5/12/20

By Josh Rubin

I wish, sometimes, now especially, that I could offer some comfort. But since I have somehow gotten a job as a witness to the treatment of people who come to the borders of the country I live in, I cannot comfort anyone. Not myself or anyone else. Not today.

It would be impossible to take any comfort from the decrease in numbers of refugees in ICE prisons, because it reflects two vectors of inhumanity. First, the wholesale deportation of refugees to the countries they fled. Second, the pitiless rejection and expulsion of people who come to our border, begging for the chance to live. With the excuse of the Coronavirus emergency, we ignore the standards of decency that might stay our cruelty, dropping even the pathetic pretense of a few months ago. Go back, there is nothing here for you.

Even children. We send them back. And the ones we have in custody already we keep. Ignoring legal orders to place them with sponsors and family, under cover of the same scourge that excuses our crescendo of cruelty. We have gone back to using the children to bait the undocumented, so we can place those who come forward on the death flights flown every weekday from places like Brownsville and El Paso and Alexandria. And we tell the judges that the children are better off in Covid-ravaged jails than in the homes that await them. Why? They might get sick. So, they are held until they turn 18, no longer needing the “tender” care offered at these brutal and loveless institutions, and can now be shackled for their trip to homelessness.

So, no comfort. I will not document the racist and genocidal policies that are willing to sacrifice people of color in the name of saving the bank accounts and investments of the privileged in the name of saving the economy in the times of the plague and the vile opportunism of cruelty to refugees. Because you know it. All the while we watch through our tears in quarantine.

There are flights leaving today, with shackled humanity aboard. Prisoners of our craven hearts are shifted, infected, neglected. Watch for our reports.