7/9/21

By Josh Rubin

I cannot start at the beginning. It goes back too far, to the reasons people leave their homes, the things that drive them from their homes. Then they reach the border, where policies intensify their desperation. Policies like racist expulsion, and separation driven by cultural self-righteousness.

The result is children without adults who are judged to have committed a crime. Is the crime migration itself? Is the crime being alone? Unaccompanied?

Whatever the crime, there is wide agreement that imprisonment is the appropriate response. First in the cold cells of border prisons, then into the massive tents and bureaucracy of a system of holding facilities. You will hear all sorts of things about these places. I will tell you things, whistleblowers will terrify you with their testimony. But without any of that, you can figure out, all by yourself, they they are prisons. If a child tries to flee, they will catch that child. They won’t let that child go.

Under Trump, secured camps for these children were opened. In places like Tornillo. Like Homestead. And during those years, the courts, weakly, spoke up for the children held inside. Judges made rules. That they must have school. Inspectors went in, and reports of the pain and the failures emerged. After a while, politicians showed up, and one by one, these temporary camps succumbed to pressure, shamed by their failures. By the stories of misery, of abuse, of disgraceful businesses reaping disgraceful profits from the imprisonment of children.

Now, under cover of secrecy, this time with no inspections, and courts not bothering to look, we have camps that do not even have rules to break. No licenses, no inspections, no investigations, no rulings from the courts, no classes. Just prison camps, bunks lined inside tents inside fences, inside forts. And inside them, children, lying in parallel like cordwood in beds, in filth, fed bad food, infested. Frightened. In the darkness, rubbing breaks into their skin so blood forms droplets that tell the depths of their despair. Reports of children on suicide watch.

And those reports that get out, workers who cannot in good conscience keep quiet about what they see. And the government responds with a promise of a cadre of mental health professionals, who I hope studied their art enough to know what the medicine is that these children need as they lie unloved, and untouched. They need the embrace of their families. Who already live in this country. Who are waiting for them. They need out.

But where are those voices that were raised in years past? Silent. They leave us to raise our own thin voices against the wind outside the fences of silence, hearing in our hearts through the abysmal secrecy the pain that we share with these pawns of a carceral game, played as if they had no souls by politicians that don’t listen, and don’t hear.

Simply this. Fort Bliss is no place for children. Prisons are no place for children.

Listen…