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June 20 - June 21, 2020
Children chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them.
soon as a child is in the custody of Border Patrol officials, he or she is placed in a detention center, commonly known as the hielera, or the “icebox.” The icebox derives its name from the fact that the children in it are under ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody. The name also points out the fact that the detention centers along the border are a kind of enormous refrigerator for people, constantly blasted with gelid air as if to ensure that the foreign meat doesn’t go bad too quickly—naturally, it must be harboring all sorts of deadly germs.
Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: 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.
eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way.
nothing has actually been done about it.
And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable.
Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.
That is how chance works, at least for those of us who do not
have the certainty of grander schemes.
The priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children.
The subtext of this is somewhat cynical and the terms of the barter a little unequal: We’ll give you a visa for the “substantial mental and physical abuse” that you may have suffered as a result of a crime committed against you . . . but. Before we do, you have to agree to assisting law enforcement and government officials in the investigation and prosecution of the crime.
The states with the highest number of children released to sponsors since the crisis was declared are Texas (over 10,000 children), California (almost 9,000 children), and New York (over 8,000 children).
It is very difficult to be granted asylum because it is not enough that these children have suffered unspeakable harm, that they will continue to fall victim to the systematic and targeted violence of criminal groups.
A handful of nonprofit organizations are responsible for all the work being done to help undocumented child migrants, and what they have accomplished is impressive.
Later, his screening, like many others, is filed and sent away to a lawyer: a snapshot of a life that will wait in the dark until maybe someone finds it and decides to make it a case.
Telling stories doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t reassemble broken lives. But perhaps it is a way of understanding the unthinkable. If a story haunts us, we keep telling it to ourselves, replaying it in silence while we shower, while we walk alone down streets, or in our moments of insomnia.
Why did you come to the United States? we ask. They might ask a similar question: Why did we risk our lives to come to this country? Why did they come when, as if in some circular nightmare, they arrive at new schools, in their new neighborhoods, and find there the very things they were running from?
