Margaret M. Seiler
Margaret M. Seiler is an educator and activist living in Brooklyn, New York. Besides her work with Witness at the Border, she volunteers with two NYC-based groups promoting humane immigration policies and supporting asylum seekers: Don’t Separate Families and Team TLC NYC.
Diary from a Genocide in the Making
By Margaret M. SeilerI spent a week on the US/Mexico border in February with a grassroots group called Witness at the Border. It was my second trip this year, since we launched a daily vigil in Xeriscape Park in Brownsville, Texas, in mid-January. “Witnesses” from over 30 states and abroad have come to bear witness to the horror wrought by the current administration’s cruel immigration policies. A steady drumbeat of incomprehensibly racist policies keeps escalating. First, the travel (or Muslim) ban, then family separation, then children in cages, then “Remain in Mexico” (absurdly called the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP), and now an alphabet soup of stealth policies—PACR, HARP, ACA—that fast track the deportation of asylum seekers. As each new policy unfurls, quicker than the ACLU and other human rights groups can challenge them in court, another one pops up. Cruelty is the point.
