Let's Live Together - StoryCenter's Joe Lambert Interviews Human Rights Lawyer Jennifer Harbury

Last week’s Presidential debate featured many issues, but it is fair to say that US immigration policy was a central one.  Suddenly we are hearing bizarre and unfounded stories of immigrants eating pets from one of the candidates.  Claims of “millions” of dangerous immigrants invading the United  States, and both candidates calling for more and more strict border enforcement.

The idea of immigration reform seemed to increasingly emphasize punishing the immigrant, and less about addressing root causes, and the complex dynamics of history, that leads to people risking their lives to cross the border. By the end of the week, I was feeling depressed about it all.

I needed a fresh perspective.

During this weekend that Mexico, and those of Mexican heritage here in the US, celebrate Mexican independence Day, I decided I needed to hear from someone I have known for quite some time fully immersed in border and immigration policy and human rights. Someone who has been a legal and political advocate for immigrants at the US Mexico Border for almost 40 years. Someone that I view as a hero in our culture, and in the vital conversation between the peoples of Latin America and those of us here in the US.

So I called up Jennifer Harbury at her home in South Texas.  The reason I know her is that she and my mother, Latane Lambert,  shared many commitments to social justice and advocacy, but they also shared a birthday.  During their many years together as close friends, separated by more than 35 years in age, I think Jennifer was inspired by my mom’s political fearlessness and badassery, but my mom was equally inspired by Jennifer’s extraordinary courage and toughness.   Though my mom has been gone for 20+ years, Jennifer says she still has lunch with Latane each year on their birthday, when she, where ever she finds herself on that day, puts out an emply plate and calls the spirit of my mother into their meal.

NOTE- Some of what is shared below includes graphic details of violence experienced by immigrants. Please consider this as you read through the interview.

Joe Lambert

Jennifer, let us assume that many of the people in StoryCenter’s audience are not familiar with you or your work.  Introduce yourself and a little bit of your background.  

Jennifer Harbury

Mr name is Jennifer Harbury. I've been a lawyer since I graduated law school 78  and came down to the border and worked with legal aid for most of my career. I love working with the farm workers and doing civil rights work and so on and so forth. 

I spent several years in Guatemala in the 80s during the Dirty War, monitoring some human rights violations, which were very horrific. Then, well,, it's a long story. It came back to legal aid because I got kicked out of Guatemala, and, but started working on a book, and one thing led to another.

I ended up married to a Guatemalan indigenous leader.  He was disappeared in 1992 and tortured long term and eventually assassinated by high level intelligence officials in the Guatemala military who were also paid informants of the CIA.  The CIA told the U. S. Embassy from day one that he'd been picked up alive, and that he was in the hands of our folks, basically. 

And the embassy and the CIA then sat on record showing there were 350 other secret prisoners of war.

All of them were being tortured. All of them would be killed when they'd outlived their usefulness. That went on for three years, the silence and, and insistence publicly to all groups that they had no information. 

And then when it was finally leaked in a sort of prehistoric version of WikiLeaks,  All of those 350 people were dead, including him. It was too late to save them. Some of them could have been saved, but the United States government locked the rescue because we were working hand in glove with those army people.

They were our people as well as the Guatemalan military's people. And US Government never exposed them, or stopped them. . We just let them do it.   [Her book on the subject, Searching for Everardo, details this story.]

Since then, of course, I've dedicated a chunk of my life working on immigration and Central America issues, U. S. policy during the war against terror.  I wrote another book about US torture policies and how far back they go, because the Army's response to the Abu Ghraib photos  was that it was just a few bad apples on a Saturday night getting out of line. But that iconic photograph of the man with the hood with the wires off his hands,  that photograph shows a position called the Vietnam position because that's where the CIA invented it back then during the Vietnam War.

So I've worked on those issues.  Since I retired a few years back, in 2017 and I've been going in and out of Tamaulipas, Mexico. to work with the tidal wave of desperate migrants coming north and formed with a number of friends, a group called the Angry Tias and Abuelas in reaction to what we saw going on, including taking babies away from their mothers once they were picked up. 

Joe

Many of us know about your monumental efforts  to hold the CIA and US accountable for supporting torture, dictators and dirty wars across Latin America.  We all sit in permanent mourning for these tragedies.  Many of us would say this is the real face of U. S.policy  as people experience it in their own country. 

And these policies have been one of the factors that has led to refugees from the wreckage of countries from that period, wanting to come to the US to escape violence by both governments and the criminal cartels that have grown in the last 40 years. 

The scale of all this tragedy, and the thousands of lives disrupted, often ended, in this era, are almost incomprehensible.  At Storycenter,  we do personal stories,  individual narratives. Because the experience of a given person, inside these large social, economic, political processes is what grounds our understanding.  Can you share some of the stories? 

