The Limits of Activism

The stories break your heart. Maria, pregnant and due any day, taken away from the Swift plant in chains. The marks of the chains still visible on her pregnant stomach after her release. The terrified young woman, back at home, refuses to leave the house even for medical care for an infection, refuses to answer the telephone, to talk to people, to open her locked door. You can send money for food, or diapers for the new baby, but Maria will be gone soon. The choices for undocumented workers are bleak: flee into the shadows, hiding and working in the United States or return to a homeland and jobs that pay not nearly enough to feed and house a family. The Lopez family. Mother cries herself to sleep and wakes up, still crying. Her husband worked at Swift, supporting the family, and he is gone and no one can find him. No word, not even a phone call in five days. Was he deported? Will he call from Mexico? ICE will not say. The rent is due at the end of the month, and there is no money. And who will buy food for the children? You can protest against the inhumanity of a system that swept up workers and took them away without a word to their families, and ICE could surely have done better. They could answer their telephone information line. They could tell families where their loved ones have been taken. They could arrange to keep the detainees closer to home, at least over the holidays, instead of shipping them hundreds of miles away to jails in Atlanta or elsewhere. Ultimately, though, ICE 's harsh task is to get rid of the prisoners. The law says they have to go. Send them back to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. The immigration laws give them no legal way to enter this country and no legal way to stay. Rafael is diabetic and needs seven shots of insulin a day. This costs $300 a week. The entire family helped work to pay for Rafael's insulin, and now that one of the brothers was taken they are not sure how they will be able to continue to pay for this. The law says Rafael's brothers and sisters must leave, and never return. The law makes no exceptions for hard-working people, for people who just want to feed their families, for people who want a better life for themselves and their children. The law does not give them any legal way to enter the United States. The law says that we do not want them here, in our towns and our factories. Barbara got home the night of the raids to hear several voicemail messages from families she knows well, who work at Swift. She went house to house, finding them too terrified to even open the door to her. All lights were turned out, and parents tried to keep their children silent. Barbara took some of the families to her home. By the end of the night, she had 25-30 people in her home. She described the scene: "People are afraid to go outside, afraid to open their doors, afraid to go to the market. Afraid of everything. The terror and empty-stare in people’s eyes is indescribable. Is this the way we treat people in America? Is this what Christian-professing people do to each other, and just before Christmas?" We can protest outside the Senator's office, and write letters to the editors, and call our Congressional representatives. We can send money and food and diapers to the families left behind. But we know that, in the end, all our efforts are noenough to help Maria and Esperanza and Luis and Gerardo and their children. The law says they have to go. Anger at the cold, impersonal injustice of our laws drives us to work for change. We hope, we believe that some day we will change that law. But not today. Despite all we can do, the law takes its course. No matter what we do, we are still left with holes in our community and in our hearts, and with a loss, an emptiness that fills up with tears.