A confirmed case of COVID in Matamoros encampment. Two others in isolation awaiting results. Let’s hope, and pray if you do, for containment.

Expulsion and deportation. Expulsion is the mechanism by which all asylum is denied. No hearing. No chance to plead for mercy. Even children. Thousands. Sometimes within an hour you are back on the other side of the border. Sometimes they put you on a plane. Goodbye.

Still hiding from the pandemic, we watch deportation flights, venture timidly out to the streets, some of us, to join in the uprising against systemic racism. My weather app still sounds alerts every time there are storms encroaching on Brownsville, Texas, a few steps across the bridge over the bloody Rio Grande, on the opposite bank, where those storms pour rain onto the clay-rich mud and flood the tents of the people we left behind, in a ragged, fenced camp in Matamoros, Mexico.

On the subject of the comments period open for response to newly proposed asylum rules...

Here is my comment. It starts further back, it steps us away from the framework we are being asked to work with. My comment asks: by what right do we tell people that the river makes a line that they cannot cross on their journey to a better life. By what just principle do we defend this line with massive military might?

Good lawyers, lawyers who are good people, fight the battle on the ground for more just treatment of supplicants who come to our borders and line up on the bridges over the rivers polluted with the bodies of the defeated. And there is special language that goes with the job, and that language forgivably hardens into the structure of the battle lines.

The power of bearing witness.

It may seem self-evident, but in the last days we have seen the seismic power of bearing witness. We have not seen the witness who kept her cell phone camera pointed at a man slowly dying under the pressure of oppression, the brutal poetry of watching a man stop breathing, his heart stopping, his voice stilled.

Life is a long journey. And the struggle, la lucha, is long. The trail taken by those who flee their devastated homes is long, and may not end anytime soon. The heavy slog from captivity to slavery to justice is long, and never over, it seems.

Witness at the Border Statement for the “Examining Best Practices for Incarceration and Detention During COVID-19” Hearing, Committee on the Judiciary, 6/2/20

Borders establish a line of force that prevent those with a righteous claim on the bounty of the earth from getting it away from those who hoard that bounty. Borders may be lines along rivers guarded by automatic weapons and gates, and they may be lines more deceptively enforced, like the ones that reach along the chains of slavery to the present, link after link weighing down a people.

This social media space is not a place any of us come to enjoy ourselves. For many of us, it is a painful experience. Especially painful now, I think.

There is no good news. There is nothing to inspire anything but despair. And for those of us who are activists, who were able at one time to turn our feelings of outrage and sympathy into vigils and sign making and loud, righteous cries, we are constrained by conditions that threaten our own survival. Many of us are old enough to be seriously worried about contracting a disease that could shorten our longish lives.

Memorial Day brings to us exhortations to exercise our memory, most commonly to remember those who died in wars, more eclectically to refresh our minds with moral hazards of the past in the hopes of avoiding those dangers ever present. There is scolding in the air. Never again is now. And more scolding that takes those scolds to task for finding equivalences among various sectarian tragedies and others. We weigh these sorrows on scales of proprietary outrage, chatter that brings to mind disputations about angels, or perhaps devils in this case, pirouetting on heads of pins.

We notice when things change. And last week as we watched the flights of ICE Air, we noticed something different happening. New flights, from near the border, to Mexico City.

What are these flights? They are expulsions of Mexican nationals. Not deportations. A deportation requires a procedure that involves ICE custody. But these folks are never in ICE custody. They are just like the immediate expulsions at the border that are being carried out under the orders of the Centers for Disease Control that pretend that we are being invaded by carriers of the Covid virus. I say pretend because our government has been wanting to do this all along: to hell with all the legal pretense, just go back where you came from.

WitnessAtTheBorder.org is our web page, where we document the work we have been able to do while we shelter in place during the pandemic of the the Coronavirus. And what we have focused on is learning about the deportation flights of ICE Air.

ICE Air contracts with Classic Charters, which in turn has a contract with Swift Air, now known as IAero. This company runs what we call death flights. Why do we call them that?

Colorado Congressman Jason Crow, alarmed at the transfers he observed in and out of the ICE detention center in Aurora in the middle of the pandemic wrote, along with other Members of Congress, to ICE to request, among other things, that they halt transfers and that they parole and release all non- violent vulnerable detainees immediately and review all non-violent detainees for parole.

My subject is breathing. How to keep breathing, when the horror of what is happening leaves you in an exhale, and has you wondering if you can win the battle against despair that keeps you in the bottom of your breath, not knowing where the spirit will come from that will suck you back into the world, and suck the oxygen of the sad world back into your lungs.

Here, on this page, we do this: we watch what is happening at one of the margins of our world. A liminal region which, for me, etches in deep relief the worst of intentions of our social order, and its worst consequences. Looking at this is a choice I and others have made, and in our darkest moments, for me at least, it is a choice I regret, but that I cannot change.

I wish, sometimes, now especially, that I could offer some comfort. But since I have somehow gotten a job as a witness to the treatment of people who come to the borders of the country I live in, I cannot comfort anyone. Not myself or anyone else. Not today.

As we expected, ICE is moving prisoners this morning from Krome and Broward, in Florida, ruled life-threatening by a court, to another prison in Georgia, where the courts may not be watching. ICE Air, also known as Swift Air. They fly sports teams around, and carry the super-rich to ski resorts when not committing crimes against humanity.

To say that these are strange times is too weak a description, but there is little point in struggling for stronger terms; we are all living in it. I think we all owe ourselves some sympathy for our personal struggles. Some of us have had the virus brush closer to us than others, and some very close indeed. We are fragile creatures, and these tribulations remind us, or teach us, that.

We are witnesses to something that is too large for us to wrap our minds around. We are watching something sweep away the world we once knew. And what follows is not coming into focus. But more and more, it seems that the changes will be profound.

Still, there are many of us who are reluctant to acknowledge the sea change taking place. We pretend that the world we will live out the rest of our days in is still the one we lived in up until a couple of months ago. This is a human thing to do; the changes are dizzying, and we have not found our feet.