My close friend Lisa sobbed in the doorway of her apartment last Wednesday night, and the only sustenance I could offer her was a warm embrace and some of my mother-in-law’s homemade chili. Even so, it felt inadequate and I started to cry, too. The chili was hot and hearty, but we, distraught over the death of a friend, could barely taste it.
Just one night before, a handsome 31-year-old El Salvadoran man who had been caught squarely in the middle of the U.S. immigration policy’s stranglehold on justice slipped quietly away to whatever lies beyond life.
I knew Diego only from Lisa’s stories and photos, but I wish I’d met him. They were B.F.F.s separated not just by miles, but also by borders, racism, and partisan politics. Amid his bid for political asylum, Diego had been diagnosed with cancer and couldn’t get into the U.S. in time to receive the medical care that would surely have saved his life.
Lisa wore a gray fleece hoodie emblazoned with the blue New York Yankees logo. It had been Diego’s. He gave it to her as a token of his affection because he had nothing else to give. I wondered if it still smelled like him in that comforting way that men’s sweatshirts somehow retain the scent of their wearers. He once asked her what she saw in “a simple migrant” like himself.
“A simple migrant”? my mind repeated. Over and over. “A simple migrant”?
It’s not simple at all.
The “migrant protection protocols,” implemented by the Department of Homeland Security in January of 2019, send asylum seekers and migrants back to Mexico or other countries while they wait their turns in U.S. immigration court. It had “Trump” blatantly written all over it. The protocols were implemented, the department said at the time, in response to “misguided court decisions and outdated laws [that] have made it easier for illegal aliens to enter and remain in the U.S. if they are adults who arrive with children, unaccompanied alien children, or individuals who fraudulently claim asylum.”
Fraudulently?
Rampant gang violence and corruption and rape and murder rates are not legitimate enough reasons to grant residence in the U.S. for an asylum seeker? What? I am near the point of vomiting. I can’t imagine how Lisa feels, or how Diego’s family feels.
Diego was one of 11 people involved in a federal lawsuit against the migrant protection protocols — a case that will likely make it to the U.S. Supreme Court someday, where, Lisa says, “I fully intend on being his voice.”
In a Feb. 10 statement calling for the end of the migrant protection protocols, Avril Benoit, executive director of the volunteer group Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), said the policy offers “no protection at all. They send asylum seekers back into harm’s way, to the borderlands of Mexico. Or to some of the same Central American countries from which people are fleeing.”
Also awful is that no one had told Diego — and by logical extrapolation, others like him — that Mexico had agreed to cover under its national health care policy those whom the U.S. turned away under the migrant protection protocols. The lack of information is devastating.
After Diego asked her what she saw in him, Lisa said she answered, “I see everything.” Beauty, intelligence, wit — “you worry about others before you think of yourself.”
Diego was deeply religious, a youth group leader in his church.
Diego wanted to build his parents a safe, comfortable house.
He didn’t want to leave his country. He loved El Salvador, but he had received death threats from either the military, gangs, or police — he wasn’t sure who, because they all wore similar clothes.
Diego was human, and he had flaws like we all do, but he had hope. He just wanted a chance.
Something in me woke up that night. What can I do? What can we do? There must be something. A no-holds-barred human rights campaign in Diego’s memory. A college scholarship fund for his little cousins. A fund-raiser to build Diego’s parents the beautiful home he can’t ever build now because he’s gone.
Media reports over the last year show that among the thousands of people who have been impacted by the migrant protection protocols, more than 600 have been documented victims of assault, rape, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes since the U.S. turned them away.
It’s been hard for me to speak up. As a journalist it’s not really my place to publicly share my feelings on national policy. No one asked my opinion. I don’t want to tell you what I really think. I’m uncomfortable sharing all of this even now, but I have the luxury of a platform to say something that urgently needs to be said — a place in the opinion pages of this newspaper.
Read that again so you understand — this is an opinion. I love my friend, and underneath my journalism skin is an actual person with real feelings. Lisa is a community pillar, an activist, a true inspiration. Could somebody please give me permission to follow her lead?
I will not let Diego’s death be in vain. It must be a wake-up call, an alarm, a call to action, for any American whose moral compass tells them that what’s happening in our country is tragic. Because it is, much more than I even knew before we lost Diego.
Christine Sampson is The Star’s education reporter.