This one's going to be tough for me.
OK, so I did get to work briefly with an immigration lawyer,
and unfortunately that was just looking
at a lot of cases and documents.
That's sort of what's really frustrating about this crisis
is that it's just a lot of documents,
it's a lot of bureaucracy, and there's
just-- there are no faces.
But I was interested in representing at least what
the documents look like.
This is not a document I handled as part of the practice.
Those are confidential.
This was released when they couldn't locate the parents,
and this is what it looks like.
Just a wall of data, dehumanized.
"Parole, denial, reason."
In America, the land is the ghost of the land.
In America, the land is the land of the ghost.
In America, the land of the ghost in the land.
In America, the land is the ghost.
In America, the ghost is the land.
In America, the land of the, is the ghost land,
the land is the land of the ghost, is the land,
is the ghost, is the--
The border becomes a site of spatial-temporal inequality,
where first world nations extract time and lifespans
from the nations south of the US-Mexico border.
The line itself manufactures temporal-social-spatial
inequality and corrupts the archive,
creating slippages of time that manifest as those who remember
from those who don't.
Those who belong to the past and those who belong to the future,
dividing languages, histories, families, futures.
Western temporal-spatial domination
thrives on forgetting and displacement.
Migration is an act inextricably bound to childhood.
The wolf womb, the open portal, the time wound,
the dark pines shining back eyes, the shine back,
the crying woman, the slap from a man,
the slap back, the hole in the wall, the fist in the girl,
the half moon split between nations,
the obliterated nation, the cord in the bedroom,
the milky flame, the leaf of cloth around the child,
the found secret, the way down.
The migrant child is the figure that
motivates the abject cruelty of white supremacist violence.
Children represent the future, and migrant children
are the embodiment of what drives white racial anxiety.
A future in which whites are outnumbered and replaced
by non-white migrants and their children.
The child in the image is no longer a human being,
but a debate, a symbol flattened by rhetoric.
Her grief and terror on loop, dimming before our very eyes.