Or We Could Leave our Bank Card for a Stranger

A year ago, a family from my community was taken by ICE. Five children and their mother were told by unidentified officers that, for their safety, they were going to a hotel, then they were driven from Colorado Springs to Florence, Colorado, where they were put in a cold cell. In Florence, the family watched as a man of small stature was slammed to the ground by “four huge men,” and his hand was forced onto the fingerprint scanner he’d previously refused. The man was unable to walk normally when he stood. Around 2 a.m. this family was taken to an airport. According to the mother’s testimony, a dozen officers told them to go into the showers and hand over their clothes. When they reached their room in Texas, with its big interior windows for constant surveillance, they were shocked. “Are we in prison?” the middle daughter asked. “No,” the mother said. “We have done nothing wrong.” But that little girl was right. At Dilley Immigration Processing Center, in Dilley, Texas, the legal maximum length of stay, established by the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, is twenty days. This family, the youngest of whom, twins, were then four years old, stayed in a de facto for-profit prison where the lights were never turned off for 324 days.

The current administration tests us: Can a candidate for our country’s highest office mock the disabled? Shrug off five decades of accusations of sexual assault and rape, and three articles of impeachment? Use the office of the presidency to self-deal and profit? Bomb a school?

This family has been used for another test: punishing children for the crimes of their fathers. These children and their mother (now divorced from their father) learned of his grave wrongdoing like the world did: from the news. They were horrified. They have since repeatedly condemned the actions of their father and ex-husband. All of that is their harrowing story to tell, and they will tell it.

For now: a sunny aside.

When—after tremendous effort—it looked like this family might finally be released, our porch began to fill. Within twenty-four hours there were six new sets of pajamas, a small prayer rug and a Muslim prayer book, water bottles and jugs of water, pads and tampons, three car seats, two first aid kits, soft blankets, small toys, and the sort of food (fresh fruit in particular) that they had sorely missed while subsisting on a twenty-first-century variant of Dickensian gruel.

Money came in, mostly from people who have no excess of it.

A good man brought over his car, a car that he loves. He did not know who would be driving it fourteen hours to Texas when they were freed, then fourteen hours back, but here were the keys. Like an emblem of the sort of world we could live in, and the thickly woven communal trust that is counter to the surveillance state, he threw his bank card in the glovebox, too. Use it.

One day a large lasagna appeared in our fridge. This lasagna was made by someone I do not know, for people she does not know. A friend had let herself into our home with dinner for this family. Roses in a vase, another day. Then there were all the offers of help: I can order a CT scan; I can write a press release; here is our home and its garden, and now it is theirs.

Having lights on while you sleep amounts to torture, long term. The defense of that practice at Dilley is sight: the guards who hide their own faces, and work for a politicized police force that refuses signage on its buildings, must be allowed to see the detainees, always. Everyone is given a number. They may upload scans of any of our faces into dystopian databases like Mobile Fortify. At Dilley, they walk unannounced into rooms where families are. The mother of this family—a brilliant and gracious woman who suffered in an arranged marriage—could never speak to her children without a guard present. Upon leaving, in addition to regular ICE “check-ins,” she and her oldest daughter, like many others, have been made to wear bulky and shaming ankle monitors, a tracking apparatus that makes their postures of prayer impossible.

The surveillance state is meant to be like God: all seeing, all knowing. An essential third attribute—all loving—seems to have never been considered. What a shame, to have all that data, and no wisdom. All those proliferating eyes, and no sight. A few hours after this family arrived at their home in Colorado, they were re-detained by ICE, “kidnapped,” in the words of their attorney, in an extrajudicial action on a day when the courts were closed. The children are the “associates” of terrorists, says the Department of Homeland Security.

We could live that way, if you want to call it living: Accepting the lie that preschoolers are terrorists, that paranoia and surveillance lead to human flourishing, that brute force ensures safety. Or we could live like this: Preschoolers get to play. You trust me. I trust you. I’ll help.

By daylight, and lamplight, and the soft dark of evening, here is what I have seen with my own eyes: A five-year-old boy dips a lollipop into his pomegranate tea and talks about giraffes, their rough tongues, their love of lettuce; he licks off the lollipop, delighted by that sweetness, and dips it in again. His five-year-old twin is intent before a dollhouse, where should each figure go, and what might they say or do: she dreams. Their middle sister, a beauty, runs down a trail with a curly-haired dog, so glad to be in the wind and air and free. Her teenaged brother, who has an abundance of fellow-feeling, takes calls from imprisoned friends to encourage them; goes to see free friends for a movie or some basketball; makes the jokes that are helping to save his life. The oldest sister, who has had to be particularly brave, is working, still: on an essay, healthcare for her mother, EMT training, admission to college, piggyback rides for the littles when they are tired. She is unstoppable, a star.

The mother of this family is like your mother, if you were lucky enough to have a good one. She adores her children. She wants them whole and glad and well. I bring her a cake. She brings me a cake. “It is an honor,” I say to her, of getting to help. “It is an honor,” she says to me, of being in that harder position, helped.

Image Credit: Winslow Homer, “Boys in a Pasture” (1874)