More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpreter an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail.
It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.
The third and fourth questions on the intake questionnaire are ones that our children, too, ask many times, though in their own words: “With whom did you travel to this country?”
The fifth and sixth questions are: “What countries did you pass through?” and “How did you travel here?”
No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.
Rapes: eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.
The priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children.
