dannyman.toldme.com

From Our Undocumented Workers

Excerpts from some brunch-time reading, penned by Cincinnatus Hibbard, via Metro Silicon Valley, transcribed by hand from the print edition:

“How often do you think about ICE?” I asked “Juan,” the gruff old ranch hand. He paused, reckoning, and replied, “Maybe 50 times a day.” That shocked me–was he that frightened? He had been stoical, like a rock, even when he had told me that he had not seen his wife or his children living in Mexico for 23 years. There were grandchildren now–grandchildren he had never held. His eyes were distant. Perhaps, looking inward, he was trying to see them now.

“Why don’t you go back to see them?” I asked, deeply moved. “I cannot re-cross the border,” he said. There is no work back home. My family, they need me here–working.”

We sat at a picnic table under a tree beside a field, where undocumented farmworkers volunteered after their work shifts, farming organic vegetables for the local food bank. Despite paying local and federal taxes, and despite their poverty, undocumented immigrants are inelegible for Calfresh foodstamps–as well as Medicaid medical insurance, disability insurance (though they work some of the most dangerous jobs) and Social Security retirement checks. They might be keeping those safety net programs solvent for us.

The winter crops were in. The workers were tending two types of onion, garlic, two kinds of cabbage, Brussels sprouts, jicama–and strawberries for the small children to pick. “Why do you work here, after working so hard in the vineyard all day?” I asked “Ernesto.”

“Because I know hunger,” he said. “I know what it is like …”

. . .

This is terror.

“Lupe” talked about a pain she had in her pelvis last summer. For months, the pain grew and grew intolerable, and still she told no one–she knew her friends would try to make her go to the emergency room–but the hospital wasn’t safe from ICE. What was this pain stabbing up like knives from her pelvis to her navel–“Was it cancer?” she wondered.

Finally, she admitted it–there was no hiding it; she would pause in her farm work as she breathed through the unbearable pain, swooning. Her friends and family were begging her to go, but she wouldn’t go–she would be taken by ICE. What would happen to her children then? Finally, she was taken in a faint for emergency surgery, by friends with H2-A papers.

This is terror.

. . .

“Sophia” fears for her teenage daughter, “Ana,” who was already given to panic-attacks. Like many Latino youth with undocumented friends and relatives, her social media algorithm is filled with shaky cam POV shots of raids and arrests at homes and school drop-off, or ICE contingents parading in full battle regalia down residential streets, guns pointed, or smuggled videos of immigrants deported to war zones (like South Sudan) or hell-on-earth prisons (like El Salvador’s CECOT prison.)

. . .

This shift to deportation work has caused slow-downs, stoppages, and/or unraveling of cases against “high level” child sexual predators, sex traffickers, smugglers, scammers, international criminals, embargo evaders and international terrorists. As the deportation arrests surge, the true bad guys are getting away.

I re-typed this stuff from the print edition because 1) I prefer reading print to begin with 2) my modest manual effort in transcribing the words means more to me and my soul than simply copying-and-pasting the same quickly-forgotten text around the Internet. I hope that in some small way, these words find meaning for you.