Due Process
The DHS attorney -- the prosecutor -- presented one piece of evidence:
An irrelevant news article from 1995.
The immigration judge still found the defendant guilty
(Of what? Of being in the wrong place. Like when they divided up my middle school into three schools arbitrarily one year and told us we could be charged with trespassing if we walked across the invisible line in the hallway out of our school and into another.)
The judge didn’t find her guilty
for lack of evidence.
That, he granted.
His argument
was that she hadn’t suffered enough.
Three men -- police officers -- beating and threatening a 20-year-old woman does not cause sufficient suffering. Not enough to stay.
You have not suffered enough, so we will send you back to those police officers and the gang member who followed you halfway across El Salvador to kill you so that you can suffer some more.
Then you can try to come here again. If they don’t kill you.
They should make judges write something like that
at the bottom of every decision, make them take ownership of the harm they cause.
Only then can they sign it.
We appealed.
While typing up the brief to send to the Board of Immigration Appeals --
to which Attorney General William Barr had just promoted a handful of judges
with the lowest asylum approval rates in the country --
I imagined writing a concrete poem in the shape of a middle finger
and mailing it to the judge.
Do you have a daughter?
I imagined
screaming in the judge’s face.
If your 20-year-old daughter was beaten and threatened by three police officers,
you might feel differently about what counts as “sufficient harm.”
My coworker
commisserated.
“The only people they’re willing to let in are dead.”
I didn’t write the poem.
I finished the brief, submitted it, and then I quit my job.
You can’t make change
in the bounds of a system
designed to cause harm.
An irrelevant news article from 1995.
The immigration judge still found the defendant guilty
(Of what? Of being in the wrong place. Like when they divided up my middle school into three schools arbitrarily one year and told us we could be charged with trespassing if we walked across the invisible line in the hallway out of our school and into another.)
The judge didn’t find her guilty
for lack of evidence.
That, he granted.
His argument
was that she hadn’t suffered enough.
Three men -- police officers -- beating and threatening a 20-year-old woman does not cause sufficient suffering. Not enough to stay.
You have not suffered enough, so we will send you back to those police officers and the gang member who followed you halfway across El Salvador to kill you so that you can suffer some more.
Then you can try to come here again. If they don’t kill you.
They should make judges write something like that
at the bottom of every decision, make them take ownership of the harm they cause.
Only then can they sign it.
We appealed.
While typing up the brief to send to the Board of Immigration Appeals --
to which Attorney General William Barr had just promoted a handful of judges
with the lowest asylum approval rates in the country --
I imagined writing a concrete poem in the shape of a middle finger
and mailing it to the judge.
Do you have a daughter?
I imagined
screaming in the judge’s face.
If your 20-year-old daughter was beaten and threatened by three police officers,
you might feel differently about what counts as “sufficient harm.”
My coworker
commisserated.
“The only people they’re willing to let in are dead.”
I didn’t write the poem.
I finished the brief, submitted it, and then I quit my job.
You can’t make change
in the bounds of a system
designed to cause harm.
About this Poem
For this artistic piece, I drew on my experience working in an immigration law firm, where I dealt with the immigration laws of our country, which are fundamentally a system of injustice. Despite a shared sense that I, and other immigration paralegals and lawyers, were doing important work to help people, I increasingly began to feel that we weren’t making a difference. If anything, we were perpetuating this unjust system by continuing to do whatever the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the courts told us to do. In this poem I explore my feelings around one case in particular, and how I grappled with the question of what power, if any, I had.