Margo Taft Stever
Immigration Policy
When I demonstrated against child separation at the border with a small group outside of Susan Collins’s office in Biddeford, Maine, I wrapped myself in the same flimsy mylar blanket given to children when separated from their parents and read a quote from a sixteen-year-old migrant mother to the small gathering:
The day after we arrived here, my baby began vomiting and having diarrhea. I asked to see a doctor, and they did not take us. I asked again the next day, and the guard said, “She doesn’t have the face of a sick baby. She doesn’t need to see a doctor.” My baby daughter has not had medicine since we first arrived. She has a very bad cough, fever, and continues to vomit with diarrhea.
Trump, Sessions, Homeland Security, Barr, and DOJ knew then and know now exactly what they are doing. They are doubling down on punishment, hoping to prove America is no longer a refuge, but a jailhouse, not just a jailhouse, but a torture chamber, not just a torture chamber, but a freak show—no longer a place for self-respecting immigrant families escaping from torture and starvation. More than 5,400 children at the border are separated from their parents, ripped from them, pried from them, pruned and slivered from them. Trump would like to jump start the child separation program during his second regime.
Let me start over. As an effort to deter desperate migrants from attempting to find refuge in America, the Trump regime has coerced them to cross the Sonoran Desert; since then, over 10,000 refugees have died. In the desert, it takes eight days for a body to totally disappear—first picked clean by vultures, ravens, ranch dogs, then by the ants that chip remaining bones and drag the fragments to their nests.
Five men came out of the desert so sunstruck that they could no longer remember their own names, how long they had traveled, or where they came from. But migrants keep on trying to cross because they are persecuted by authoritarian regimes in Central America, cannot find jobs, and their children are starving. Children cry in cages. We lost their parents; we don’t know where to find them.
—Submitted on 10/17/2020
Margo Taft Stever is the author of Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019), Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019), The Lunatic Ball (Kattywompus Press, 2015), The Hudson Line (Main Street Rag, 2012), Frozen Spring (Mid-List Press, 2002) and Reading the Night Sky (Riverstone Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, Plume, and other journals. Stever is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, NY.
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Emily Jo Scalzo is the author of The Politics of Division (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Mobius, Blue Collar Review, New Verse News, and others journals. Scalzo holds an MFA in fiction from California State University, Fresno, and is an assistant teaching professor of research and creative writing at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.