A stunning North Carolina–made modern curio cabinet, a best-ever buttermilk biscuit mix, a surprising Georgia-inflected port, and twenty-one other Southern-made products compose this year’s crop of honorees across six categories home, food, drink, crafts, style, and outdoors. Plus: Our first ever Sustainability Award winner
AJO â It was a simple message scrawled into a basalt rock lying near-empty cans of beans and jugs of water that volunteers had left deep in the Sonoran Desert for undocumented immigrants passing through: âGracias.â
But to Mikal Jakubal, who, as a volunteer with the Ajo Samaritans, had been making weekly trips into the backcountry to stock water drop locations, the note was affirmation that the groupâs efforts were appreciated.
âFor the most part, we will never hear from the people who use this,â Jakubal said. âWe donât know what it was like getting to this point. We donât know what is after this. But you have this one little connection across massively different life experiences: They found some water and you found a thank you note.â
Advertisement: “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.
The drop-offs of asylum-seekers in Southern Arizona began roughly a month after President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Justified by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as a response to capacity and resource issues, the off-loading in rural communities is one example of the Biden administration doubling down and in some ways intensifying a controversial Trump-era practice on the border. Under President Donald Trump, large groups of asylum-seekers were for a time released in the western city of Yuma, creating major strains on the community. Under Biden, similar releases are now happening in communities a fraction of the size of Yuma and with far fewer resources, creating a fraught and untenable situation for humanitarian aid providers in some of the border’s deadliest areas.