A Hard Job Made Harder by the Pandemic

Javier Hidalgo ’98

I supervise the attorneys in the Family Detention Services program here at RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services). The core of our work is to provide pro bono legal services under a universal representation model for individuals detained at the Karnes County Family Residential Center – one of three family detention centers in the U.S. Family Residential Centers are the only places DHS/ICE is allowed to detain asylum-seeking children with their families.

Beyond our team’s core services, we essentially are an emergency response team; the population we serve is often immediately impacted by policy changes. Our role is to react to do our best to protect the civil rights of the families we serve. Generally, the families detained in Karnes are in a screening process known as Expedited Removal, where USCIS screens asylum- seekers to see if they have a viable claim of fear before placing them in normal asylum proceedings. The screening process is optional and supposed to be a low bar. It is not designed to assess the merits of a claim, but to see if the reason they claim to be seeking asylum in the U.S. could qualify them for protection.

USCIS has made the process increasingly difficult to get past, so they can deport as many asylum-seekers as they can without allowing them to prove their case in asylum proceedings. For the families detained at Karnes, two things are consistently true – families in detention means kids in detention and DHS is required to follow strict protections pertaining to children detained by ICE. Essentially, under this provision, DHS is required to release children without delay, with their families, because DHS is also prohibited from separating families unless they find the parent is a threat to the child’s safety. DHS/ICE rarely complies with these requirements, and we often are fighting to get families released promptly. The conditions at Karnes are in no way adequate to house children, or really anyone. Under normal conditions, most of the children at Karnes are ill with cold and flu-like symptoms. There are hundreds of children sharing a handful of toys, and they are infrequently cleaned. There is really no way to prevent rapid spread of disease among the population.

When we became aware of the threat from COVID-19, we were concerned for the risk of tragedy at Karnes. We observed little or no precautions put in place by ICE and their contractor, the private prison company GEO. There has been little to no testing done. We observed detention center staff coughing and not social distancing, which is not really possible in a detention setting anyway.

Access to counsel was always a problem for families in detention. This was even more so a concern as we sought to transition to work with our clients remotely. Our team was able to navigate the logistics of remote meetings, and remote representation at immigration court, despite the many challenges. Still, the inability to physically meet with our clients greatly hampers the ability to build trust with those traumatized by the circumstances they are fleeing.

The emergency response nature of our team allowed us to pivot quickly to meet the new reality under COVID-19, and quickly pressure DHS/ICE to release the families detained at Karnes. While that fight is ongoing, including through litigation, the population at Karnes has drastically decreased as a result of my team’s efforts to get families out of harm’s way.

Prior to COVID-19, roughly 200 families were detained at Karnes, which amounted to a population of around 600 individuals. Now there are about 25 remaining families, and ICE continues to dig in on releasing them. It seems ICE’s plan is to keep the detention center running at minimal capacity to justify the existence of family detention centers. Fortunately, ours is a team of fighters, who will not give up on winning the freedom of detained children.

Javier Hidalgo ’98 is a supervising attorney at RAICES Texas, a nonprofit that promotes justice by providing free or low-cost legal services to immigrant families and refugees. Prior to joining RAICES, his practice focused on consumer protection, civil rights, and administrative law in New York City.

Clergy Member Offers Insight from the Easter story

The Reverend Lex Breckinridge '70

There is a synchronicity, I believe, in the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has been unfolding in Lent and Eastertide. Lent is that season when we are invited to let go of our attachments to our false gods, the gods of success, wealth and comfort, that numb us to reality. That letting go, if we really do it, can be scary and can feel like death. But that’s not the end of the story. Easter comes right behind Lent. Death isn’t the end of the story.

In the pandemic’s early days, the deep desire was for things to return to “normal.” Yet, as the pandemic has worn on, it has become clear that “normal,” the known, the expected, the unsurprising, won’t be happening. We are in unknown territory, and the old, the familiar, the routine, are not our current reality and won’t be our new reality. What our new reality will look like we can’t yet say, but the Easter story offers us some insight.

There’s no doubt we are all feeling weary and wounded these days. Indeed, all of Creation feels wounded, doesn’t it? So, it’s important to know that when Jesus appeared to his disciples following his death and resurrection, he still bore the wounds of the crucifixion in his hands and his side. The new reality of Jesus’s resurrected life included his wounds. The Resurrection, the new life, the new world it opened up, apparently wasn’t possible without Jesus’s wounds. In fact, if you think about it, it’s only at the place of the wound itself that healing can happen.

How many times in your life have you wanted to run away from your wounds, wish them away? How often have you been ashamed of the broken parts of your life? How often have you tried to ignore the suffering in our world? For me, the answer is plenty of times. Yet, it’s in our suffering that we are most vulnerable. And, it’s in that vulnerability, that humility, that we are finally open enough to change, to let go of our attachments to those false gods that blind us to the real world and our true selves. It’s in our woundedness that we are open enough to allow God to come in, to transform us, to allow God’s Reality to be our reality. Of course, it’s always this way whether we like it or not. It’s one of the great spiritual truths that the place of our deepest suffering is also the place of our greatest strength. And it is this very woundedness, ours and Creation’s, that will also be the place of our healing.

