“These are all our children, and we shall either profit by or pay for whatever they become” – James Baldwin

I think I know what James Baldwin meant when he said this, but even a genius of his imagination could not have conceived that America would one day lock children in nightmarish detention facilities run by CoreCivic, a publicly traded detention company that has won contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the past year, even though the children had neither committed nor even been accused of a crime. But what James Baldwin could not conceive, Pro Publica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power and has won eight Pulitzer Prizes, was able to bear witness to and report by going inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. (Thanks to dear friend and Share Our Strength supporter Patty Larson for bringing to our attention one of the first detailed accounts by someone who has visited and talked extensively to many of the kids. https://tinyurl.com/274awdfx )

The children being detained there, to avoid family separations, are not supposed to be there more than 20 days. Many as young as 12 or 14 have been there between 30-60 days. They miss their schools, teachers, family and friends. You can imagine the nightmare even without reading the article: bad food, worse medical care, terrible sanitation, fear and uncertainty, the trauma of separation. The New York Times today documents the unsafe conditions, inadequate medical treatments, etc. https://tinyurl.com/2nsnve7k (Photo credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times)

But Pro Publico lets the kids speak for themselves. Thirteen-year-old Gustavo Santiago said “I have friends, school, and family here in the United States. To this day, I don’t know what we did wrong to be detained… I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”

We all know by now that it does little good to decry such events. But it does great good to not forget, to act, organize, donate in support of legal actions - as I just did to both The Young Center For Immigrant Children’s Rights (https://www.theyoungcenter.org/) and RAICES, formerly Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (https://raicestexas.org/) - to strengthen political will, even to share information such as this so that others are moved to act as well.

If as Dr. King said, the arc of a moral universe bends toward justice, then history promises a reckoning for the injustices of the present. Every time one of us shows up and speaks out that reckoning draws closer, infinitesimally at first, inevitably at last.