12/27/22

By Josh Rubin

“Titulo 42”

When I listen to spoken Spanish I am lucky if I understand half of what I hear. Unless I keep listening. Unless something is said so many times that my sluggish comprehension has a second, third, fourth chance at it.

Standing with migrants in the Mexican border cities, I heard it a lot. It was the thing that those with dwindling funds and cold hands and hungry children hinged their hopes on: the end of Título 42. The policy that libels darker skinned people with the vilest lie: that they carry a disease that justifies suspending human rights. Come back, the expulsees were told, when the order is lifted. And those words echoed along the spine of a hemisphere, past the Darién jungles, shaking the continents with their deep bass note of hope, and thousands upon thousands took to their feet, wrapped their children in their arms, and filed northward.

And in my halting Spanish I started, many times, to say what we had every reason to expect. That they would find a way to delay that date. As they did today. And I felt in my heart what they will feel, as the word spreads along the ropey windings that carried the hope, now carrying a setback which must bring tears first, before that stubbornnest of feelings returns, now in the coldest and darkest season: hope.

They do not know my country as I do.