The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

by Yxta Maya Murray

  Marjorie looked at me, still smiling, and her eyes did seem to soften for a second. “He’s great with the girls.”

  “What have you been up to lately, Kev?” Lacie asked.

  “Oh, hell,” I said, taking a sip from my glass and then another one. “I’ve been working like a bear on this one issue. Immigration.” I drained my glass and flagged down the pizza guy for another one.

  “Oh, immigration,” all the women said in serious voices.

  “Um,” Marjorie said.

  I got my new wine glass from the guy and drank half of it, in like one swallow. “My boss has been riding me. It’s this really tough case about—”

  “Um, wait,” Marjorie said, grinning and squeezing my arm.

  I hesitated and drank some more, watching the tiny but scary shifts in her expression.

  Marjorie’s eyes remained glittering, and her smile stayed just as wide. But she very lightly shook her head no.

  “Sorry, what?” Lacie asked.

  “Oh, it’s just . . .” Marjorie said. “Didn’t you say it was classified?”

  I continued looking intently at my wife’s beamy eyes and stone grin and began to think about how, when I’d left Baker & McKenzie to come to work for the administration, she’d been excited. It’s been a fun, happy time, full of deregulation and the promise of power and loads o’ money to be made after my public-service stint or maybe even during. But then, later, it seemed less good, with the social hate and the actually really low pay. These memories fiddled with my mind a little, so that Marjorie’s face flickered in front of me and then seemed to morph all at once into a smaller, sweating, squalling version—Heather’s face, as she’d pitched a fit on the floor of the ice cream store the day before. I flashed on Heather making a pistachio angel as she furiously flailed her arms and yelled. I contemplated my child’s red, dumb mug and her squeezed-shut eyes. You couldn’t spank kids these days. You just had to wait it out. When I was young, I’d gotten spanked plenty by my parents, and for behavior far less disgusting than my daughter’s. But I was glad that things were different now. Gentler, more civilized. I loved Heather more than anybody else on the planet, and the thought of her spitting with stupid rage and her screaming made me suddenly feel so tired I could have just lain right down, right there on the grass, with the ladies’ high-heeled shoes sticking their spikes into the earth by my ears while my wife looked down on me, disappointed.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said, draining my glass while the women all nodded at me. “It’s just this thing at work.”*

  The agents take them in their wet clothes, at first, to the “hielera,” the “icebox,” a refrigerated building, a large processing center, where they had to try to sleep on the concrete floor or sit on concrete benches under mylar blankets, prodded by agents all night and day, deliberately kept awake. . . . After the Hielera, they went to the “perrera,” or “doghouse,” a place where families were put in cages, cyclone fencing between them as though they were animals. . . . The detention center in Dilley is run by CoreCivic, a company that contributed $250,000 to President Trump’s inauguration.

  MARIN GARBUS, “What I Saw at the Dilley, Texas, Immigrant Detention Center,” The Nation, April 22, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/dilley-texas-immigration-detention/

  Correctional Officer. . . $15.63 per hour. . . Senior Correction Officer. . . $42,261 per year.

  “CoreCivic Salaries in the United States,” Indeed.com, accessed June 20, 2019, https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Corecivic/salaries

  “I can’t imagine being the person who grabs a hold of a child and takes them. I don’t know where you have to go in yourself to be able to do that job,” [the baby’s foster mother] said.

  CAITLIN DICKERSON, “The Youngest Child Separated from His Family at the Border Was 4 Months Old,” New York Times, June 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/us/baby-constantine-romania-migrants.html

  Zero Tolerance

  YEAH, I TOOK HER. It’s my job. So, of course I took her. She was supposed to go to the doghouse, the segregated cages, but I put her somewhere better. The mother didn’t like it, but that’s really not my problem. If you don’t like it, then don’t come here, that’s what we say.

  I’m sorry, excuse me? Yes, that’s what I’m telling you, I was told to bring her to holding C.

