4/27/21

By Josh Rubin

I went to Tornillo yesterday. I had spent well-remembered time outside the gates of what was then a prison camp for what we call unaccompanied minors, better thought of as migrant children. I was there forever. Or for three months.

It was a thousand years ago. Or three years. The wind was blowing yesterday, and the cotton had not yet sprouted, so the fields were in dry clumps. I parked at the open area beside the gate to the port of entry. An open gate, with nary a guard. I got out of my rented car and tried to decide where to tread again in a place where my feet had at one time or another trod before nearly everywhere.

There are no tents. No voices of soccer playing children on the wind. The children are not being kept here now. They are at a place a little way down I-10, at Fort Bliss, the massive military base. Somewhere on its endless acres, there are tents, and there are children, and there are the sounds of children, braver during the day than at night, in their cots, and in chronic uncertainty.

No guard came to ask me my business at this Border Patrol station and bridge to the other side of the river. To the other side of the world. Where I would cross, a thousand years ago. Where I still knew the way.