No Safe Place to Land

Sometimes you can’t close your eyes. You can’t look away. You get fixated on what you see, and when you close your eyes after a long day at work, you see it happen all over again. You see grown men in uniforms pushing exhausted little children back into the Rio Grande River so that they can, what, float back to Mexico?

In an email to his boss, paramedic and Texas State trooper Nicholas Wingate complained he was ordered to push migrants who emerged from the river exhausted with life-threatening injuries back into the water where they would likely drown.

Still believing in the mission to “secure the border from bad people”, Wingate wrote, “I believe we have stepped over a line. We need to recognize that these are people who are made in the image of God and need to be treated as such.”

Mexican migrant workers have been recruited to fill our nation’s cheap labor gap and expand the fortunes of American business since World War II. Official immigration policies aside, businesses today actively recruit, hire, and profit from illegal border crossings. Mexicans on the other side of the Rio Grande risk their lives knowing jobs await them and believing they will find a safe place to land.

But no safe place exists here for the majority who cross. Instead, like fish, they get hooked on brutal razor wire. If they’re lucky, a state trooper with a moral conscience might help cut them out of their bind. But most follow the order to look the other way. If migrants make it out of the water, there will be other troopers ready to shove them off a shore that until 1848 was part of their own homeland—without a meal or consideration for their wellbeing. This is inhumane, unwarranted, reprehensible, and evil.

If this is the new and greater America Greg Abbott and others of his ilk envision, let’s remember Goya’s vision expressed through this caption on his painting "The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

To all those who will continue to brave the waters of the Rio Grande, I dedicate this beautiful song.