Since June, Daniel Blue Tyx, a reporter based in McAllen, Texas, has traveled from Brownsville to Laredo to everywhere in between, chronicling the response of border communities to family separation and the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. What he's encountered has been both heartrending and inspiring, and at Strong Arm Press, we plan to publish a book, Angry Tías and Guerilla Lawyers: A Summer of Resistance on the U.S.-Mexico Border, about what's really happening on the ground at the border of the United States and Mexico. But because we're not a corporate publisher, we are relying on regular people to fund the project and then to buy and spread the word about this necessary book.
Ordinary people from the border region--led by a surprising coalition of faith leaders, lawyers, and progressive activists, the majority of them women--are taking the lead in fighting back against the Trump administration’s cruel immigration policies. They’re sitting in immigration courtrooms documenting the stories of parents and children who appear in mass trials, often without a lawyer or advocate. They’re following up on each and every case with phone calls to lawyers, detention centers, and shelters. They’re taking food, water, women’s hygiene products, medical supplies, and -- most precious of all -- dollar-store flip-flops to the asylum seekers forced to camp overnight on international bridges. And they’re organizing and engaging in civil disobedience to protest these immoral and dysfunctional policies.
The response Tyx has documented has been a vivid and remarkably successful demonstration of grassroots democracy in action. The policy of family separation was reversed—at least officially. But the fight’s far from over. Hundreds of parents who were deported without their children, often under false pretenses, remain separated from their families; their reunions are complicated by the same rampant violence and corruption that led them to seek refuge in the first place. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is pushing to terminate a policy that bans children from being held in detention for more than a limited number of days, replacing separation with the indefinite incarceration of families whose only crime is seeking safety in this country.
Tyx has been a border resident for the past 15 years, the last five of which he's spent working as a freelance journalist. During that time, he's seen other immigration crises come and go, with little change. The national news media goes home, the conversation shifts, and the government returns to operating under the radar with little accountability or oversight. The stakes are too high for that to happen this time. What's really happening at the border—and how grassroots female activists in border communities are responding—must be documented. Nobody else is doing it.
Practically speaking, we at Strong Arm Press also hope to educate readers who want to help so that they can make the biggest difference possible, whether it be through donations, volunteer work, advocacy, or other action. We want this book to play some small part in maintaining the sense of urgency necessary to end family separation once and for all.