Suppressing Humanity

6 min readNov 29, 2021

*This is an installment of a newsletter I write about the US border and immigration detention. Feel free to share and let anyone know if they want to get this newsletter they can sign up here.

This edition is mostly about other people’s writing and I’ll start it off with an article recommendation from Jacobin Magazine if you can stomach it — People are Drowning off of the English Coast because of Anti-Immigrant Policies. The piece is a response to the news this week that 27 migrants died trying to cross the English channel and its premise will not surprise anyone who reads my newsletter: as nations militarize their borders and expand strategies of deterrence and externalization of immigration enforcement we are seeing more and more dramatic deaths in migrant populations. And we are implicitly meant to believe that migrants deserve death for being displaced and daring to move. I am having trouble reconciling the scramble to impose travel bans on African countries to prevent the spread of a COVID variant with the acceptance of the uncanny level of refugee deaths in Europe because of border closures. Of course preventing death is of the utmost importance but it appears some immigration controls can be used to keep one population safer while placing another in the gravest peril. None of this is new.

Yet one sentence in that Jacobin piece gave me pause, surprised me, and stabbed my heart a little bit: It takes real effort to suppress humanity. I have noticed this, but always in reference to the people I meet in migration. I have witnessed people act in extraordinarily brave ways and endure punishments that are unthinkable to me because of their most human will to survive. I have seen people throw themselves onto moving freight trains in the Mexican jungle. I have had a client sit for two and a half years in an ICE prison with zen like calm, insisting he could not be deported. I have seen a mother hand her infant over to cross a border without her, not knowing when she would see her again. Beholding this strength, this courage, this resolve has always made me appreciate how foolish and dangerous government deterrence strategies are. When people are fleeing death there seems to be very little they can’t face. And as the poet Warsan Shire famously wrote, no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.

What surprised me about the observation that it takes such effort to suppress humanity is that the writer was talking about us — or at least those of us who are not among the tens of millions of displaced people moving across the planet. The author argues that most of the public actually has deep compassion for the migrants who die facing border externalities and do not want to be complicit. He suggests that most people react with anguish to the news of these deaths because they possess a basic humanity that tells them life should be protected. So it instead becomes the State’s project to convince the public that their own livelihoods are being threatened by migration, that options do not exist to protect every life, and that death is a pragmatic result of choosing to protect yourself:

“You have to use every media organ and political platform you have to press and proselytize this narrative until it becomes dominant. And you have to use blunt force — spying on, arresting, defaming, and punishing activists and campaigners and rescue workers. You have to do a great deal of damage to a great many people, intellectually, morally, physically.”

My heart races a little when I read that last paragraph. Admittedly it’s been racing a lot lately and it’s been taking more and more effort to keep panic attacks — one of the particular mysteries of my own brain and nervous system — at bay. I have been facing the most demoralizing fight of my career battling the Biden administration for the release of dozens of Haitian men from brutal detention in the New Mexico desert. I often try to resist the description of a lawyer as “on the front lines” or “in the trenches” because these days I mostly sit in my lovely home and stare at a computer, but I have really been feeling that blunt force of our government’s insistence that my clients do not have a right to live. Nearly every legal maneuver, every creative intervention, and every act of protest my team has developed as detention advocates has been met with callous indifference by people who have learned that the system will destroy people like me and my clients before they themselves are held accountable.

What’s most painful about these defeats is that my clients and I have the moral high ground. We are asking that people be released from detention whose individual incarceration makes no sense. They are each a person who is being held to await a removal proceeding to Haiti. They all crossed the border in exercise of their internationally recognized right to seek protection from violence. None crossed the border illegally. None have a criminal record that ICE can articulate to justify their detention for public safety reasons. By releasing them the government will not give up their ability to pursue deportation as their removal hearings will continue in immigration courts around the US. But releasing them will give them a shot to defend themselves that they will never have in Estancia, New Mexico. We have agreed to accept bonds or ankle monitors as a condition of release. Yet, the government’s position is that there “is no urgent humanitarian issue present” that merits their release from detention.

None of their individual needs inside of that facility matter. They are pissing blood, losing weight, or writhing with insomnia because of anxiety and depression but no individual experience constitutes anything urgent enough to outweigh the government’s need to deter Haitian migration. No one I represent is actually seen as a person but rather as a body in a mass, one who could be millions. I don’t think the Biden Administration expects us to believe that any one of these men is a threat in and of themselves, but they rather expect us to believe that there are more men like them and more after that and more after that and if we treat one of these individuals with respect and love then we will invite the crisis of having to treat all people with humanity and we obviously can’t have that. So we are expected to settle for pain and suffering and death.

It takes real effort to suppress humanity. I have been studying the architecture of that effort for a long time and can see through it though I am having trouble seeing my way out of it. I am not afraid to say that I am feeling defeated. That may well be because the system I use, the legal one, does not contain the answers I am looking for. The law, it turns out, can be fearful and cowardly and knows a lot about how to protect privilege and property and protocol, but doesn’t tell us all that much about the human spirit. Literature does, though, and poetry too. Perhaps there is meaning in a stanza from one of my favorite poems by Wendell Berry:

To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard

Because still, the author of that Jacobin piece reminds, ordinary people don’t stop trying to help. He observes that people everywhere refuse to accept death as the only answer to the question of migration, or policing for that matter, or poverty. They protest, they organize, they fundraise, and they place their own livelihoods on the line to keep that flicker of humanity alive. There is no answer but loving one another. I suppose this must mean to me that there is enough compassion in the world to treat each of my detained clients with the dignity that they deserve and not be afraid of what it means that we then have to treat the next one with dignity and the next person too. I am praying the people holding their lives in their hands can see that too.

Happy Thanksgiving, whatever that means to you. And happiest first night of Hannukah, a hopeful holiday if there ever was one.

If you missed other newsletters here they are:

Suppressing Humanity

Written by allegralove1