. But the wall before us, the 30-foot one that towered over the ceremony, came from Trump’s first presidency. In 2004, we could not have possibly fathomed that Donald Trump could ever be president. Now, the Trumpian blueprint was entrenched in the landscape, and the ceremony beneath it felt like a reckoning.
Despite all this, there is always something profoundly hopeful about the walk. There was a sense of hopefulness the first year, when we felt as if we were taking on U.S. policy directly, like boxers in a ring. And now, 22 years later, it is more an act of enduring civil disobedience, a guarantee that this will happen year after year until the deaths stop and the policy changes. There is a fortitude, a spirituality, and a deep reverence in the walk that comes through with the crosses and prayer ties that honor the 154 people whose remains were found in the Arizona desert since the last walk. Here, the deaths have not been forgotten. I remember the words of walkers from over the years, such as Franciscan friar David Buer, who said an “overflowing love” inspired him to participate. Or octogenarian Chris Amoroso, who said in 2014 that the walk was “praying with my feet.” In my experience, it’s true; there’s something that happens from walking for days in the heat as summer begins. Despite the support walkers receive from humanitarian groups like Humane Borders and the Samaritans, which provide endless water, and abundant food supplied by the community (in no way do the walkers attempt to imitate what migrants do; it is a walk done in solidarity), most people do not emerge from the desert unscathed. Whether it be blisters, severe chafing, or out-of-control sunburns—I have suffered all these things, including once having sunburned eyes—the walk gets branded into and beneath the skin.
But there’s something even more important that’s happened each time I’ve done the walk. There’s always a point when I realize that all that matters is the next step. A point where any and all personal ambitions fall by the wayside, a point where I feel part of something much bigger than myself. When this happens, after walking in the desert for days, you can feel the presence of people around you, and by this, I mean not only the walkers but also people unseen in the desert and those who have passed through before and those who have died. There is a connection to them that becomes profound and unbreakable. I remember knowing this the first year we did the walk in 2004. And I felt that on Monday at the ceremony under the Trump border wall in Sasabe. When this happens, it transcends even the policies and begins to melt away the false divisions that afflict a Western and bordered way of thinking about people and life.
The Guatemalan man found last June is probably marked Desconocido on a cross, like so many others. But as media spokesperson Jamie Wilson said, “But it is not true. The people are not unknown.” They are known by many. They are known by their families. They are known by their loved ones who might still be searching for them. And that’s what happens when you walk; you develop a deeper knowing that is difficult to put into words.
Isabel Garcia might have captured this knowing best, at the end of the press conference, when she recited the Navajo prayer about walking in its entirety:
The Migrant Trail will end on Sunday, June 1, with a gathering at Kennedy Park in Tucson, Arizona, at 11 a.m. Below is an image made by The Migrant Trail about the event.
