7/12/20

By Josh Rubin

This group began when a few people, informed by experts in child welfare, assembled a pretty lonely protest at the gates of a child migrant prison in Tornillo, Texas. We were there to draw attention to the unnecessary confinement and consequent traumatization of children who were classed as unaccompanied, many of them separated from adult relatives as they came across the border, having fled violence and poverty in their own countries.

Witnessing continued at Homestead in Florida, on the edge of an Air Reserve base where we stood on stepladders and called out to and waved at children who we were told by those who had been inside were being confined in filthy quarters and sometimes held in solitary and sometimes fed drugs to keep them calm.

Then to the border, when MPP got underway, the program that turned people back at the border to wait for a legal process that would doom people to failure in their quest for asylum from untenable misery in their home countries. In some places, like Matamoros, across the narrow river from Brownsville, Texas, tent camps were established for these supplicants, waiting at the gates, esperando, which means both waiting and hoping.

We stood, we tried to be as noticeable as we could, again trying to draw the eyes of a preoccupied nation to the plight that we made sure filled our own eyes, and tore at our own hearts.

Covid sent us scurrying home, not without a separation trauma of our own, but told we must not visit those we had come to know, and realizing that we had certain obligations to ourselves and our families to stay healthy and alive.

Since we left, even the charade of the asylum procedure has ground to a halt, nearly immediate expulsion replacing the legal kabuki. And in the last few days we learned of a program to train vigilantes to go after people with strange accents and dark skin and take them down in the name of ICE, which has fully morphed into the secret police of a fascist regime.

So, perhaps you gather that things have gotten worse, trampling our small efforts under the hooves of the apocalyptic mounts, the landscape of the protest, the witness movement littered with battered spirits and a diaspora of tears.

I would like to acknowledge this failure, without guilt. I report all this because we have to know where it stands. We are witnesses, and must report what we see.