The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  As we waited, my temples began to throb, and all I could think about was how this heat and this sun helped make things disappear, how the desert as landscape—preexisting and natural—was a refinement of the torture centers that had existed in places like Chile and Argentina. Those black sites had been housed in preexisting buildings so that after the deeds were carried out, knowledge of them could be scrubbed away and the buildings reintegrated into daily life. The desert was that and more, helping not only to carry out the deeds but also to obfuscate lines of causality and responsibility. It made those who died in it seem responsible for their own disappearance.

  The final place of unrest for these unidentified dead is a section of Tucson’s Evergreen Cemetery. Most of the grounds are tree-lined and lush despite the arid climate, but beyond a certain point the grass ends and there is only hard, bare dirt. This austere periphery rarely sees mourners; it’s where migrant remains are deposited when no identification can be made. The area looks like an abandoned lot. There are two rectangular grave markers on the dirt next to each other, which read “JOHN DOE UNK 1992” and “JOHN DOE UNK 1995.” Someone stabbed a small bouquet of red plastic flowers between the slabs long ago. The petals have since been beaten down by annual monsoons and have faded to a dull pink. In 2004 the county ruled that unidentified remains found in the desert would be cremated to save space. The above-ground columbaria look like brown dumpsters, with ceramic slabs that open to dark niches where the metal boxes of unclaimed ashes are placed and will remain in ambiguity.

  CHAPTER 11

  Streamline

  An older white stranger in his fifties buys me drinks well into the night. He’s one of those lonely types who rambles continuously without stopping, maybe because he lives alone and rarely has occasion to speak aloud. He’s saying something about his brother who he hasn’t seen in over twenty years because of a fight they had. Around closing time I don’t need to let my eyes go crossed for everything to look soft. The bare, hanging bulbs bloom into orbs of light that look like white hydrangeas. When he pays our tab I give him a hug before we part—because he looks like he really wants one. He says he can’t remember what the fight was about, but it’s too late because they’ve gone too long hating each other, and now it’s just about that hate. “Call your brother,” I say before we say good-bye. He gives me a cigarette for the road, and I take off walking down a random street without direction. I feel like walking, and so I do, for hours. I tend to do this in every city I find myself in, wander around at dawn listening to the hollow sounds of urban spaces at night. Tucson has its own pitch, but it also sounds like all the others, like an empty iron hull, similar to putting your ear to a seashell only much grander because this is the rushing static of highways and commerce in the distance. I must have walked for four or five miles before making my way to the house where I’d arranged to stay. I didn’t see a soul the whole time.

  I open my eyes before my alarm goes off. It’s dark and the unfamiliar orientation of the room throws me. Then, just as my eyes adjust to the darkness and I see a white cat staring at me from a window ledge on a redbrick wall, I remember I’m in Tucson.

  The woman who hosts volunteers in Tucson lives in an old adobe structure that used to be a market. Five-foot nopales line the front, some of which still have purple fruit on them from the monsoon. The federal courthouse is just a couple blocks away and, as I leave the house, I cut across a parking lot about the size of a football field. In the middle of this huge black lot, I come upon the desiccated remains of a small white scorpion—no larger than a quarter, perhaps crushed underfoot.

  In the middle distance, the federal courthouse mars the landscape. It has the look of a research hospital or an urban juvenile prison. I approach a short woman with jet-black hair who stands at the stoplight across the street from the entrance. Her hair is like thick wire, and from behind she looks like my mother, with whom I haven’t spoken in weeks. At the desert camp, getting cell phone service required walking up a hill that was heavily patrolled by Border Patrol, so I didn’t make any calls. Besides, I would have had to come up with a series of lies about where I was and what I was doing, and she always knows when I’m lying to her.

  Inside the federal building a man wearing a blue Civil War uniform walks through the metal detector. It blares harshly, amplified by all the hard surfaces.

  “Pewter,” he says to the security guard, pointing at his buttons.

  Upstairs a handful of individuals silently congregate at the closed door of a courtroom. I recognize an older woman with a shock of gray curls and an elegant gait from a newspaper photo I’d seen of her speaking into a bullhorn in front of this very building. A series of judges’ portraits in oil, about a dozen, hang on the wall. Three are men of color. The woman with the gray curls looks powerful. She enters the courtroom first. The rest of us file in behind her.

  A tall, brutish man tells us not to communicate in any way with the detainees. A door near the judge’s stand opens, and the large hollow chamber is filled with the sound of chains as prisoners shuffle in with their wrists and ankles shackled. Around seventy men and four women are led into the federal courtroom by US marshals. They’re chained together in groups of eight and slacks of metal links between them drag across the courtroom floor, crashing over the lip of the threshold to the chamber door. As they file in, the sounds accrete into layers of metal crashing into metal with a constant undertone of dragging and scraping across hard surfaces. It almost becomes rhythmic for moments but quickly slips back into chaos.

