by John Valentine
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| The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a ruling from a federal judge in Texas requiring the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era immigration program that forces asylum seekers arriving at the southwestern border to await approval in Mexico…. The court’s three more liberal members—Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—said they would have granted a stay of the trial judge’s ruling…. The challenged program, known commonly as Remain in Mexico and formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols, applies to people who left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. After the policy was put in place at the beginning of 2019, tens of thousands of people waited for immigration hearings in unsanitary tent encampments exposed to the elements. There have been widespread reports of sexual assault, kidnapping and torture. —The New York Times, August 24, 2021. Photo: Olga Galicia and her family at a makeshift camp for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, near the border with the United States. Credit: Emilio Espejel/Associated Press via The New York Times. |
The trail snakes north, coils
like a rattler.
Mindlessly moving in the glare
of the sun, they go.
Diaspora bound. Weary,
everything left behind.
Hopeless.
And here comes the hand
that says no.
The one that refuses
The hand like a wall.
Thunder, rain up ahead.
Lightning.
The trembling. The reckoning.
All that they feared.
The night. Its stillness.
The hand.
And now
here comes the storm.
John Valentine lives in Savannah, GA, where he teaches aesthetics at a local art college.