America’s Immigration Reckoning Has Arrived
In the summer of 2014, I joined a group of journalists in an organized visit to a Border Patrol warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. My daughter had just turned 5 the day before. As I walked out the door, I remember using my hands to smooth out the wrinkles on her school uniform as tenderly as if I were waking her up from sleep. I remember writing my daily note to her in our shared language—Eu te amo—with an extra dose of guilt; leaving her in her father’s care was always safe and convenient, but never easy.
That goodbye would have hurt so much more if I knew what I was about to witness. With concrete floors and fluorescent lights that stayed on day and night, the 120,000-square-foot warehouse was no place for children. And yet there they were, hundreds of them, lying close together under space blankets, in makeshift holding pens marked off by mesh-wire fences more than eight feet tall. In the article I wrote about the visit, I noted the contrasting reactions between children of different ages: While a teen cried, her face buried in a soiled stuffed lamb, a toddler smiled as she held a Border Patrol agent by the hand. The teen telegraphed awareness of the predicament the caged children were in. The toddler, oblivion.
Throughout the spring of 2014, while covering the Southwest as Phoenix bureau chief for , I had closely followed the evolving in apprehensions of unaccompanied minors over the previous year—about 69,000 children caught while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone.