  It seems as though it can’t be real, human beings shackled and led into the federal courtroom on a chain for nothing other than immigration offenses. It feels like I’m watching a historical reenactment, something from the distant past, but Operation Streamline has been touted by some as progress. Even though the particularities of this little-known spectacle are viscerally obscene, it’s one of the endpoints we’ve reached following our bipartisan, foundational assumptions about what a nation-state is and needs to be. There’s no humane or ethical way to deny people who live in countries riddled with violence, poverty, and corruption the right to try to make a livable life in “your” affluent country, much less so when “your” country’s government has been deeply involved in creating the conditions being fled.

  The soundtrack of metal upon metal peaks at an almost intolerable level before some of the men and women sit down in pew-style benches to the left of the judge’s stand.

  I’m sitting in the fourth row of benches for public observers. My eyes are fixed on the succession of faces emerging into the chamber. One man looks around the courtroom like he’s never seen anything like it: the panels on the walls, the towering judge’s stand, his fellow prisoners, some of whom are having trouble dragging themselves and their chains to their seats. I’ve never seen anything like it either. His face is covered in dust and streaked with sweat. He seems slightly confused, as if he doesn’t understand where he is or what’s happening. A trickle of dry blood has crusted over on his forehead and pooled into a clump at his brow ridge. Another man coughs, and puffs of dust come off his red shirt, lingering in the stagnant courtroom air. He looks like a friend I once worked with, also undocumented, who used to pop his head into the alley when I’d go on smoke breaks and take one drag of my cigarette, then pop back inside because his fiancée, a US citizen who would have slapped him if she’d caught him smoking, worked there too. He’d once drunkenly confessed that when he started dating her, the possibility of getting his citizenship had been in the back of his mind, and he wondered aloud whether he wouldn’t have broken up with her a few times when they’d gone through some rough patches in their relationship had her citizenship not been a factor. I told him it sounded like a pretty standard love story to me, and that seemed to appease whatever it was he was feeling.

  Most of the detainees’ clothing and skin is torn up from brushing against hard, thorny plants in the desert or falling down slopes of jagged and shifting rocks. The air is thi
ck and sour with the sweat of almost a hundred people, some of whom have been traveling for days, sometimes weeks. The stretch of the Sonoran where most of these people were picked up is some of the harshest terrain in North America. Plants and animals in this desert corridor are hearty and designed to protect their water and limited resources, which means features that draw blood and cause pain.

  Two court translators look at each other, smirking. One of them whispers something into the other’s ear, and they both chuckle. I wonder if they’re here every day. They seem to not see the prisoners.

  None of the people who are shackled look out toward the observers. I don’t know many individuals who like to be observed at all, let alone during situations of great distress. They must know we’re not here to help them, how could we, and so they must wonder what the hell we’re looking at. Groups of around seventy or eighty people are brought into this courtroom five days a week. A woman I spoke with, who had been to Streamline previously, said she had seen a man who could barely drag himself to his bench. He’d had to be told to be quiet several times during the proceedings because his pained groans echoed in the chamber while the judge read his sentences. It turned out the man had been apprehended after journeying through the desert for something like six days. He’d told the Border Patrol agent who picked him up that he’d fallen and that his leg was radiating agonizing pain like he’d never felt, that he needed to see a doctor, please. He had been told to shut up. He was booked, and he waited several hours before being transported to a holding cell in Tucson, where he asked to see a doctor again, and was again denied. He met with his public defender an hour before going into Streamline, but instead of receiving medical attention he was made to drag himself in to stand trial. He was sentenced along with the rest of his seventy- or eighty-person cohort and transported to the private prison where he would be held. There he was finally seen by a doctor who determined that he had sustained a broken femur, which is considered a life-threatening injury.

  The men and women look battered. Many have been traveling on foot over severely uneven terrain for days, some have been journeying for weeks, and for some this is not the first border they’ve crossed. A thick man wearing a navy blue windbreaker that reads “MARSHAL” across the back looks bored as he tells the first batch of eight men to move, pointing to the spot on the floor where he wants the first man. My temples are pounding, and I can feel my heart beating in my neck. The sound of their chains fills the courtroom again as they shuffle out of the pew. It seems so obviously wrong to shackle and batch-litigate groups like this that I can’t believe it’s been deemed legitimate, that rather than this scene being a violation of any law it is the law in practice.

  The marshal doesn’t look into the detainees’ eyes as they file by close enough to lean forward and kiss him. His face is relaxed and emotionless as he leads them forward to stand before the judge. The translators put on their headsets, and when the detainees are standing in a line facing the judge their public defenders line up behind them. For most, today is the first and last time these public defenders will see their clients, and because of the sheer number of people processed every day, they get about twenty minutes with each.

