Last week the ACLU in conjunction with the Trans Border Institute held a conference at USD titled “Ending Human Rights Abuses at the U.S.-Mexico Border. I attended and came away daunted by the current challenges to more humane immigration policies and energized by all of the smart people who are working on the issue.

The conference included a visit to the border at Border Field State Park and some very powerful testimony from people who had been caught by ICE and had their lives badly disrupted.

The bulk of the conference was about what lawyers and activist can do to protect the human right of individuals on the border and in the detention system. Which it turns out is very little. Congress has passed legislation that exempts DHS from environmental and other constraints while building the border fence and the Supreme Court has upheld the right of the government to run detention centers and have internal inspections.

The role of the ACLU and the Trans Border Institute in this process is to keep shining the light of truth on the issues and hope that eventually the people and then the government will change their direction.

The panel at which I learned the most was titled "Multimedia approaches to Human Rights Advocacy." The panelist were Heidi Boisvery of breakthrough and John Carlos Frey of Gatekeeeper Productions They both had inovative ideas for how to change peoples minds about immigration and were willing to share them.

At Radical Immigration we believe that the underlying assumption that governments can discriminate about who live within their boundries has to change and we are working to do that. In the meantime organizations like those above are doing what they can to improve conditions for those faced with the current reality of an inhumane and immoral system. Progress will be made.

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