Students travel to the border for course addressing immigration

This time last year, Lily Bonasso was an Upper St. Clair High School senior studying about immigration policy in Spanish class.
Part of the lesson involved students watching a documentary about children trying to reach the United States from Central America.

Harry Funk/The Almanac
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Lily Bonnasso displays a water jug found near the southern border, colored black to help prevent detection.
“It really affected me,” she said. “I mean, everyone in the class was upset. They were sad. But I would go home and talk to my mom every day, because it took us three days to get through it, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know what to do. I want to know more.'”
During her first semester at Washington & Jefferson College, she learned about Engaging the Sonoran Border, a course offered during January that features a study trip to Arizona.
“I was scared to do it,” she admitted, “because I’m a freshman and I didn’t know the professor, and I didn’t know anyone else going on it. But I thought to myself, if I don’t take this opportunity, then who am I? I’m not even willing to step out my comfort zone to learn more about it, who am I as a person?”
And so she joined associate professor Jason Kilgore and nine other W&J students for the two-week excursion earlier this month during an especially relevant time in American history: its longest-ever partial government shutdown, with the impasse focusing on funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Kilgore launched the course, “designed to increase your knowledge and experience of U.S. immigration policy on humans (and other animals) living near or crossing the Sonoran border in Arizona,” last year. The course’s title refers to the 100,000-square-mile Sonoran Desert, which covers about one-third of the state.
The students’ experiences included visiting a port of entry in the border city of Nogales and helping with the efforts of the Tucson Samaritans, based at a church in Arizona’s second-largest city, to provide humanitarian aid.
“We spent three days with different groups in the field, legally leaving water, first aid, food packs, sockets and blankets in geocached drop-off locations,” Kilgore said.
The W&J contingent also sat in on federal court proceedings related to Operation Streamline, a joint initiative of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice now in its 14th year. In another case of the name stating the purpose, the initiative seeks to try as many defendants as possible in a short period of time.
“It is when a group of migrants who were captured are brought in and put forth in front of a judge, and they are tried in a criminal proceeding instead of more of a civil one,” sophomore Kailee Havdra explained. “They are basically asked if they plead not guilty or guilty to entering the U.S. illegally, and most of the time they plead guilt and take whatever punishment is given.”
The students, though, were denied an opportunity to meet with U.S. Border Patrol representatives.
“We did that last year, but we could not do that this year due to the partial government shutdown,” Kilgore explained. “We were considered a non-essential function.”

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