Illegal border crossings, like the one in San Antonio that turned deadly, are an Appeal to Heaven

June 28, 2022 

Local authorities in San Antonio, Texas, today, found a trailer outside San Antonio containing at least 46 dead people. "By all accounts," per Payday Report, "the incident is the deadliest border crossing incident in U.S. History."

Other accounts noted that at least 15 people, now updated to 16 people survived the deadly heat and are receiving medical care. 

The similarity to season 2 of The Wire, (David Simon's HBO police procedural) is pretty striking. Those who died appear to have suffocated to death without water. The high in San Antonio today was 123°F. It does not appear that anyone was arrested. 

Those 46 people who died and the other 16 casualties deserve thoughts and prayers. They also deserve to have people understand the context in which they risked their lives for the chance at a better life. It's against no legal principle that I know of to risk your own death. I am not a lawyer, but I can say that it wasn't suicide; they had a chance. They chose the dangerous way, and maybe they had no other choice. 

The desperation that would make you take that risk. These are; they must be, people that can find no contentment in the country they are living in, but, not only that, they must be people who have not the fundamental capacity to cope with their own lives while living in the country that they have been in. They must have accepted that at such a deep level to accept this level of stakes that are so high. 

I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are mentally ill. I'm not surprised many of them couldn't get a visa or felt like they couldn't get a visa. And I don't blame them for wanting to be a ghost in a better country instead of living as a regular person in a bad situation. 

And so I don't blame them for getting in that trailer. 

I think it's important to remember there is a sort of catechism; a sacrosanct viewpoint to adopt both logic and empathy in events such as these. I learned it from my dad; it goes like this in this situation: Everyone has their own story, and their own reasons. For whatever reason these people though it was better to risk their lives than stay where they were. Hard to imagine that the only reason was economic greed. Probably, they saw no future for themselves at home. That's the kind of viewpoint I learned to take on things, like this, as a child. It's how I wanted to see things in the first place, and once it was expressed to me it made sense. 

This is not an uplifting story, but it is a story. For these people in the lorry, doing anything was better than living paralyzed in fear. It is a tragedy but it is not straightforward, and there are no victims. 

I just imagine that for these people the truck didn't represent even an escape, but shelter; shelter from a storm that was life where they lived. I'm sure every one of them felt a quiet relief at getting into the truck because now there was only one way: forward, risk it all or not. It was not even about life or death, because for them, there was only suffering towards death, or risking, for the possibility of everything, a quick death in the truck that might not come. 

This is why the "coyotes" say, as I have heard, that their only concern is that they take the truck to the place where they are going, to the best of their ability, and the coyotes wont take any risk to their own lives getting them there. These are people that have signed their own death warrant, tho' death may be uncertain. They're appealing to Heaven. And the only people in that operation who have any trust in the sanctity of their own lives are the smugglers. And if the people in the truck make it, it's because the coyotes guarded their own lives. And if the coyotes don't conscientiously care only about their own lives, there is not any hope at all on that journey. There is no room for an appeal to Heaven if a coyote isn't willing to sacrifice others to save his own life. 

-- he represents hope in and of himself. The Appeal to Heaven is contained in the character of his person, and so on and on, like the old Native American coyotl tradition embodying hope but cautioning against it.