The American Friends Service Committee says that it promotes a world free of violence, inequality, and oppression.
Add to that compassion for others, and you have the basic philosophy that motivates San Diego native Pedro Rios, whose artwork appears at the Bonita Museum through March 28.
Rios, the San Diego director of AFSC’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program, is a human rights advocate and longtime defender of immigrant rights. After meeting him for this interview, I found him to be a thoughtful man who does not take his work or life philosophy lightly.
Rios has been with the AFSC since 2003; he has worked on immigration rights and border issues for more than 25 years. One particularly important program Rios oversees documents abuses by law enforcement agencies and advocates for policy change, as well as working with migrant communities.
He is also a steering committee member for the Southern Border Communities Coalition and ex officio representative for the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium’s Advisory Committee.
I first learned of Rios a few years ago, when I heard about the tents and stations AFSC had set up next to the border wall to give assistance to the migrants and refugees who were coming through. AFSC provided hungry and thirsty people with water and snacks as well as giving them information on how to navigate reaching their various destinations in the United States.
With the new administration in place, very few migrants have been coming through, but several stray dogs have appeared; Rios and other volunteers have been feeding them with donated dog food.
He is first and foremost a man who believes in human decency and likes to help others with dignity and compassion. He answered the following questions.
Q: I know you have worked with the AFSC for many years. How did you get started with them?
A. I returned to San Diego from the Bay Area with my partner during the summer of 2002. I began working for AFSC in April 2003. My title was Project Voice Program Coordinator. In 2005, I became Director of AFSC’s US-Mexico Border Program, and I have held that position ever since. I had previously known of AFSC from its work organizing against California’s Proposition 187 in the mid-1990s [and] I participated on a panel with Roberto Martínez. He had been AFSC’s US-Mexico Border Program Director during that time.
In San Francisco, I was working at a community law organization supporting elderly migrants who were at risk of losing their public benefits. I was also organizing against INS raids, so the position with AFSC was a natural fit for me.
Q: Tell me about your work. As a director, what are your duties and who do you supervise?
A. My responsibilities include overseeing the programmatic work and administrative tasks of the US-Mexico Border Program. I regularly meet with colleagues to discuss border and immigration issues and how they impact border communities and migrants. We strategize on how to best respond to those policies, always looking at how to uphold basic rights. I participate in coalition meetings locally and regionally. I frequently provide an analysis to media outlets on various topics related to immigration. I support with documenting mistreatment by law enforcement agencies, addressing individual cases but also patterns in practice.
Lately, I have been leading Know Your Rights workshops for people who could be affected by immigration operations conducted by ICE or Border Patrol. I supervise three people, all of whom are well-qualified and knowledgeable colleagues.
Q: What has been rewarding for you in your work? What has been frustrating?
A. I have been working in this field for over two decades with AFSC, and much longer prior to joining AFSC, and what frustrates me the most is to see how much policies related to border communities continue to push for militarization as a solution to dealing with migration. The “prevention-through-deterrence” strategy that Border Patrol adopted in the 90s continues to drive decisions about migration policies and practices, compounding upon each successive administration irrespective of which political party is in the White House.
Deterrence is reflected as a logic model for most of the enforcement paradigm, which has led to increased injuries and deaths. Pushing migrating people to remote mountains and desert terrain, or forcing people to use dangerous routes, eviscerating asylum protections, and even the border wall infrastructure — all are meant to deter would-be migrants from entering the United States.
It is frustrating to see that elected officials with the power of changing course on detrimental migration and border policies do not care about being more imaginative concerning the treatment of human beings. Their go-to has been to respond with violence. A more compassionate human rights centered approach, prioritizing meeting humanitarian needs, is not part of the framework for developing migration and border policy.
Migrants face insurmountable obstacles to a thriving and dignified life in the United States, and I’ve met people from all over the world who deal with this on a daily basis.
More than rewarding, because my interest for doing this work is not about having any selfish reward, it is a relief to see that people have the will to survive and do so by building community. When people are organizing against state-sponsored terror, which is how I qualify immigration raids, it is a North Star for how we should strive to live under threat — always moving forward in a principled manner, in spite of those obstacles that seek to debilitate and break the human spirit. Often, that movement forward means having to pick up your family and traversing many countries seeking safety from harm.
Q: With the new administration, what do you foresee or think is going to happen to our immigration system? I read that many of the migrant shelters in Tijuana were empty.
A. The new administration is expanding the criminalization of migration and of migrants in ways that we haven’t seen before. By capitalizing on prior administrations’ misguided policies, and adding new ones, the immigration system will be extremely punitive and cruel and will no longer offer the same protections to migrants as guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.
A clear example of this was cancelling the CBP One app, which is how migrants were making appointments to seek asylum in the United States, and which was really the only safe option of doing so.
By removing that app, tens of thousands of migrants were left stranded without the possibility of safely seeking a viable asylum process in the United States. Defunding of USAID has had the effect of taking away vital resources from shelters in Tijuana and other border cities.
The immigration system was already broken, but now the current administration wants to collapse it and make life miserable for people in a state of vulnerable mobility. While shelters in Tijuana have a reduced population, this doesn’t mean that the needs of migrants have been resolved. In fact, now migrants have fewer support systems and shelters are now much less equipped to address their needs.
Writing, Photography a Necessary Outlet
Rios also makes time for his family and creative outlets he enjoys, such as writing and photography. He says that writing and photography help him to process how he experiences the world around him. He likes to incorporate photography in his work to help him document what he believes are historic events, saying that he feels it is a way to remember that the human spirit strives for a better world, especially now as he believes asylum rights are being stripped away.
Rios and three other artists are participating in an exhibition at the Bonita Museum called “Friendship Park, Take Amistad on the Road,” which runs through March 28.
The purpose of the exhibit is to showcase sculptures, photography, paintings, performance art, and participatory installations about the past, present, and future of Friendship Park. Each of the four artists is communicating a shared message of cross-border friendship or
“amistad,” which for them is the essence of Friendship Park.
Rios’s contribution is a ladder he found at the border in South San Diego that was used by someone to cross into the United States. Between the rungs, he installed framed photographs of different periods of how families and others have enjoyed Friendship Park over the past 20 years.
Both the ladder and the people in the photographs represent a counternarrative to the militarization of a park that was meant to be for gathering and enjoying time together. He says he believes that in their own right, they defy the coldness of militarization and resist misguided policies and practices.
When I asked him about his writing, he replied, “Writing is a way for me to organize my thoughts about a particular subject matter. I have written for several publications and in some cases, what I have written has been impactful to someone.
“I think of the article I wrote concerning the Border Patrol’s use of a challenge coin with violent imagery. After reading my article, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection told the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector that they could no longer use it and he had it removed from their website.”
Rios insists that he could not do his work alone.
“I work with a team of people, and with colleagues throughout and beyond AFSC, who are committed to seeing social justice practices incorporated into how we build relationships with each other,” he said.
“The practices of collective work and organizing are fundamental to creating a more just and humane world for all.”
