For more than fifteen years, members of Pueblo Sin Fronteras have been reaching out to the most vulnerable immigrants in the United States and to migrants and refugees on the move.
We are an all volunteer collective of friends who decided to be in permanent solidarity with displaced peoples.
We accompany migrants and refugees in their journey of hope, and together demand our human rights.
We provide humanitarian aid and professional legal advise to migrants and refugees.
To build solidarity bridges among peoples and turndown border walls imposed by greed.
None of the donations you make go towards paying salaries or administrative fees; it goes directly to Caravan members and to our accompaniment efforts—via Freedom for Immigrants, a 501c3 organization. All donations are tax deductible.
Thank you for standing with us alongside immigrants in their struggle for justice, freedom, and dignity.
Tijuana, México.
To the migrants and refugees of the Central American Exodus and the world,
To the community of migrant & refugee human rights defenders,
To national and international civil society organizations who defend migrants and refugees,
To the indigenous people who have expressed their solidarity with the Central American Exodus,
To the towns and communities who have been witness to our work all along the migrant route,
To the national and international human rights governmental human rights agencies,
To the press,
To the corresponding authorities,
For the past few days, Pueblo Sin Fronteras has been the object of multiple critiques and declarations that discredit the work we have done for years, and especially our accompaniment of this Exodus. These declarations are irresponsible and by criminalizing and defaming us they increase the risks faced by all human rights defenders -- both those who speak out and declare their solidarity from within their own contexts, as well as those who put their bodies on the line. These declarations also put members of the Central American Exodus in grave danger.
In light of this humanitarian crisis it is necessary to join together, instead of detracting; to build unity instead of fragmentation. For this reason, we call on the many Mexican and international organizations of human rights defenders, who are concerned for the lives of the thousands of people who are fleeing danger in their countries, to directly accompany this Exodus, ethically and with commitment.
We call on the National and State Human Rights Commissions as well as the Inter-American Human Rights Commission to take precautionary measures for the protection of the migrants and refugees of this Exodus as well as the human rights defenders who accompany it.
Pueblo Sin Fronteras is a transborder organization made up of human rights defenders of diverse nationality and immigration statuses that promotes accompaniment, humanitarian assistance, leadership development, recognition of human rights, and coordination of know-your-rights training along migrant routes, as well as monitoring and raising awareness of human rights abuses against migrants and refugees in Mexico and the United States. Our accompaniment does not end at the border. It continues in the immigration detention centers of the United States and the communities in Mexico and the US.
No member of Pueblo Sin Fronteras receives a salary, and the funds that are received in small donations are used for accompaniment, human rights defense, direct humanitarian aid in shelters and along the migrant route, direct aid for people in immigration detention centers, and for organizing tools and logistics. We do not receive financial support from any government, corporation, or political party.
As an organization, we accompanied two Migrant Caravans in 2017 and one in the spring of 2018. Hundreds of Central American participants of those caravans received legal orientation from volunteer attorneys about their options for regularization, refugee status, and asylum, both in the United States and Mexico.
Many of those caravan members have regularized their status in Mexico, some have been granted asylum in the United States, and many more are awaiting the resolution of their cases.
Far from encouraging migrants to pursue life in the United States as their only option, we have made a sincere effort to provide accurate information about the opportunities that exist in Mexico for people who would probably suffer under the punitive asylum system of the United States, which systematically deprives asylum seekers of their liberty, separates families, and often deports people to their death.
At the same time, we have asked Mexican institutions to comply with the laws that govern the issuance of humanitarian visas and the recognition of refugee status, because the system that currently exists for these processes in Mexico is full of irregularities and human rights violations. These include the incarceration of asylum seekers, the confinement of asylum applicants to violent and impoverished regions and cities, arbitrary and illegal delays, and a lack of infrastructure for addressing refugees’ most urgent humanitarian needs.
Pueblo Sin Fronteras also coordinates two migrant shelters in Sonora --in one of the most violent and exposed border zones in the country-- which provide food, a roof, and humanitarian assistance to hundreds of people each month. We have built community organizing campaigns against the separation of families in the United States and against police violence in Tijuana, among others.
On October 12th of this year, when we learned about the Caminata Migrante beginning in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, we began to closely follow all the information we could find. We were aware of the delicate electoral moment in the United States and change of administration in Mexico, which this caravan would struggle to navigate. However, we also appreciate the critical conditions expelling people, principally but not only from Honduras, and we understood that the emergence of the Caminata Migrante demonstrated how hunger, death, and the desire to preserve life were the true causes of the exodus, and not, as some have tried to misinform in public forums, any opportunistic political calculation.
For these reasons, as human rights defenders, we recognize the need to offer direct accompaniment, as far as we were able, due to the situation of abuse and use of force to violate human rights that we began to observe from the moment the Caminata began to cross through an increasingly militarized frontier between Honduras and Guatemala, and above all upon arriving at the border between Guatemala and México.
A group of volunteers from Pueblo Sin Fronteras traveled to southern México to accompany the members of the Caminata, which from that moment was recognized as a mass “Exodus”, now that the mass migration which has been occurring for years in this part of the continent has finally made itself visible due to the collective character of the Caminata.
As we have accompanied this Exodus, we have walked, slept, eaten, and built community alongside the migrants who drive it forward. In our previous work of accompaniment and defense of human rights we have built channels of communication with authorities, public safety agencies, and civil society. On the road with this Exodus, those same agencies have requested our presence on a variety of occasions as participants in facilitating the distribution of humanitarian aid and the protection of human safety in critical moments. We have sought to serve as a link when it is effective and when the Exodus itself requires it in order to travel more safely through especially dangerous regions, despite the circumstances and obstacles imposed in many cases by the federal government and by various state governments, despite the risks along the road, and despite the criminalization that has been encouraged by unethical media outlets.
We have also recognized and tried to encourage the leadership and decision-making abilities of the women and men of the Exodus, supporting the transmission of information from officials and from civil society through facilitated assemblies and organizational processes, tasks which have been daunting due to the scale, the uncertainty, and the desperation of the Exodus. We have approached these tasks in coordination and constant communication with other people and organizations who have been present to accompany the Exodus on its path.
We reiterate our grave concern that the work of accompanying the Exodus is being disparaged and criminalized, as well as our call to organizations and individuals of good faith to build unity in order to better support, improve our efforts, and protect each other in a context of widespread violations of human rights.
In solidarity with the migrant peoples and refugees of the world,
Pueblo Sin Fronteras
Contact: refugeecaravan@gmail.com
