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1/I returned from Tijuana on Tuesday. Yesterday the sadness hit me. The thing about experiencing human despair, generosity, weakness, beauty, cruelty, hope, and courage all tangled up together in almost every interaction for a week is that I find it hard to put it all into words. 
2/One interaction that I keep thinking about lasted less than a minute: on one of the days we were providing last minute advice and encouragement to the asylum seekers, who were about to go present themselves to CBP, I talked to a woman, who was traveling with her three sons.
3/ The eldest of the three- 7 or 8 years old - had a nasty, hacking cough. We answered some of the mom's questions , and then I grabbed one of the cough drops I had in my bag and handed it to her, to give to her coughing son. And then we moved on to talking to the next family.
4/For the past few days I have found myself thinking about the boy with the cough, wondering if he got sicker in the “hieleras,” the freezing cold holding cells where CBP detains recently arrived migrants for days.
5/Does he wonder why, after his mom brought him all the way to the country where she had told him he would be safe, he is locked in a freezing cold cell, fed disgusting food, watching his mother being humiliated by guards, who despise her solely because of what she stands for?
6/I wonder if he will be one of the “lucky” ones, who is eventually released with his family so that they can fight their asylum case in a system of laws that becomes more and more hostile to their interests by the day, or whether they will be deported straight from detention.
7/So yesterday I cried for the little boy with the cough- and for all the others we met. And I wished that they may all be safe and find comfort soon, knowing very well that so many of them won’t.
8/Our government is doing this- in our names. Please don’t be silent. Do what you can to turn this all around.
