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By Paula Arno Martinez
Heading home today.
I’ve always conceptually understood what my asylum clients have gone through to get to safety in the United States but I was not prepared to see it first hand. It broke my heart to see people who were so full of hope, and, almost excited to be tortured by the US Government (hieleras, family separation, detention). We tried as best we could to explain the reality of situation they were heading into, but for them that was better than the situation they left behind. It shook me because I know that our messed up system will provide protection to very few of the folks I met because of BS asylum laws and an administration that continues to erode the few good bits we had.
Nobody leaves their home unless they have to. I wish people could understand that. If I were in some of those same situations, I want to believe that I would fight like hell to give my children a chance to survive. I want to believe that I would do the same. But I don’t know that I have that kind of courage. I met people from all over the world in Tijuana - Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Cameroon, and Ghana.
I am forever changed by this experience and am deeply honored by the level of trust folks had in me to tell me their life stories and journeys. The level of trust that parents had in me to help them strip their child down in the middle of a freaking plaza to make sure that they had their warmest layer of clothing next to their skin because CBP was about to take away everything except for the layer of clothing closest to their skin and stick them in a freezing cold holding cell, with nowhere to sleep, for 3-10 days.
Al Otro
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