News & Commentary

Inside a Texas detention center, 3-year-old Sammy* was asleep next to his father, Ever Reyes-Mejia, on the ground with a tin foil emergency blanket when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told Ever that he needed to go see an immigration judge and fill out some paperwork. Ever asked whether he should leave his son asleep and was told that he would return shortly and there was no need to wake him.

Grace,* an indigenous woman from a small village in Guatemala, came to the United States seeking protection from beatings, sexual assault, and death threats. Grace made the long and treacherous journey from Central America, arriving at the border in June. She was deeply traumatized, having been raped, beaten, and threatened with death for more than two decades at the hands of her abusive partner, a non-indigenous man, who frequently disparaged and mocked her for being indigenous and unable to read and write.

Good things don’t always come to those who wait. 

Over the past week, a Facebook video went viral, showing an El Paso police officer drawing his gun on a group of Latino kids outside a community center and handcuffing the person taking the video. The video has drawn outrage — and rightly so — as an illustration of the urgent need for robust police policies and training emphasizing de-escalation and how to interact with youth.

On Tuesday, in response to the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging family separation, a federal court ordered the reunification of thousands of families torn apart by the Trump administration. The decision was a rare victory for civil rights, immigrants’ rights, and common human decency in the age of Trump.

In the federal courthouse in Brownsville, in the space of 75 minutes, 63 people were read their charges, asked to plead guilty or not guilty, and sentenced. Handcuffed and chained at the waist, they had to stoop to raise their right hands.

Like many on the border (and elsewhere), I’ve been working day and night to fight President Trump's monstrous and morally irredeemable family separation policy. But in spite of the now daily injustices wrought by the Trump administration, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security, somehow I feel so energized—overwhelmed, but energized. Finally, we are not alone, and we feel everyone’s energy bent towards ending this crisis.

It may seem odd to celebrate a day that recalls the fact that enslaved Africans in Texas were among the last to know they were freed, when General Gordon Granger issued the order in Galveston two years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. But for myself, Juneteenth invokes memories of church, community and family celebrations of everything good about living in brown skin.

66 children a day ripped away from their parents, who beg officials to tell them where their kids are. Children as young as 53 weeks or 18 months old. This isn’t a dystopic TV show: it’s Attorney General Sessions’ “zero-tolerance” prosecution atrocity for immigrant parents and kids who cross the border together. And prosecution numbers have just begun to be ramped up: the thousands of families affected are just a start for this evil scheme (658 children were separated from May 6 to 19, which included only ten court days).