4/24/20

By Josh Rubin

UPDATE: It is in the air. It is in the air.

UPDATE: 9 am. Flight still on the ground in Brownsville.

UPDATE: She may be on a deportation flight, 8:20, from Brownsville to Honduras, this morning.

Don’t look away.

The mother and her young teenage daughter fled Honduras. The daughter’s life was threatened by her uncle, who promised revenge against her for her testimony against her father, testimony that her father had raped her.

They spent months in the Matamoros encampment along the banks of the river, named Grande by us, called Bravo on the other bank, moving slowly, slowly through the cruel policy called the Migrant Protection Protocol, known as Remain in Mexico. They asked for asylum. And at long last, after multiple hearings, they were told that their situation did not qualify them for asylum in our country.

Her mother could not let her go back to Honduras, to face the violence they fled. As others, others who love their children, have done, she sent her daughter across the bridge on her own, to present herself as what is called an unaccompanied minor, to somehow get her out of the danger she faced in Matamoros, and back home in Honduras, close to death.

Others have done this, sending the children, saving them at least. And the US doesn’t like the practice, because it looks too cruel to send them back, to do to them what they do to other desperate, but older, people. That is, ignore their plight, sorry, no room at the inn. Children had been getting a different kind of treatment. Not good treatment. But they let them in.

But today, under the shadow of the plague, the US will teach them a lesson. They intend to deport the girl. To Honduras, where no family awaits her. Where revenge awaits her. That will teach her. That will teach THEM.

TODAY. We are watching for her. We are watching the planes. The death flights.