12/9/22

By Josh Rubin

TORNILLO

It is a place that haunts me. It was chosen to hold captive thousands of children, away from the sight of a nation horrified by what they had heard on a recording smuggled out of a detention center on the other end of the Texas border, in the east. A child crying for its mother.

In this place were congregated children stranded by border policies that incentivized separation, that took children in if they presented themselves without their parents. Desperation did the rest. The policies have different names now, but the desperation is still there today. Children, crossing, alone. Kept from family.

Tornillo haunts me. Children walking from tent to tent, following the rule of never touching, arms’ length apart. Children, as we later learned, threatened with deportation if they misbehaved. Children, many Guatemalan with little Spanish, and no English. Children, no end in sight. How long inside? Two months, three months, four months, they called out, when I managed to get close enough to ask.

Where are they now? The bad publicity that came from our vigil that started with one, and climbed to many, at the gate, camping at the gate, finally got loud enough to bring it down. The tents came down, they rolled out the once-roaring generators that howled all day and night along with the wind in the winter desert.

Where are they? Does Tornillo haunt them? Do we visit that place again and again, together and forever apart in our dreams?