  I’m just trying to answer you honestly, which is what I was told to do.

  I’m a senior corrections officer at the Dilley Detention Center. It’s my responsibility to manage and contain the aliens who come to our facility.

  Now, you don’t have to [indistinct] me like that. I’m sitting here trying to be professional, and I expect the same thing from you, Mrs. [indistinct]. Fine, Sharon [muffled].

  If you don’t like that I did my job like a professional, it’s because you’re living in a fantasy world. I hope the lady’s getting this part down too. Because that’s what we should be talking about at trial, the lawsuit, whatever. We should be talking about that and not about me taking the youngster and putting it in another sector. No, we should be talking about how this entire system is rigged, and you guys with your law degrees and your total ignorance about the world don’t have the faintest clue what you’re involved with here. But I do.

  No. No.

  No. I want to talk about something else.

  What you don’t understand is the number of people that we’re supposed to process. What people just don’t understand is how little we are paid and the overwhelming amount of work that we’ve been assigned to do. We have to maintain order in an unmanageable situation. And we have to do our duties under the law, which is zero tolerance. It’s no tolerance, which means that the work load is just going to be just that much more insane. When I first got here in 2014, we were processing 480 aliens. And now’s it’s up to 2,400. Do the math. And they’re putting all of it on us. And most of us don’t have enough money to feed our own children well or to take them to nice places or to give them nice things. We’re exhausted, frankly. That’s what people don’t understand.

  Also, come on, let’s be honest. The aliens that we’re managing are themselves criminals. In most cases, I’m saying. I don’t know how many aliens pass their credible fear screenings. But it isn’t a lot. From what I understand.

  I’m from here, South Texas. I graduated from Dilley High School ten years ago and then took the job at the Center because it pays more than half again as much as I was earning waitressing. I waitressed at the Subway on the interstate and got paid $7.25 an hour. Do you know how much that is? $14,500 a year. You’re standing there behind the counter with your hands hurting so bad because you have to cut up all of those chilies all day. You’d get paid more if you poisoned yourself in the grape or strawberry fields like an immigrant or had no respect for yourself and did something worse. Because women, sometimes, around here, when they get real broke, they’ll go low. I didn’t want to do that. And I didn’t.

  But really, I was ready to do almost anything. I was that desperate. I already had my son, my baby. Nat. So I had to think about him. Mom helped me take care of him, but Nat’s dad, Raymond, didn’t really help much. So, of course I’m going to jump at a job with CoreCivic. Are you kidding? I get paid over 42K a year now. Which sounds like a lot. And it is a lot more than when I was at Subway. But now that I have two kids, and Jerry is out of work, it’s peanuts, man. My rent’s $1,500 a month, which is all on me since Mom got sick and lost her job. So, forty-two, let me tell you, it’s nothing.

  What happened was that Edgar pointed the aliens out to me and said, “Take care of it.” So I did. She wasn’t the first. And it’s not like she died or got hurt. They just sent her to Chicago, I think. Because there have been deaths, at other facilities. But we are working so hard to keep these conditions up to par that nothing like that has really happened here. It never happened except for once, and that’s after it was out of our hands, and that particular infant received adequate care.

  In this case, Edgar said to take th
e child to holding C, and so I did go get her. It’s not that complicated.

  Did I feel anything? What kind of answer are you exactly looking for?

  When I first got here, I was falling all over myself to take care of the women and the children. I wanted to do the best job and get promoted, and I did, but not because I was getting diapers or aspirin. But when I first got hired, I’d see the mommies and babies, and I didn’t really get what the situation was, the overwhelmingness of it. I’d see them like individuals. I’d be like, this one’s named Graciela, and this is her kid Pedro, and this is her daughter Yolanda. Or, this guy’s name is Victor, and his kids are Rudolfo and Cecilia, and his wife’s Serafina. I’d notice the color of their eyes, and if any of them were sick, which they all were, because they’d been in the water and then captured, and they get scared and all jacked up.