Jennifer

Mostly I work out of Reynosa, Mexico, which  the United States State Department has listed as one of the most dangerous places in the world, at scale of Afghanistan or Iraq.  Immigration officials with grandparents in Reynosa are told not to cross to visit.

But that is where we send everyone back. Young 20 year old women … to places where they will be kidnapped, raped, battered, abused, many trafficked and many never seen again. It's just the way it is.

I can give several examples of what people are facing. These are stories from many years of this work.

One young Salvadoran mother was had a two year old son fled north because her husband was a police officer.   She was living with her in-laws and first her husband had to flee and then also her father in law.

And then the gangs came looking for them and when they didn't find them they would machine gun the mother in law in her house.  They told this young woman, your little boy is next. He's the next in line. Your husband's not here. 

So of course she fled, you know, thinking that she'd been given enough warning. 

So this is a very tiny, very fragile young woman made it all the way to northern Mexico with her little boy.  And she was with a group that had been brought up by a coyote - someone that for a fee will get you up there somehow.  And as they approach the river in this part of the state, you cannot cross the river unless you pay the cartels a crossing fee.

It can be a thousand dollars or more. And they aren't kidding. In the Reynosa area, if you cross and you don't have the ID number showing you that you paid the fee, they will kill you.  And this happens..  

They got to the riverside and a different gang apparently showed up, grabbed them all and kidnapped them and held them for ransom.

And she and the others were told that their children were going to be sold for their organs, iif the ransom wasn't paid immediately. So, of course, her husband, immediately paid the ransom. And they were released. The little boy was traumatized. He'd heard all of this discussion. The mothers were hysterical.

They ran to the river again. And this time they made it to the river, got across, and told the U. S. immigration officials what had happened. And they said, well, you're not in danger. And we're now under the Migrant Protection Protocols program (Trump era regulations allowing Border Patrol to reject asylum requests made on the US side of the border).  

They forced them to go back, and of course they were promptly kidnapped again. and dragged away. And this time, several gangs apparently got in a fight over whose property they work  and a huge shootout ensued. And they said, she said, all of us parents, we just put our kids flat on the ground and laid down on top of them and prayed with bullets flying overhead.

And finally, the groups moved off and we're still shooting each other. at each other and the parents jumped up and ran to the river and swam across again risking drowning and got to got to U. S. Border Patrol agents and are again told it's MPP, you're not in danger, go back. 

This time she moved over to Matamoros hoping it would be safer and she was kidnapped again with her little boy, this time just her and the child, and she was gang raped in the back of a pickup truck with her little boy inches away watching. 

Then they were dumped out bleeding and hysterical near a shopping mall back in Reynosa.  That's when I was called.  I got a hold of a lawyer friend of mine still doing immigration cases.  She was just furious. They're not supposed to send anyone back under MPP if they're in immediate danger.  She raised hell about it in front of a judge, went to the correct officials and they still said, she's not in danger, and they send her back. 

So we rented a little apartment for her and two friends, and they stayed there for a year. But what can I say? The damage was done. That child is beautiful, and he's smart as can be. I, knew him as the sweetest and gentlest child. But there were days when he just laid down on the floor and started screaming and kicking. He's not alright. I hope someday he'll be all right, but I don't know if he will or not.

Joe

An unbelievable and heartwrenching story.

Jennifer

Another woman told me how difficult it was with the gang situation.  One of the gangs came for her 8 year old son.  That’s the recruitment age for the gangs in parts of Central America.   They said he has to come and start basic training and doing errands for us and stuff.

She said, don't be ridiculous. I'm not sending an eight year old to do this stuff.  So they said, okay. And they went to the school, grabbed their kid, dragged him kicking and screaming to the backyard and called her out. Then they picked up an axe and chopped off his fingers.

So they left, she wrapped a towel or something around his hand and ran. She didn't stop for anything else. She ran all the way from Central America, any way she could and got to the Rio Grande and tried to cross. 

We were able to get her across finally, but in the conversation, while I was filling out the forms for her. I was staring at her because I was so horrified.  She thought I didn't believe her and she said you don't believe me do you and she grabbed her child's hand.   The child had that million mile stare right he wasn't saying anything and she pulled his hand out it was still wrapped up in a bloody towe.

So that's how real it is.

Most people don't tell what actually happened back home, even if it means they don't get asylum, they just can't tell .

This is the last story I'll tell for now, a typical one of this whole just insane era .

I was filling out wildly filing out forms for cases sitting n a a church. And I looked up and this woman with two tiny, freaked out children, very pregnant, was just hobbling up the aisle towards where I was sitting.  To talk to me, she had to lie down. She and her husband had refused to join certain relatives with a gang.  They were driving one afternoon with their two little children in the back, and they were ambushed by their own relatives who opened machine gun fire and killed the husband.

She took seven bullets

She woke up in a hospital. They'd been unable to remove the bullet just beneath her cervix. 

She heard from people that  the gang found out that you've survived.

