7/2/26

Joshua Rubin writes TALES FROM THE SPEEDWAY SLAMMER

Long days under the punishing sun, doing our best to stay sunscreened and hydrated, and I wonder—and who wouldn’t wonder—what I am doing across a road from busy gas station on the edge of the highway, oppressed by the summer’s first heat wave, watching cars going in and out of a long driveway that leads to an unobstructed view of the massive, low relief slab of concrete with few windows, the place that is called the Miami Correctional Facility that has recently gained a second identifier as an ICE detention facility. I watch, looking for opportunities to learn details that must be sensed remotely, as well as chances to encourage prison staff to question what they are doing, and confronting those driving in and out, filling their tanks, with our call to action, plastered on the sidewall of our little canopy, set up for shade, to close this place that has set aside and added onto its horrors half of its maximum security facility, dedicating it to holding the victims of ICE raids until such time as some calculus says it's deportation time, or transfer time, or even, when the bureaucracy finds it convenient, a walk to the gate to be released into the middle of Nowhere Indiana, where family members have little chance to find them, help them, or to return to lives shattered by the cruelty that as we say, because it surely seems to be true, is the point. Punishing ends to stories that might more easily have happier endings, or at least less tragic.

And don’t I wish that the stress this puts me under could make some small dent in the concrete walls, that it could crack them, and at the end of one of these long hot days, as a reward for subjecting myself and other kindred protesters to long hours of distress under that hot sun, the walls would crumble, and out would walk the unjustly imprisoned, pouring out, joy trickling back into their hearts, rejoining those they love and who love them. Ah, what a fantasy!

Too much sun.