  I remember this one case, back in ’15, back when I was still with Raymond. This was when Obama was president, so don’t you forget that. You think that Dilley was invented in January of 2017.

  So in ’15, there was this alien named Graciela, who I was mentioning, and she had this kid, Pedro. I mean, she had two kids, but Pedro was the one with the problem. Pedro was about one and a half years old, which was around the same age of Nat, so I knew how old he was when I saw him. Pedro was runty with huge brown eyes and this shiny little face that changed expression all the time. Oh, he was cute. We put them in the icebox with the others, and that Graciela was hard as a brick and didn’t complain. She got her kids and put them under her sweater and sat in the corner and just waited.

  But what I noticed was that Pedro started crying after the second day, and he didn’t stop. And my reaction wasn’t, “How can I get this kid to shut up?” Because that was Edgar’s reaction. He was back here then too. We were both just correctional officers in those days, though he’d already been at the Center for four years already. Now I’m a senior corrections officer, and he’s a sergeant. Anyway, Edgar was like, “Jesus Christ, get me out of here.” Because little Pedro was making such a racket. Edgar put his jacket over his head to block out the sound. “I hate my life,” he mumbled at me through the jacket, until our sarge at the time, Milly, told him to cut it out.

  So the baby’s crying for two days, but Graciela wasn’t doing anything about it. Nothing. Just nothing. I think she was from Guatemala. Here, they’re all like from Guatemala or Honduras. And I don’t know how they raise them there, but those girls are tough, like too tough. Like unnatural. Because Graciela was just staring at the wall with no expression while her daughter’s lying around all filthy and her son’s screaming bloody murder.

  I felt that scream tear through me, I swear. Because I’m a mom. I’m a natural mom. I feel those things. I felt them then—I felt them for her kid. Because that’s the type of person I was. Before everything became so overwhelming. Anyway, I ran over to the kid finally, and I put my hand on its face, and it was burning hot. It was just flaming hot.

  I said, “This kid has a fever!” But Graciela, she was just checked out. I don’t know what was wrong with her. She didn’t make a move and only looked at me with these empty eyes. I grabbed the kid from her and ran him to the infirmary, and they had to do a surgery on him super fast because he had an infection.

  “I guess he had septicemia,” Edgar said later, shrugging. “Good on you, Georgia,” he said.

  So I saved that kid’s life. I did that. So why don’t you put that in your pipe and puff it.

  Yes, Edgar pointed me to an approximately five-year-old minor who was in the apparent custody of an alien who said that she was seeking asylum. But what she really was, the alien, was suspected of illegal crossing, which is a federal crime that entitles her to deportation unless she can pass the credible fear screening. And until she passed that test, the child was going to be separated from her, because we didn’t even have any proof that she was a blood relation of the alien or not being trafficked. So the child becomes an unaccompanied alien, right away. Which is why we have to remove them, for their safety. Also, we have to separate the families, that is, the aliens, in order to deter future aliens from coming here with their kids. That’s why it’s zero tolerance. Because we have to do something about this assault on the border that we’ve been experiencing for just years and years. The aliens have an incentive now to show up here with all of their babies and then get released into our society. And it just can’t happen that way anymore.

  Excuse me, ma’am, but do you really see any other way? Are you saying that you want open borders? Have you really thought about what that would mean? Where do you live? I see. That sounds nice. Do you have your own house? No, really, do you have your own house? Like, with a mortgage and everything? Or do you live in some shitty little apartment with your sick mom and your out-of-work husband? Hmmm? You want to take a break? Is she going to shut off the little recorder there? Hmm?

  I’ll bet you’re so excited to have this case. Talking to big bad me.

  So, you live in the big city, and what that means is that you have zero percent of any kind of clue what it means to be overridden by these tidal waves of aliens who are hurting themselves and their children and us by just flooding into the territory and expecting every kind of service and benefit, while people like me, who obey the law, have barely anything at all. And I mean barely anything.

