3/1/23

By Josh Rubin

A few years ago, those of us who started this group began by planting ourselves outside a fenced-in cluster of tents at a port of entry, east enough from the city of El Paso to feel like the middle of nowhere, an irrigated portion of the Chihuahuan desert, right at the river that forms the border with Mexico. In the camp, we had learned, were children, young teens who one way or another had separated from their families.

One way or another. There are lots of ways: they may have left their homes, mostly in Central America, because of a number of factors. Like violence, like hunger, like despair. They may have traveled all that way alone. Why alone? Well, mostly because our country makes it very hard for adults to get past that border, while it allows minors in. Sometimes the families with children come all the way north with them, only to be stopped themselves, and together they decide to send the kids ahead, throwing them on our mercy. Sometimes, even when the adults can be granted admission, a requirement that they must be parents or legal guardians breaks apart the families, leaving the kids on their own. This happens even with close relatives like grandparents, aunts and uncles, adult siblings. So, one way or another, the kids arrive alone.

And they make their way into a bureaucracy, one that can be quite callous, but even when operated with the best intentions seems incapable of providing the kind of care needed by a child that has undergone a traumatic journey and separation. From outside the fences, we watched as children, forbidden even to touch one another, marched single file, an arm’s length apart, even escorted by guard to the bathroom and shower huts.

The news, which is no news to us, reaches us this week that some of the children we waved to through the fences at Tornillo, and later, Homestead, found their way to the killing room floors of slaughterhouses, where they were employed illegally by unscrupulous business folk. That rather than going to school have been spending their time working, some of them working off the debts to the coyotes and cartels that got them to the border. Why is it no surprise? Because the practice of using child labor always finds the most vulnerable. The ones without family with them to keep them safe. The ones whose families are far away.

The other news that finds us is that the Biden administration has plans to make it even harder for people whose lives are precarious in an indifferent world to get past the walls, guns, and racism that make up the border. Only minors alone, their hearts aching with their separation, will pass through the gates, probably in greater numbers. Family members who can’t watch their children go hungry or get recruited into gangs, will make the fateful decision. And some of those kids, in a society that is willfully blind to who works the night shifts of the most dangerous jobs, will find themselves in the cold, and alone.

So, let us remind ourselves, as politicians scheme to stay in power, and to cover themselves with small bits of righteous rhetoric, that what children need is their families and a society that values every last one of them. And we need to erase the border we are forever fortifying between children and their families.