Last week, I watched the 2021 winning New Yorker short documentary Aguilas, about a group of volunteers from Aguilas del Desierto who look for human remains in the Arizona desert every weekend. The documentary opens with voicemail recordings of families who are looking for their loved ones, many of whom had communicated with them for the last time while walking through the desert. 

When thinking about the immigration policies implemented both during Republican and Democratic administrations the metaphor that comes into mind is to have a rope around the neck, Republicans tighten it and Democrats loosen it but no one would think about removing it. Human Rights First’s recent report denounces that 1,500 migrants who were obliged to wait in Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocol were killed, kidnapped, raped and tortured because the Mexican government does not have the capacity to create secure facilities for them to wait for their immigration process which can take months or years. 

A Aguilas del Desierto volunteer says while walking around the desert “Every bone has a story in these hostile and treacherous lands, our migrant brothers die trying to give their families a better future.” Think about it. Wouldn’t you do the same for your family? We need to demand our public officials the creation of humane migration policies as if they were to be applied on us.