Just before Independence Day, 2019, a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General found a scene of squalor in the US Border Patrol’s jails on the southern border: “standing-room-only cells, where some detainees have been held for a week or more, detainees not having access to showers, kids not having access to hot meals.” Confronted with this report by an NPR interviewer, Brandon Judd, head of the Border Patrol’s labor union, said that he “agree[d] with it 100%”: “Our facilities, 100%, are absolutely overcrowded. When we’re dealing with the number of people that are crossing the border right now, when we take them into custody, we have to take them back. We have to process them. We have to put them through a certain process to verify who they are, make sure that the children that they have with them are, in fact, their children. And then we have to wait for ICE or we have to wait for HHS to take these individuals off of our hands. If HHS and ICE doesn’t take them off of our hands, then we have to hold them. I mean, think about unaccompanied children that we take into our custody. If HHS ... do[es] not come and take these children off of our hands, we can’t just release them to the street. We have to hold them until the proper authorities come and take them off of our hands.” […] This masterclass in delinquency frames CBP as helpless witnesses to lamentable “conditions” imposed on them by other agencies, by Congress, perhaps even by those sadly improvident immigrants who, in this representation, are mysteriously appearing in CBP’s jails without anyone hunting them down, handcuffing them, placing them in the backs of jeeps and vans, and incarcerating them—certainly not CBP. The magical incantation that makes this breathtaking disappearing act possible is a phrase uttered in the voice of a child to whom the Law is given: We have to ...
Jesse S. Cohn, Hot Equations: Science, Fantasy, and the Radical Imagination on a Troubled Planet (University Press of Mississippi, 2024), pp. 23–4.
