5/31/22

By Josh Rubin

I have been home for a few days now, having returned from a trip to the border. I met friends there, compañeros en la lucha, friends in the struggle for migrant rights. We had hoped for a small victory, a lifting of Title 42, a brutal ani-immigrant policy masquerading as a health order, but it remains where it was, ordered by a man in robes somewhere in Louisiana to stay there for as long as it takes to figure out other tools our government can devise to deny human rights to those who make their way to the margins of our country, hope in their hearts.

So, we went down to witness an event that did not take place. But, it turns out, it is impossible when you go to such a place with open eyes, trained eyes, you might say after all the time we have spent there, to leave the way we arrived. Because while we were there, we saw numbers and words turned to pictures. And now I need to turn them back to words.

Those who follow the work of Witness know that we produce detailed reports of the so-called expulsion flights to the devastated land of Haiti, flights that have intensified under the Biden administration. It is a massive, cruel, racist, horror show. We can see that in the numbers. But what I saw, what I wish I could show you, is what it means to connect those numbers to the Haitian people and others I saw in the streets and shelters of Reynosa, a Mexican border city, a purgatory where they have gathered to survive in deadly danger of crime—rape, assault, kidnapping, extortion—forced to remain there in the hope that some human kindness and decency finds its way into the crevasses of US immigration policy.

And what stays with me since the sight of women, men and children gathered in clusters on cartel-controlled street corners in the rubble and ruin of poverty, under the hot sun, is the connection. If they try to cross, they may likely find themselves back in a Haiti that likewise threatens their survival. On those flights, making up those numbers we report on. And if they survive, and if they summon the kind of courage that an old man like me does not have, they will mount again a journey of years to stand at the gates of my country, asking again for the chance to live.

That turns numbers into tears.