The Tragedy of Artesia by Megan Jordi
I had the pleasure of volunteering at Artesia with Megan Jordi. Megan is a co-founder of the only legal services non-profit in New Mexico that is “dedicated to preventing separation of families due to deportation.” It’s called the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center. Here are her reflections on the week spent at Artesia.
-KitJ
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Driving away from Artesia last night, my eyes unexpectedly filled with tears and I cried chest-heaving sobs. After a week of representing detained women and children refugees in immigration court bond hearings, the stress of the week, the lack of sleep, and the weight of the tragedy of Artesia hit me. I was reminded of my body’s same reaction almost 10 years ago when I drove away for the last time from the unaccompanied minor detention center in South Texas where I had been working as a volunteer paralegal. That was the experience that got me into this work in the first place. But this time it was supposed to be different. This time I was a lawyer. This time I knew the larger contexts of things and the nuanced political climate that manipulates humanitarian crises into fodder for politicians’ games. Logically, I understood opposing counsel’s arguments in court, even if I disagreed with them. But if I understood how things worked now, why was I feeling such raw emotion all over again?
The tragedy of Artesia is not only its inhumanity. The stark brown landscape, makeshift trailers, chain link fences with barbed wire, and the uniformed officers made to look tough with muscles and guns certainly do nothing to soften the harsh reality of detention. But what hit me at the end of this week was that the real tragedy of Artesia is in its suppressed humanity. Artesia is a place no one wants to be. The town smells like gas from the local oil refinery, the most popular restaurant at night is the Taco Bell-KFC combo establishment on Main Street, and now it’s known as the place where hundreds of traumatized Central American and Mexican women and children are confined in the bastardized name of national security. As one lawyer put it, “Everyone cries in Artesia.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers roam the grounds of the detention center in khakis and sunglasses, escorting detainees and lawyers from trailer to trailer. It’s obvious who’s in charge when even lawyers have to have an escort to go to the bathroom. I didn’t know any of the officers’ names at the beginning of the week. In my mind, they were carrying out a job with which I fundamentally disagreed. They were the enemy. But as the days passed, my perspective slowly changed. We began to seem like bad actors in a B-list movie, trying to play roles that didn’t come naturally. I began noticing the way the officers smiled and greeted the detainees, the way they joked in bad Spanish with the children, and their countless attempts to entertain toddlers with paper airplanes, toys, and singing along to Pixar movies in Spanish. You could see which children had endeared themselves to certain officers. “That one’s the best,” an officer said to me, pointing at a 5-year old indigenous Guatemalan boy, who had entertained himself for an hour transporting wads of paper from his stash to where the officer sat. The officer would accept the paper wads, saying, “Grah-si-us,” not realizing the child only spoke Quiché. But that wasn’t the point.
The point is that Artesia resurrects a deeply rooted humanity in each person who ends up there, causing everyone to feel the most basic human instincts on an emotional level. ICE officers had been sent from all over the country—Boston, LA, Miami, among others—to run this facility in the middle of the desert, incentivized by increased pay and the promise that their stint would be temporary. Three lawyers from across the nation—one law professor, one firm attorney, and myself, a non-profit lawyer—all came armed with a sense of duty and social justice, statutes in hand, ready to fight. We were all soldiers prepared for battle with one another. What happened was just the opposite. We all fell victim to our most basic human emotions that happen when people with very different experiences come together in a confined space under tragic circumstances. The intense intimacy we began to experience with one another was jarring to our brainwashed hearts and minds that had been trained to see each other as less-than-human. This was not what we had been told to feel. This was not what Washington had in mind. Like the unnatural feeling soldiers must feel when sent to kill people they have never met, we—the refugees, the lawyers and the ICE officers— felt as though we had all become pawns in Washington’s games.
The movie “Crash,” says in its opening lines, “I think we miss…touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” The women’s stories of survival against the odds, the horror of watching sick children get sicker from the trauma of confinement, and my disbelief at how government attorneys via video monitor could argue that these women and children should be kept in detention, will all stay with me. But the experiences that really changed me were the ones where humanity was allowed to surface despite the inhuman protocols we were supposed to follow—the ones that highlighted the interconnectedness of all of us. I remember the Honduran woman who wailed, “God is Great!”, her hands uplifted, while ICE officers smiled and congratulated her on her release on bond; the little Guatemalan boy who, mimicking his mother’s emotional response to being granted bond, ran to me and threw his arms around my legs; the ICE officer who brought me coffee in my 12th hour of work when he could see I was flailing; the judge who didn’t make a woman stand to be sworn in because she was holding her sleeping, sick child in her arms; the little boy who drew me a picture of his house in El Salvador with rivers and animals and rainbows while his mother testified about her brutal rape in that very house in the next room; and the ICE officer who said everything I was feeling: “These are not the people we should be detaining. All of us on the ground know that. But nobody listens to us.”
What would our world look like if we were allowed to feel? Who would we be if we were allowed to connect with those most different from us? What if those on the ground who had contact with these refugees had a say about how they should be treated and the policies that directly affected them?
After over 80 hours of work by each lawyer and over 100 hearings altogether, more than 50 women and their children were released on bond to continue their fight for asylum in the United States. I do not know how many of them will be successful in the end and how many of them will be ordered removed back to their countries. What I do know is that humans are resilient, especially when they are shown a little compassion along the way. And if given the chance to connect with one another, we will always naturally lean towards compassion over disdain, understanding over quick judgment, and love over hate.