The Boy

So we stood our ground...

An excerpt from illdefinitions

The boy came dressed clean, with a fresh hair cut. No tattoos, no logos, talking to his brother in Q’eqchi’, one of the indigenous languages of his country rooted all the way back to the Maya.

We met up outside the now familiar federal building with a couple of new and old volunteers. As word and press images of the mass detainments had spread, so had the community of enraged volunteer court watchers from all corners of the city.

Waiting there, before anyone, was one of the boy’s high school teachers. She said she was too scared to go inside but had come to see him and support him–and perhaps say goodbye. She said another one of his teachers was coming who did want to go in with us but was running late. We couldn’t wait.

He hugged the teacher and brother in long, lingering embraces. We went through security and up to one of the now infamous court floors. We passed two unmasked agents camping out in the corner of the floor, with one masked enforcer behind them. The ICE agents have their quotas and now roam the halls openly, high on their freshly given authority. We pressed on and escorted the boy into the courtroom.

The judge seemed nice enough. All the migrants before her had their papers in order or in process. Everyone was given extensions for their asylum applications. We heard no tussles outside the courtroom. It was Friday; maybe they had already reached their quota for the week.

The tardy high school teacher finally came into the courtroom nervous; this was her first time. The boy went up bravely when it was his turn. After explaining to the interpreter, adroitly, how he had no parents here, only four brothers who were pooling their money to get an attorney to finish processing his asylum application, he rose and presented a handwritten letter to the judge, thanking her for overseeing his case.

Even the court clerk was impressed. She accepted the letter into evidence and gave him a two-year extension for his next court date. The teacher sighed with relief. The veteran court escorts–some who’d been escorting court respondents since the first Trump administration–did not.

I went outside first, to look around. The hallway seemed clear. The teacher hugged the student. The other two escorts formed around him, with me up front.

As we turned the corner to the elevators, a sleepy looking plainclothes officer suddenly perked up, took one look at the young, indigenous looking student and went straight for him.

“Ok guys, this one.”

As he reached around me, the other agents rushed in to break up our little defensive line and get to the boy.

Crucially, unlike with all the other detentions I’d witnessed up to now, nobody had an open file with a name or photo. They had no list that included the student. Because he was in a special immigration program for certain youths under the age of 21, ICE wasn’t supposed to arrest him. Yet no one had asked him his identity. Nobody had declared having a warrant for his arrest. The agent had simply taken a cursory look at this young boy and decided then and there to grab him.

So we stood our ground.

His teacher erupted into tears. The other accompanying escorts grabbed me to form a human chain around the boy, shouting, “What are you doing??” Which was a fair question, as there was zero communication beyond, simply, “Get him!”.

A surreal tug of war happened between us and the ICE agents, swaying back and forth, the teacher howling, as more ICE agents arrived and tore the boy from us. Through it all, the boy stood straight as an arrow, somehow keeping stoic and dignified as all order collapsed around him.

Then the shouting really started.

“HE’S JUST A BOY!”

“HE’S AN UNACCOMPANIED MINOR!!”

“HE GOT AN EXTENSION FROM THE JUDGE!!”

None of it mattered–they whisked the boy away to the back room.

We stayed in the hallway pleading our case. One of the veteran leaders of the boy’s support group, who had done all due diligence beforehand, tenaciously repeated his special unaccompanied minor status over and over again, shaking his documents in the ICE faces.

Then I looked at the most senior agent on the scene, an older looking Latino in his late 50’s, and straight shamed him relentlessly in Spanish. Unlike the new young rambos, he looked like his tenure at ICE long predated the current administration, and he looked tired. Each question I asked about him and what he was doing seemed to hit his soul directly. He was surely counting his days to retirement–and his pension.

After some long minutes of this, one of the agents darted out from the back room.

“Where are his papers??” Clearly frustrated. “His teacher is here? Where is she??”

The sobbing teacher raised her hand.

“Come with me.”

They disappeared again into the backroom as our hallway protest continued. A giant, masked bodybuilding agent came out and whispered to the older, defeated Latino agent I had been busy shaming. They had fucked up, and they knew it.

“You let him go??” I cried. Silence. The older, Latino agent gave some small semblance of a nod.

“They let him go!” I yelled to the other escorts. “Let’s get out of here.” We were here for the boy, not to try and teach ICE agents futile lessons on morality.

The boy texted us he was out, and what corner he was on. We rushed out of the building to meet him. He was in front of Federal Plaza, shaking, tears running down his face. His four brothers all showed up to collect him, shaking, all with tears running down their faces.

We instinctively hugged after such an intense ordeal, he and his brothers thanking all of us profusely. We were all still changing gears: from what we thought was a grim and certain inevitability, to being immensely happy he was out and with his family.

We were all shaken up that day, obviously no one more than the boy and his brothers. Who knows how long that traumatic imprint might last, or how deep it will be. The teachers were impacted, too, taking time from work to vouch and look after the boy, just to see, firsthand, exactly how ICE does things. They teach at one of the dozens of newcomer schools in the city, with hundreds of migrant students now waiting for their own court appointments under this new regime.

Now they, too, will have to gear up for this new reality.