A NEW HAMPSHIRE YANKEE ON ICE
By Deborah Sherman de Santos
A small taste of a book in progress:
Chapter I - ICED
November 24, 2008 I was a normal wife and mother. Thanksgiving
was three days away. I’d started my day feeding the chickens and
goats on our small farm, did some shopping, spent time on the phone
coordinating schedules for the multi-family dinner planned for turkey
day and took my teenage son to his jujitsu class. November 26 found
me sitting in a police station looking into an abyss of international
politics stemming from the end of the Cold War and coordinating the
dissolution of the various pets and belongings that had been a man’s
life. My mind scrambled to keep up with everything I was being told,
everything that had happened and that I had just learned. I stood lost
in a jungle of government agencies and national egos. The task facing
me was to find navigable pathways back to safety for a close friend,
Audrius, and if I was to help him, for myself. Thanksgiving was a day
away and totally forgotten. I’d been ICED.
Well over a million people are ICED by our government every year in
the United States. They aren’t killed. That would be the old meaning
of the term. This is the updated, twenty-first century version where
people are left walking around, existing under crushing mental torture,
perhaps wishing they’d been killed instead. ICE stands for Immigration
and Customs Enforcement. It is part of DHS, the Department of Homeland
Security. They are responsible for handling the detention and deportation
of immigrants within this country. Please note: I did not say “illegal”
immigrants. By the summer of 2009, it was reported that nearly 19,000
– more than half – of the immigrants held in detention (prison)
by ICE were guilty of no crime. These detained immigrants who are not
criminals have none of the protections that are legally granted to murderers,
rapists, drug dealers and the like and so they can and are held indefinitely,
some for years, and under conditions that it is illegal to maintain
criminals in. Some are held in ways that, if the same were done to a
dog, would land the caretaker in jail.
One of the first things that happens to a person who has
been ICED is they suddenly start to speak in acronyms: ICE, DHS, BIA
. . . for those who are still walking around unaffected it begins to
sound like their friend’s speech has been taken over by some form
of gibberish. The acronyms give comfort. Like the inhabitants of a Harry
Potter book who refuse to speak the name of the ultimate evil, not speaking
the name of these agencies leaves a person with a shred of hope, allows
the illusion that their own government has not become the resident evil
in their life. Only corrupt governments attack and destroy the lives
of their own people and this is the United States. This doesn’t
happen here – and so those who have been ICED speak in acronyms
and hope that they will miraculously be spared.
According to a recent survey, one in five residents living
within the United States is a recent immigrant or closely related to
one. ICE looms over every one of their lives, an unfeeling predator
lying in wait to pounce at the first sign of vulnerability. Nearly 400,000
people were detained and deported by ICE in the last year. Many have
families and loved ones who are American citizens or are living legally
here in the United States holding down vital jobs in the fields of health
care, national defense, aerospace, agriculture, engineering, computers
and child care to name just a few. Citizen parents are helpless to prevent
their adult children, brought here as refugees while still very young,
from being deported to dangerous countries those children do not know
for absolutely no offense or a minor offenses that even the last three
men elected to our presidency have committed. Citizen children watch
in horror as their father or mother is taken away in handcuffs ripped
from them with no regard as to those children’s future. Recently
one boy in Boston on witnessing his father, a legal resident and single
parent, being taken away from him, asked the agents where they were
taking his daddy. An agent turned to the 10 year old child and said,
“You are never going to see your daddy again,” a cruel and
unnecessary answer to a frightened child that will ultimately travel
forward and affect the lives of his future friends, co-workers and neighbors,
courtesy of ICE. There’s a whole lot of pretending going on.
Words come easily to me, they always have, but sitting
down to write out what has happened to me, my family and my friend,
Audrius since the United States government decided to dictate to us
who we could and could not love and associate with is incredibly painful.
It is now a year and a half since Audrius was taken from our neighborhood
that fall day. He sits in a prison cell still. An immigration judge,
seeing the evidence, recognized the danger Audrius faced if deported
and granted him deferral of removal under the Commission Against Torture
(CAT), but the ICE prosecutor has filed an appeal with the Board of
Immigration Appeals (BIA). After using the fact that Audrius was under
oath to force him to state things that could increase his chances of
being killed to a near certainty she is now doing her best to insure
that he is deported to precisely that fate. To write this all out, to
tell what has been done to our much loved friend, to us . . . to me
over the last year and a half is to relive the tears, the pain, the
terror and the hopelessness. My mind is reluctant to cooperate. This
experience is relegated to those things that one would wish to forget.
It is my habit to take frightening and hard experiences
from my past and turn them into funny stories to tell at parties years
later. A story about my first trip away from New England on my own where
a wrong turn found me lost in West Virginia’s Appalachia at 6am
on a Sunday morning with a pregnant horse, a van driver who had just
had an epileptic fit and a van with faulty brakes is a sure party pleaser.
The story I am writing here will never see such a humorous retelling.
Most people who survive what is being done to us do not speak of it
again . . . ever! This is not a tale of a mishap from which I am rescued
in the end by quirky characters who show up just when they are needed.
It has no reassuring tale of human compassion coming through to save
the day in amusing ways. This is the story of how a citizen can become
the random victim of a heartless act, not even directed at anyone personally,
just done because that person was there. It is the story of the violation
of a 60 year old Yankee grandmother’s life by nameless and faceless
government agents using the power of laws our government admits are
unjust and unfair. I grew up in one of the oldest families in the United
States of America. My ancestors founded this country. I thought I was
safe from such things. I was wrong.
