“Can you bring my passport?”
I was frantically putting on shoes and yoga pants to hustle out the door to pick up my child from his Baltimore City public school when he asked me that question. It was about the 10th call between us in about an hour, at a time when he should have been in class.
But this was not a normal morning.
“Mom, we’re on lockdown,” he said on his first call, around 7:58 a.m. I jumped to the terrifying conclusion that a shooter was on the loose, but the danger was another type of unruly and violent entity: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. My son’s teacher got on the call to confirm that agents had detained someone outside the school, and that the rest of the kids were safe.
But are they? Is any child really safe if they beg their mother to bring proof of American citizenship to school so they don’t get kidnapped, too?
I hesitated to write this column because I am very protective of my son and his privacy, but I need you to know that we are all at risk. Your whiteness, your Americanness, your proximity to the fanciness of the fancy will not save you.
So what are you going to do about it?
I am not naive. I am the descendant of kidnapped Africans, so I know that a shaky sense of security from one’s own government is very much in keeping with the American tradition. It is. The federal government is, at this moment, trying to expeditiously purge my rights as a Black American, no matter what my passport says. This is not a case of someone not believing in a threat until it comes for them. They’ve been coming for me.
Just last month, The Banner wrote about how ICE agents were posted outside two Southeast Baltimore schools. Like vultures. Like a warning to all of us to watch our backs. We know kids who go to those schools, and I told my child I hoped ICE would not come to his school, too.
But they did. It’s a travesty.
This was a heinous act on school property. I had to step past the site where this happened to retrieve my very nervous kid. How do I know he was nervous? He called me three times between the time I got out of the car and the moment I could grasp his hand in the school office.
He would hate me telling you that, because he’s a big middle schooler who is violently allergic to any suggestion that he is not a mature and important almost-adult. The way he reached for me, though, told me he didn’t have time to feign coolness. He needed his mom.
But he knows now what I have always known. His mother cannot protect him from agents who come to terrorize a school community. The man and woman who were taken were unable to protect children from watching them being dragged away. There is nothing we can do, and I am convinced that the architects of these dreadful policies want you to know that. They want us to be helpless. And I don’t have an answer for that.
It feels like a failure as a parent because I cannot make the monsters go away. I cannot banish them with a wish. I am powerless to assure him that more of his Latino friends are not going to watch as their parents are roughly pulled away in broad daylight. I cannot satisfyingly answer all the questions he has about where ICE takes you, when they will release you and to where. Twelve-year-olds are not ready to admit they need anything from their parents, so if he’s full of queries, he is scared.
I have no conclusions, no Mister Rogers lessons that sum this up to leave us with hope until the next episode. We are entrenched in this disgusting chapter, and all we can do is look out for each other. Make videos to witness. Be aware. And believe those who tell you this is true.
I know it’s true. I saw it in my child’s eyes. I can’t fix it. That’s maybe what makes me the saddest of all.
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