sibarikupuame:
prettiest-squid-girl:
wild watching the rest of the us talk about ice invading their state or city and how they’re doing this or that and its terrifying that our nation has descended to this and this is the biggest or worst or lowest or whatever other superlative….
and they’re just describing what daily life has been like in el paso for upwards of twenty years. but no one cared when it happened here, because it was happening to the people its “supposed” to happen to; mexican immigrants, many undocumented.
just feels. fucked. that this city has been under the boot of ice for so fucking long. and i have never once seen it mentioned or talked about or acknowledged. i’ll bet you money the vast majority of ice’s arrests are still undocumented mexicans in texas.
but no one talks about that, because thats what is “supposed” to happen, and everyone decided over a decade ago when mexican kids were being put in cages outside our town and that made national news, that they were fine with it.
~Impulse ^Vic
a big part of the reason we have the fear of cops we (me and my systemmates) have is from growing up with ice sweeping where we lived. sometimes neighbors would disappear and we’d be like “where did my friend beto go?” and someone would say he and his family didn’t have papers, so they got taken. just disappeared, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
under the biden administration we saw ice taking people just about every month. just pulling over trucks and arresting everyone inside. no one cared then.
all of the ice activities that have been making national and international news trace their origins back here. el paso sent ice agents to chicago. and i don’t say this to downplay the horror, everything ice is doing is absolutely terrible, but we were on tumblr in 2009 trying to get people to care and the only ones who did were overwhelmingly other latine people and a handful of Black bloggers.
people here are just really thoroughly defeated and broken. there are still protests every now and then, and at least one small activist group, but nothing has anywhere near the energy or presence other places have because we as a city and as communities have been crushed for decades. people here don’t expect things to get better, they haven’t in twenty years.
– tocaya