  The third prisoner looks younger than me, maybe even a minor. He has trouble walking in a straight line. His wide-leg jeans are covered in dust and are so wide they look almost like a dress. I remember having a pair just like them in the early nineties, with a stitched red stripe down the side of each leg. I find myself wanting him to turn and see me seeing him, but I have no idea what I’d do if he actually did, or if my presence here would mean anything to him. The chained men line up behind a long desk facing the judge. Their attorneys stand behind them, and some help the men with getting their headsets on for translation. They’ll hear everything the judge is saying in Spanish, but with only minutes between them and their attorneys, there’s only the slimmest chance any of them understand what’s really happening. The lawyers have little time to do anything except tell them to take the plea and outline what will happen. They don’t interview them to document any trauma they may have suffered or any violent crimes they may have witnessed or been subject to, both of which would give them a shot for a non-immigrant U Visa. In exchange for their guilty plea, first-time offenders will not serve any jail time and will not be charged with any felonies or crimes associated with human trafficking or document fraud.

  The bailiff tells everyone to stand or remain standing. The judge, a middle-aged white woman, walks into the courtroom holding some papers and takes her seat. The prisoners are told to raise their right hand and are sworn in. The first eight are processed in a matter of minutes. They mostly listen as the judge reads from her papers and doles out predetermined sentences. Three of the men in the first group are being charged with unauthorized reentry. They’ll avoid felonies as part of the plea agreement, but they’ll be given anywhere from thirty days to six months additional jail time. Most likely they’ll serve it in a private Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) prison. Before sending them off, the judge chastises the men in a way that seems practiced and unfeeling. Why hadn’t they done it the right way? This is a country of laws she tells them. She says she expects they’ve learned their lesson.

  “Good luck to you all. I hope you have no more trouble,” she says.

  Just before they’re taken away, she reminds the men who’ve already served their time and have had no time added that this doesn’t mean they’ll go free. “You’ll be released to Immigration authorities and I’m not sure how long it will take to arrange transport to your country of origin, but you will no longer be held on this charge,” she tells them.

  Immigration authorities will hand the men over to CCA, where they’ll be held for however long their sentence is and then continue to be held indefinitely and no longer under any charge. Over the past two decades the number of sentences doled out in federal courts has boomed dramatically, from 36,564 in 1992 to 75,867 in 2012, and this growth has mainly been the result of one particular offense: unlawful reentry to the United States. That means that this felony offense alone accounts for a 48 percent increase in the total number of sentences handed out by federal courts. A US marshal standing by one of the courtroom walls opens the same chamber door the detainees emerged from earlier, and another one leads the chained men to it. I look at each one of their faces as they disappear beyond the threshold. I can’t imagine anyone in the courtroom actually thinks their troubles are anywhere close to over. The chamber door slams shut behind them.

  I scan the rows, looking for the faces of the men from Puebla we’d encountered just two days ago on the side of the road. I don’t think I see them, but when I try to recall their faces, all I can manage is a fuzzy approximation. I remember we sat by a mesquite tree, and I remember we’d shared a genuine moment, where we recognized each other’s full and complicated humanity, and that the truth of what happened won’t ever be forgotten. The harder I try to bring their faces into focus, the more they seem to shift to looking like members of my family. I remember their faces had seemed warm and youthful to me and that they were tense until I told them my mother was from Puebla. They aren’t among the prisoners, I’m certain, because if they were I know we would recognize each other. They may have been here yesterday, maybe even the day before, or perhaps they’ll be here tomorrow.

  A human life is a totality, so much so that no matter how much we know about a person or a loved one, the individual retains a sublime kernel of mystery that seems to bloom whenever we really look at it. Eighty of them are processed here, like this, every day. Several rounds of people are processed within minutes. It reminds me of a meat grinder, and the justice seems construed solely as predetermined punishment. A detainee raises his hands, one clasped inside the other as if saying a prayer, but he’s only going to scratch his nose. His small movements ring throughout the courtroom because of his chains. Another man, who looks to be in his late thirties, who was caught reentering for the fifth time, answers the judg
e in fluent, nearly unaccented English. Stained nearly completely brown, his billowy white T-shirt hangs on his body, heavy with several days of dried sweat and sand. His arms have the sinewy, dried-out look of someone who labors many hours of most days. Likely he lived somewhere in the United States for years, maybe decades, before being picked up for a moving violation, DUI, or maybe one night he punched someone for a good reason, very little reason, or no reason at all. Judging from how old he looks, he may have had a family wherever he lived, and this might be his continued attempt to rejoin them because he won’t give up on being with them. From her elevated bench, the judge, shrouded in black, looks like those old etchings of plague doctors. She sentences the sinewy man to 180 days in prison, after which he’ll remain in detainment as the state arranges for his removal.