1/22/25

By Joshua Rubin

I listened to an NPR report this morning. A reporter interviewed some people in Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, where, as in other Mexican border towns, people had been waiting either to get asylum interview appointments or to attend the appointments they managed to make. One man told him he had an appointment that was canceled, an appointment that was to take place one hour after Trump ascended to the highest office in our country. One hour before his time to cross to the middle of the bridge, show his phone to the sentries, and go to his interview, the appointment was canceled, and the app used to track them refused any new applications.

Here in New York City it is hard to see any change. It is cold here, so the relative emptiness of the streets may be mostly people protecting themselves from the weather. But it frightens me, as if the quiet of my apartment is not safety but tension waiting quietly to erupt into—what?

I am told things that suggest that beneath the frozen surface is a city ready to deliver the protocols of hatred that have been laid in place by this new order. Shelters will close, food will be scarce, and men with guns will knock on doors. I can imagine roundups and corrals. People herded to the border and back across those bridges that I have freely walked. I will not need my imagination soon, will I?

Folks like me, privileged enough and horrified enough, chat with our friends about the terrible country we live in, and we spin fantasies of going somewhere else. Few leave, though, despite it all. I will speak for myself: I don’t know where to go, and I am old, too old to begin a new life. But people, like those huddling in my imagination, afraid for the knock at the door, and those who stand on the bank of the river, gazing at its opposite, and those in those places from which they will flee—they still want to come and settle in this benighted place, rarely pausing in their conviction that a better life awaits them here, with the likes of us.

How bad will it be? For us, it is an awful way to spend one’s last years, in the glare of hatred. For them, well, I wonder if they should have such faith in this particular migration’s promise. The promises I hear when I can no longer hide from the tsunami of the new order are not ones that should attract the hopeful. Unless, of course, they are the only hope.

We were horrified when the departing vice president told the poor of Central and South America not to come. It did not sound to our ears like a message that leads to a more just world. But now, only a small minority opening our arms in welcome will not be enough. We are not strong enough to protect them, though we will probably try. Because that is what we do.

The calculus has changed. Cruelty on this scale is a mighty deterrent. We will witness and report as the the waves crash, even on the sidewalks of New York, as the tide of cruelty floods.