One Haines resident is spending January in Mexico, but not at a beach side resort. Retired teacher Patty Brown is at the southern border to volunteer in a migrant camp in Mexico and  protest what she calls a humanitarian crisis.

 

It’s nearly 70 degrees at the southern border, where Patty Brown is living for the month of January.

She connected with KHNS from the Gateway Bridge that passes between Brownsville, Texas and the Mexican city of Matamoros. Brown crosses the bridge daily to volunteer in a migrant camp across the Rio Grande. She helps serve dinners and and puts her credentials to use teaching children during the day.

“These are sort of just makeshift schools in tents,” she said.

“The one today is called the sidewalk school. So kids come because they are very, very eager to learn. And they like to be with each other and they like engaging experiences provided by volunteer teachers.”

When she returns to the U.S. side of the border, Brown and a rotating group of twenty to fifty activists called Witness at the Border gather under the palms and oaks in Xeriscape Park, a small green space bounded by multi-lane boulevards.

It’s hectic but we want an audience, so it’s a good thing,” Brown said.

They are protesting U.S. Homeland Security’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a Trump administration policy aimed at increasing safety at the border.

What MPP means is that non-citizens seeking asylum at the Southern border must wait in Mexico rather than the United States for the duration of their immigration proceedings. Mexico is responsible with providing any humanitarian protections. That’s led to migrant camps like the one in Matamoros where Brown volunteers. She says it’s mostly families from Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

“You know, at face value, it looks like people are doing pretty well considering the circumstances. But when we sit down and have an opportunity to actually talk to people, you hear horrible stories about what they left in their own home country, what they experienced on their way up through Mexico, and what happens to them at the camp that night,” she said.

The camps are tidy and the air is filled with smoke. Some families build makeshift ovens out of mud or discarded materialsthe spinner from a defunct washing machineand prepare hot lunches they can sell to earn a little bit of money.

Haines is over 3,700 miles away at the northern border, but it’s a Haines-sized population of about 2,500 that that is unhoused, living in small tents without running water or electricity. That’s what hits home for Brown.

“We get to turn on the lights and turn off the lights and we get running water and we get flush toilets and they get none of those things. And they have to live like this for months,” she said.

The wait for an asylum hearing is long. Homeland Security reports a near 800,000 case backlog. They say that 9 out of 10 cases from the Northern Trianglethat is El Salvador, Guatemala, and Hondurasare denied refugee status.

In December, Governor Mike Dunleavy agreed to continue to accept refugees in Alaska after President Trump gave states the option to refuse them. Anchorage-based Catholic Social Services is the only refugee resettlement program in Alaska. But State Refugee Coordinator Issa Spatrisano told KHNS in an email that individuals from the Southern border are not resettled through her program.