The gate at the Nogales Border Patrol Station, February 2017.
The Department of Homeland Security is doing off-the-record roundtable discussions in 16 U.S. cities to listen to community concerns.
Community representatives from eight Southern Arizona human and civil rights groups - including Human Borders, the Kino Initiative, Tucson Samaritans and others - took part one roundtable discussion in Tucson, which Arizona Public Media attended but was not allowed to record.
Haris Tarin, the senior policy adviser for civil rights and liberties at Homeland Security, said before the meeting that he and his colleagues had braced themselves for tough questions and even hostility.
“Once you sit down and see, you’ll know it’s not feel-good conversations. They are really difficult conversations that we have here,” Tarin said.
Tarin says his job is to listen and take issues back to Washington, D.C. Nearly all of the two-hour session was taken up by two concerns: mistreatment by Border Patrol officers and the growing number of families being separated by the Trump administration’s deportations.
“Immigration is a big topic here in Tucson,” said Tarin, "and we want to make sure that we continue to engage and talk and that they know that the federal government, and specifically DHS, is listening to communities.”
Sometimes, he said, what they hear from the community becomes the basis for policy changes.
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