  My salary, as I’ve said, is $42,271. After tax, Social Security, Medicare, that’s about $35,400. For five people.

  My rent is $1,500 a month, which is $18,000. Food bill’s about $670 a month. Car, with payments and insurance is—

  I’m sorry, is this boring you? Did I get off topic? Oh, really? We’re not here to talk about me?

  That’s what I’m saying.

  I started to see the professional side of things about, I don’t know, maybe a year or so after the Pedro incident. Our intake started to really pick up. Like I told you, now we’re at over two thousand units. Sometimes, honestly, it seems closer to three thousand a year. They just keep coming and coming and coming. And on the staff side, I’m getting higher wages than the lowest rank. Our beginning correctional officers get paid just a little over fifteen dollars an hour, and most of my subordinates have their own sad stories, let me tell you. Divorces, domestic violence, bankruptcy. Alcoholism. A lot of depression. So we’re all just managing here as best as we can.

  You’ve been to the facility. You’ve smelled it. And it’s loud, right? It’s so loud all the time you can’t hear yourself think. Try to think of what it would do to you to work in those conditions.

  I’m saying that it is just not possible to keep seeing the aliens as totally regular folks, like, as individual, single people with their own little lives and what have you. You want something to exist that just can’t. They all start to look the same, and they sure as hell all have the same story. They’re all crying, and they’re all staring strange with blank faces, and they’re all sick, and none of them belong here. And it’s our job to make sure that they get contained in safe conditions, so that when the judge sees them or they get deported, they’re still in one piece, and so are we.

  I think that I noticed the change in myself, the necessary change, necessary for my own self-preservation, in about 2016. Maybe earlier. The way it works here is that first we put them in a large containment facility that is known for its cool temperature, and then we put them in another facility that has more separated or segregated cages. Yes, the icebox and the doghouse, that’s what they’re known as.

  We don’t want them to go to sleep in the icebox. There’s a policy reason for that. If they’re sleeping, or they look like they’re sleeping, then maybe we’re not going to know if there’s a serious medical problem happening. So we want them to be alert. We don’t kick them. We don’t kick them as a policy. I’m not saying that I myself have never personally seen anyone kick an alien, that is, nudge them with their feet, so as to keep the alien awake. That’s not kicking them. That’s keeping them alert so that we can see if there’s
a medical problem.

  When I first got here, I would cry when I’d see Edgar and the other guards kicking them or handling them with their feet, and I would worry about how cold it was and what have you.

  But you get used to it. It’s the job. You’re asking people to do a job that requires a certain amount of mental strength. You can’t be running around having nervous breakdowns about this one not having a sweater or this other one having a fever. You just can’t. Because then you will lose your job, and that’s four people who depend on you now not having anything to eat.

  Do you think that prisons and alien camps can be run by bleeding hearts that are sobbing over every little thing? That is just not possible from the guard’s point of view.

  So I started to move them with my feet too. And when they didn’t want to stay awake, I’d get mad at them, just like Edgar got mad and like every other guard would get mad. You get angry. You see the scared and deadness on their faces, and, I’m sorry, but in the end it doesn’t touch you anymore. It just doesn’t. That’s how it works. That’s how it works in war, that’s how it works in prison, and that’s how it works in alien containment facilities. There are certain hard truths that keep this country running that civilians just don’t want to know a damn thing about.

  So I’d move them with my feet, and I’d keep them awake. And I’d see my other guards doing the same thing. We were all doing it. And when the aliens did something awful, like attempt suicide, at first, of course, it’s a shock, and you run about like a chicken with no head, but in the end, if you laugh a little, it’s just to survive this ridiculous life.

  Listen, my father was in the Marines. He was at Ganjgal. He told me, in war, soldiers laugh at the enemies that they see skewered on a bayonet or who get taken down by phosphorous. And in alien camps, at the end of the day, there’s some dark humor here too.