RGV Welcoming Committee Statement on Tragedy in Brownsville TX

Contact: Martha Mercado, LMSW, RGV Welcoming Committee Facilitator

Email: mmercado@goodneighborsettlement.org

The RGV Welcoming Committee is a group of individuals and nonprofits based in South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and the adjoining Mexican state of Tamaulipas. These organizations and volunteers have welcomed migrants into the United States for at least the last two and a half years, and assisted those waiting in Mexico. Our mission is to serve every migrant with dignity, care, and respect.  

Early Sunday morning in Brownsville, Texas, a group of immigrants were struck by a speeding automobile while waiting at a bus stop outside the Ozanam Center shelter, leaving seven dead and at least ten severely injured. As our community is shocked and overcome with grief, the RGV Welcoming Committee mourns these unthinkable deaths and injuries inflicted on our immigrant brothers and sisters who came for a safer life. Our deepest condolences go out to the families and loved ones of those killed and hurt.

Whatever facts are ultimately determined, we believe that the focus of healing should be centered on the impacted individuals and family members. Instead of deploying the victims’ deaths politically, we ask that people learn the names, backgrounds, and migration stories of those whose lives were lost or damaged.

We call on politicians and media to stop the vilification of immigrants. Above all, people like those harmed today are human beings with hopes and dreams. We ask for an end to mischaracterizing our border communities as unsafe and unwelcoming.  We also deplore the pretense that forcing migrants fleeing violence in their homelands to wait in dangerous northern Mexico is a humane or secure option.

While the federal government has justly expanded the admission of migrants at ports of entry along the Southern border, harsh deterrence measures such as increased expulsions into Tamaulipas continue to harm human beings and externalize realities of immigrant suffering by people, including many children, akin to those who perished today. 

Greater humanitarian assistance and support, with open minds and hearts, are what helps–not hostility, harassment, and militarization distracting us from true needs. Let us remember today’s victims with compassion and love as we honor their sadly incomplete journeys to safety in the United States.