It is tempting to imagine that we are living in end times. Those of us who are older and confined to quarters as the pandemic spikes might conflate our own fates with the fate of the world. The dead end in front of me could indeed be for me alone, or it might be for everyone. Those who speak of end times look for signs, and there are signs everywhere. Fires burning out of control, great storms, the pandemic itself. For me, the disappointments with the eruptions of age, flareups in body and mind, are signs as well.

Scorched earth.

During these days, days that we hope will lead to end of what I think could properly be called a reign of terror, we will see—indeed we are seeing—an angry regime doing its very best to hurt the country, the people of our country, and with specific vengeance reserved for people of color, all people who stand in the way of the imperium that was to last a thousand years. It is the imperium of greed, and its weapons, inequality and racism and exploitation, will be deployed with a resentful fervor in these days ahead.

A MELANGE OF EMOTIONS

Over the past few days Witness at the Border was humbled to work with over 100 amazing advocates to try to stop an Omni International ICE Air deportation flight to Africa. Despite the efforts of this tireless group and some Members of Congress (below), 60 Cameroonians were sent back to a country in the middle of a civil war. 28 Congolese were also deported on this plane to a country extremely ill-equipped to deal with the risk of COVID exportation. We failed to move ICE to a humanitarian place. We may have failed to save some lives.

WHY WE WITNESS – THE MACHINE

To be sure the past month or so has been filled with horrendous events including unaccompanied children held in hotels by transportation specialists, despicable medical conditions and encounters at Irwin Detention Center, detainee deaths reaching an all-time annual high, and ICE Air activity at record in-pandemic levels, just to name a few.

“False Profit,” painting by Mear One

It’s cool this morning here in Brooklyn, and there is a breeze. Breezes are a good thing, because they disperse and dilute the particles that carry Covid. To the south of the neighborhood I live in, schools are being closed. It appears the long-predicted fall surge of the deadly virus has begun.

Everything you NEED to know about America's most troubled law enforcement agency, with Jenn Budd.

When those we are against behave as horribly as those we now face, knowing what we are against is easy. We are against racism and xenophobia, and we are against a terrorist government that encourages terrorism by paramilitary groups and more official arms of terror like ICE and CBP, whose persecution of the poor and brown and black make them easy to hate.

Covid on the rise in our country, and likely in Mexico, too. The hurricane season has not ended, and along the banks of that fortified river that defends the unjust portion of the world’s wealth against the poor and hungry, people who have seen all of the seasons through wait to see what an empire does in what appears to be decline and fall.

We do some mental maneuvering to keep our balance. It is not easy to have perspective on the times we are now living through. No one I know was alive during the flu pandemic or the Black Plague. Nobody to advise us how to emotionally navigate these waters. And for those of us, many in this group, we have had our eyes on the borders that defend the unequal share of the world’s wealth, and have seen for ourselves the eyes of those who wait on the other side, or in camps that imprison, eyes that haunt us even when ours close for the night, at the end of long days of bombardment with the horror of the present.

How do we think about the revelation that there are women in an ICE prison saying that they were subjected to surgeries that will prevent them from having children?

Some people have told me that I should be measured and cautious in my reaction to this. That an investigation has not happened. But doesn’t that ignore lessons we should have learned by now? Women have said these things. To the brave nurse who came forward and from whom we learned about this. Now, to lawyers who represent them. To volunteers who have heard them.

This morning many of us are trying to come to grips with the news out of an ICE prison for migrants in southern Georgia. A nurse working there seems to have run afoul of the privately run prison’s administration over health practices. She tells of neglect and cruelty in the handling of the COVID-19 scourge. This part leaves us sad but unsurprised.

It’s been a hard week

We have learned that nearly nine thousand children were sent out of the country, expelled summarily, sent to the countries they fled. We have heard about ICE Air, that miserable operation that carries the bodies—boxcars in the sky—reminding us of yet another episode of genocide, by transporting COVID to a Virginia prison, infecting hundreds.

In about two weeks’ time, seven bodies have turned up floating on the river known on the south bank as the Río Bravo and on the north bank as the Río Grande.

The deaths were not accidental.

Despair.

Bodies turn up on the Matamoros banks. The worst leader since Hitler—I say that without hesitation—gins up a frenzy of hatred to distract us from the sea change in our lives brought on by his failure to respect a scourge of nature and the science that would have saved so many of us. And his minions work furiously to expel the tired and poor across the border to their wretched fates.

Word comes to us, from the edge of that river, of the death of Edwin Rodrigo Castro de la Parra. He leaves a family behind on those banks. We are told he may have plunged into the river to save someone whose desperation had pushed them over that edge, someone who saw hope on the other side and lost all hope behind.

A few things to think about.

Things are getting worse. Our country is expelling people, denying them even the farce of a legal proceeding. It is justified by the claim that foreigners, at least the ones that come to our southern border, carry the disease that we have in higher numbers than almost any other country.

Witnessing the atrocity of the Homestead detention center, summer 2019

As Hurricane Hanna fed the swelling Río Bravo, as its banks overflowed into the lives of the Matamoros encampment of refugees, and as now swarms of mosquitos, zancudos as they are known, bring still more misery and perhaps illness, we cannot help but reflect on the predicament just faced and still faced by these friends of ours forced to perch precariously on the very edge of Northern Mexico, eyes toward the United States.

COALITION DEMANDS RELEASE OF TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DOCUMENTS REGARDING THE DETENTION OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.

Latest update: Good news. Weather service reduces its estimated crest by 1.5 feet. Should begin subsiding soon.

Update: Weather Service has revised downward its prediction of a crest. We are only an inch or two from it, now. Soon the waters will begin to recede.

Photo by Josué Rolando Cornejo Sabillon