We know they're coming for you, you know, take your children and run. 

 She took the kids and she ran. She crossed the first time the Rio Grande and went straight up and turned herself into a border patrol officer who said, “you're not at any particular high risk.”

This was during COVID. Anyone at high risk was not supposed to be sent back. And she was a medical emergency.  So she tried again from near Reynosa, swam the river with her two tiny children and was told again, you're not in any high risk category, go back. 

So she got sent back and a Mexican journalist bumped into her and was so infuriated that he called me and we were able to get her across.

Joe

Such nightmarish stories.  But it makes you think, what about everyone else?  You multiply this by hundreds of thousands of people.  The stories of even the ones that make it north are are exceptional. The unexceptional  ones are people that just died in their village . And it's not just the gangs, it's all these brutal governments and military are also constantly disappearing people, or shooting people, or starting their own gangs.  

Jennifer 

We tell everyone they should go back to Haiti and fix their own country, well, we're the ones that trashed their country. Our response at the worst possible time during the pandemic was to take people's children away. I have friends that worked in, in the centers right the detention centers and they came to me and said we don't know what to do.

And that's of course, when we got a friend to do the tape recording of the children crying and that put an end to that for the moment, 

if Trump comes back in, he's already said he's going to reinstate that program. 

My husband's case being one example.  Those military officials who disappeared hundreds of thousands during the dirty war....are now running trafficking of narcotics and humans networks.

Joe

The cynical part of me believes that all of these systems (the cartels and the drug trade, the military in some countries being integrated into the movement of drugs and people, the Immigration approach of the US Government),  serve power of some kind or another.  All these histories intersect.

Jennifer

Several of my husband's killers are walking around just fine. One was recently president of Guatemala before he was thrown in jail.  

Joe

Despite all these horror stories, people are showing up to help people, on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

Jennifer

I've been very heartened, of course, by the numerous groups just down here alone in the South Rio Grande Valley who saw what was going on, and  were outraged and started joining together.

Many of these folks were never political before. They are normal people going,  “What are those babies doing on the bridge in 108 degree weather for two weeks at a time? And that pregnant woman, why can't you go in and use the bathroom?”

 I've been very heartened by the number of people that want to help and have a totally human reaction. I was very heartened when the crying baby tape came out and people of all political backgrounds said, “That’s too much.”   That is at least one chord that humanity that was struck and everyone came running to help the kids.

That all gives me great hope

Now, look, anyone that looks like you or like me, came from somewhere else. We're not Native American, right? Even two of three of Trump's were immigrants.

Let's get real, these people are exactly the same as us. They have equal rights to us, to survive, save their children, put them in school, work hard, get food,  not have an eight year old taken to work with the gangs, on his birthday, to have fingers chopped off.

We need to step up. and say this is a global crisis. We all need to share in the work to locate and arrange resettlement in an organized and reasonable manner imanner so that people can be safe. The first entity to support that comes to mind would be the United Nations, but maybe we need a new organization. One that would interview everybody and have them neutrally decide who really is in danger and deserves asylum. I think people who are in danger should have a safe place to go, period.  We need a new model.

And it worked brilliantly, of course. We just need to come up with a new model that's rooted in the reality of us all being people. These are families.  Exactly the same as us. We were families, too, and we came running, too. That's it. So we all have an equal claim if we want to be really realistic about it. We're on their land, not the other way around.  

Joe

So many countries, here at the end of this neo-liberal era, have mistaken the impoverishment of the middle class as having something to do with immigrants, despite the evidence.  People turn back to that time of scapegoating whole sectors of the population.  This feels like the repetition of a dark history in our recent past.  

Jennifer

My father was a child in Holland, the Netherlands, 10 or 11 when World War II was starting up.

And my grandfather was listening to Hitler every night, of course, on the radio.  Everyone was trying to figure out what to do.  Would Hitler come that far west.

My grandfather reacted by throwing his closest family on the boat to America. 

The rest of the family didn't get on a boat fast enough and you can guess what happened.

My father would never discuss politics. He didn't want to remember the war. He just wanted to hide basically. But when Trump started running for office and he looked at how there was an almost identical our socioeconomic situation. Once a great power going down, we white people have had everything stolen from us. We're ashamed. We feel dethroned  and we're going to go after those dark people that robbed us, right? 

For my father and my aunt they had the same reaction to Trump. When they heard that tone of voice, albeit in English, they all started having nightmares again. It's like we've heard that message before.  And everyone died.  

So are we going there, or are we going to listen to Gandhi's teachings.  He was a pretty salty old guy, he said,  “we can all live together like brothers or we can die together like fools.”   

I think is a very great quote. 

Joe

Well, let's end it there. Let's just say let's not die. Let's live together. 

Image Credits: top of page: Democracy Now interview with Jennifer Harbury

Interview was held Sunday, September 15, 2024.