7/25/20

By Josh Rubin

UPDATE: They are still at that damn Hampton Inn in McAllen. Can anyone follow them?

Some thoughts this morning.

The Hilton chain backed down and will no longer allow themselves to be used as a prison. We need not wonder that greed, and a little desperation in these hard times for hotels, led them down this hellish path in the first place. And we need not wonder that those same motivations led them to disown the practice after the heroic actions of the Texas Civil Rights Project uncovered this, and allowed us all to spread the outrage all over social media and television.

But, as in the case of Tornillo and Homestead, where pressure closed their gates, we have to wonder where the children are now. We make a spectacle of these places, we expose them, and, regrettably, we have no evidence that we have slowed them down. Only that they have moved it out of our sight.

That is why it is heartening to hear of the ACLU and the Texas Civil Rights Project partnering to sue over the clearly illegal practice of summary expulsion. While I can’t bring myself to rely on laws that exist to enforce the borders that protect our wealth and privilege, I am pleased that the virtuous manipulators of those laws are using every weapon they have to interfere with those institutions of persecution.

And now it’s a hurricane that is bearing down on the fragile camp on the edge of the Rio Bravo, mere miles from the motel rooms now evacuated by the ICE toadies that roughed up the lawyers who tried to get into them to help those prisoners. I am not a person of faith, but many of the people within the pup-tented fenced perimeter on the muddy banks of Matamoros are. Today, I hope they are right.