In 2019, six students and I spent a week at the South Texas Family Residential Center – a remote, for-profit private facility and the country’s largest immigrant detention center. We worked with women and children seeking asylum from unimaginable violence.
We heard stories of rape, kidnapping and mutilation, including against children; gang extortion, brutal gender-based violence, police complicity and murder. We heard how hard it is to escape the gang once in their sights – how they mark young teens to do their bidding, and how resistance makes you a target. Mothers who had lost children could barely speak about those experiences.
But it was a flaying built into the unforgiving machinery of immigration law.
I was struck by the connections we forged with those families over shared values of community, love and even humor. Their resilience and patience were extraordinary. People with a powerful moral compass who refuse to align with evil, even under threat – who give up everything for family – they are the parents I aspire to be. Our case successes were beautifully poignant.
After several 15-hour days confronting these women’s personal horrors, one of my students unraveled. She had recently finished working with a woman in a particularly challenging case.
“I don’t know …” she trailed off.
“I don’t know if I did enough. What if I didn’t do enough for her?” Her hands shook as tears came. “What if I failed her? She was so scared … she may die … What if it wasn’t enough?”
I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t.
And that’s just the problem, isn’t it? We can never do enough. The weight of that young mother’s fate haunted my student for the rest of our time in Texas.
In a different facility, I spoke with a gentle, quiet man and his 9-year-old daughter who came to the U.S. to escape being killed for refusing to obey the gang.
“You are the only person I’ve met since I’ve been in this country who has treated me like a human being,” he said.
He showed me a gunshot scar, explaining what was in store for them if they were sent back. On the eve of their deportation, while we spoke of their being hunted and murdered, his little girl drew a happy family in front of a cozy home, using a pen and highlighter on scrap paper – the only supplies we had. She gifted me her drawing, before being ushered back to her cage by a man with a gun.
I couldn’t stop their deportation. I still have her drawing. I don’t know if she is still alive.
In that moment, and many since, I felt my student’s distress. It came again when I learned of the administration’s effort to end the legal protections that allowed me to speak with that 9-year-old about her confinement at all: the decades-old Flores Settlement, which requires safe and sanitary conditions when the government chooses to confine children. These safeguards have helped prevent – and expose – the worst government treatment and neglect of the children it detains.
Even with important wins, the truth that our work often falls short – especially against the vast, dehumanizing machinery of power – is crushing. Whatever we do is a single droplet in a massive, vicious tide. It feels impossible.
This system’s cruelty is clear in policies that advance degradation over dignity. But it’s a reflection of political choices made over time, which we have the power to change.
Here’s what I believe still matters.
It’s showing up, even when the odds get steeper and the losses greater.
It’s advocating for compassionate public policy, even though they currently seem at odds.
It’s supporting those who devote themselves – often at great personal cost – to work for something better.
And it’s people like the volunteers at Springfield Immigrant Advocacy Network, who keep pushing forward – case by case, policy by policy, standing alongside those impacted and insisting on their humanity and worth. They and others like them help build a more just society.
In the darkest times of my own life – during the sorts of grief and failure that no one can fix – it still meant something to have someone sit with me in the struggle. So I hope that if all else failed – when my legal efforts were not enough to save a family – I was at least able to be that person for them. The one in their corner. If it didn’t stop the tide, perhaps they breathed just a little easier for it.
Sometimes that has to be enough.
Poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”
If you haven’t yet figured out your role, reach out – find your people and your strength. No act is too small. Let us reconstitute the world.
Deborah Anthony is a board member of the Springfield Immigrant Advocacy Network.
