Friday
Testifying before a Congressional committee investigating inhumane treatment of asylum seekers, Yazmin Juarez’s gave the tragedy an all too human face by recounting how she lost her baby daughter due to “neglect and mistreatment” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I share an Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet to acknowledge her heartbreak.
According to an NBC News account,
“We came to America, where I hoped to build a better, safer life for my daughter Mariee,” Juárez said in Spanish, sitting next to a photo of herself and her daughter. “Unfortunately, I watched my baby girl die, slowly and painfully. A few months before her second birthday, she ceased to exist.”
So far several children have died, either in ICE custody or shortly after being released. Here’s more from NBC’s account:
During her testimony, Juárez described being held in [Customs and Border Patrol’ custody for three or four days, where it was “very cold” and they were kept in “a cage” and “forced to sleep on a concrete floor.”
When transferred to an ICE detention center in Dilley, Texas, a nurse determined Mariee was healthy, she said. Juárez said she noticed there were many sick children at the detention center and that there was no effort made to tend to the children or to separate the sick children from the healthy ones.
And further:
Juárez said after several days in ICE detention, Mariee became sick. She described taking Mariee to visit the clinic at the facility several times, waiting hours to be helped.
The first time she took Mariee to the clinic, she was told the child had a respiratory infection and was given Tylenol and honey for her cough. But the next day, she said, Mariee was worse and running a fever of more than 104 degrees and began having diarrhea and vomiting. Juarez said this time she was told the child had an ear infection and that they gave her antibiotics to treat it.
“I begged them to conduct a more thorough exam, but they sent us back to our room,” she said.
Juarez and her daughter were finally released to go stay with relatives in New Jerse and went immediately to a hospital. By then, however, it was too late.
Trump officials vacillate between saying that conditions are fine and that Democrats are too blame when they aren’t.
Many of the poems written about mothers losing children attempt to be consoling, as is only fitting. Given that this death is directly linked to a Trump administration policy to use inhumane conditions as an immigration deterrent, however, there can be no softening. I therefore turn to Millay’s agonized cry to capture the full emotional measure of the tragedy:
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
What should we say about those who close their hearts to such grief?
