4/5/23

By Josh Rubin

We will start at the end. Maybe 40 burned bodies, dead. Maybe 30 more who may survive, their lungs forever scarred by the smoke. The numbers imprecise, vague. The list of names and origins incomplete.

A fire in a locked prison, the prisoners behind bars for their poverty. Swept from the streets of Ciudad Juárez, where they begged and sold little items, like windshield wiper blades, to cars slowed down in the traffic, picking up pesos to feed themselves, their children. Migrants from further south than Mexico, stateless people in the streets, just days before the visit of the Mexican president. Gathered up, put behind bars, locked into an overcrowded, dark place that Mexican authorities refuse to call a prison. Not a prison, they say, una estancia, roughly translated, a place.

An agreement. Between the president of the United States and the president of Mexico in an election year. They agree that migrants are a problem that should be hidden. For the U.S., hidden in Mexico. For Mexico, kept out of sight. A series of agreements. Remain in Mexico, that grew encampments in flood zones, desperate prey for the cartels that run the border cities of Mexico. Title 42, that pretended that a pandemic excused blind expulsion across the bridges and the skies of the most vulnerable people in the world. Arcane regulations, devised by partners, asylum rules that push the unwanted into the streets, then arrested, for the crime of being unwanted, and unsightly.

One hand washes the other, they say. But the blood leaves a trail to those hands.