Well, I'm back

I started posting here way back in December of 2004. My last post was on January 18, 2013. Since then, I have concentrated on Twitter -- <@relford> -- where I have posted over 8,800 tweets since June of 2009. I will continue tweeting for sure, but it is time to once again go beyond 140 characters.

So here goes.

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With almost 47 years of ministry and activism here in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, it seems fitting for me to begin with an update on the ongoing double tragedy here. 

Every day families are torn apart by deportations, the majority of them due to minor offenses or something like a burned out tail light. (Astounding to a lot of us, two million deportations have now been carried out under the aegis of President Obama.)

The second tragedy is even worse. Migrants continue to die in our vast desert. In the federal fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2012, 179 bodies of migrants were found just here in the Tucson Sector of the border. The next year,182 bodies. The weather is only now heating up (in the high 80s this week), but 36 more bodies have already been recovered since last October 1. 

Since 1999, over 3,000 bodies of migrants have been brought to the Medical Examiner's "coolers" here in Tucson, Since 1994, over 6,000 bodies have been found along the whole 2,000 mile border.

Tomorrow I will post what I consider an excellent summary of this whole borderlands catastrophe.