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“You can’t even describe what we are doing as a Band-Aid on a gushing wound,” Jakubal said.
He said a long history of U.S. policies in Latin America has contributed to the reasons migrants are risking their lives to trek for days through harsh terrain in hopes of finding better lives in the U.S.
In other words, Jakubal said, “what’s going on at the border now is like a symptom on top of a symptom on top of a symptom of the deeper problem.”
A shift in policy
Doug Ruopp, a veteran volunteer with the migrant aid group Humane Borders, remembers a time before people started to die at striking rates in the Sonoran Desert. He moved to Tucson from New England in the late 1990s to become a bilingual teacher. Back then, the border crossings he heard about were different.