We have a unique opportunity, a sacred opportunity. We can live into this New Reality with the hope that the Resurrection promises. We can bring into this New Reality what works and let go of what hasn’t worked. During these extraordinary times, it’s become so apparent that we care deeply about one another. We have been greeting strangers on our walks and reaching out with offers of help and with vulnerable requests for help. Life is slower. It’s giving us a chance to reflect on our lives now and what they will look like when we ease back into community. Are we going to choose to spend more and better time with our families and friends, more time building healthy relationships, more time in reflection and contemplation? Will we make different and healthier choices on where we put our resources? Will we work to heal this precious planet and not destroy it? We can, these days, see a lot more clearly what’s important – and what’s not.

We are all suffering in one way or another. It all seems absurd and tragic and unjust. Yet, if we can see our suffering as the way forward toward transformation, not something to be denied or avoided or projected onto other people, we will find deep peace and healing. I pray we don’t miss the opportunity.

The Reverend Lex Breckinridge ’70 serves as Rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Medina Wash. Virtual worship services and a daily mix of Scripture studies, reflections, and musical offerings from St Thomas can be found at www.stthomasmedina.org.

The New Isolation: A Force for Creative Good?

Rick Moody '79

The author writes about how his “belief in isolation as a force for creative good has been shaken in this moment of quarantining and self-distancing.”

I used to have strong feelings about the value of isolation for creative artists. For example, when I was in my thirties I worked at Yaddo, the well-known artist’s retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., whose rooms were once inhabited by eminences such as John Cheever, Sylvia Plath, and James Baldwin.

Often, I went in the winter, in heavy snow, and stayed in a small room for two months or so, hard at work on various longer works. Yaddo is an austere, beautiful place, sort of like an old robber baron estate, infrequently updated, now ghostly in its quiet and simplicity. They make your meals for you. All you have to do is work. The isolation of Yaddo and MacDowell (a similar retreat in Peterborough, N.H.), and other residencies, is comprehensive, and if one is a real self-starter in the creative work – novels, or paintings, or concerti, or epic poetry – one can find it rewarding, as well as challenging. You can perform yoga by yourself for two hours, read Tolstoy for two hours, answer a raft of e-mail, and still have eight or ten hours to work – without ever speaking to another soul.

But my belief in isolation as a force for creative good has been shaken in this moment of quarantining and self-distancing. For one, I’m almost never completely alone, at all, as I have my family around me, a smallish family, but a family nonetheless, and, being with them with the kind of intense togetherness of the quarantine is the epitome of not being alone, and frequently just as moving as was the isolation of former days. At the same time, we are physically cut off from the outside world. When one comes to make art, these days, by staying up late, waiting for everyone to go to bed, or by getting up really early and punching out a bunch of notes on an iPhone in the same room where others are sleeping, before anyone arises, one is making work by isolation, but, mainly an outwardly imposed solitude, one shaped not by artistic belief, but by current events.

I don’t really want to write in the externally imposed solitude, or not according to its dictates. There’s a stifling quality to this isolation; its changelessness seems to mean the same things, again and again, wherever and whenever – grief, boredom, worry. I would like, someday, to be again a writer who could gallivant off to Wyoming or Saratoga Springs, to recline on a divan for eight weeks thinking about the history of the short story form. But at present that seems unlikely, even decadent.

And so, in the meantime, there is this – writing this piece on the Ikea couch, while the television is on, my wife is in the kitchen cooking a hot dog, and my son is watching spy ninjas. God’s precious silence, in which I am kissed on the cheek by my adjacency to the remote and infinite, is replaced with creative work in which my loved ones are at hand, and in which these words are hard won by virtue of interruption. Maybe this more inclusive isolation is where we are now, the writing of this time.

Rick Moody is the author of 12 works of fiction and nonfiction. He teaches at Brown University.

We Must Not Let Fear Paralyze Us: Dispatches from Life in China

Shaun Rein '96

On January 24, my family was on a plane headed to Kenya and Tanzania for a long-planned safari. It was the day after Wuhan had been blockaded and 68 million Chinese were unable to leave Hubei Province. We had heard about a mystery illness afflicting Wuhan in late December. The U.S. CDC issued a travel warning to Americans on Jan- uary 6 to not visit China. But until Wuhan was blockaded on January 23, none of us knew how bad the devastation would be. Each night, after a day of seeing lions stalking the great migration, we were glued to our mobile phones.

My family’s flight back to China in February was canceled. Including my niece, Teresa Pan ’15, we ended up roaming around the Middle East and Africa for six weeks in search of a safe spot as we tried to fly back to China. Flights from Dubai and Melbourne to China were canceled. Visas expired, so we moved on. After six weeks, visa runs became impossible. Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt shut their borders. China was starting to appear safer, so we decided to take a circuitous route and return to Shanghai. When the plane landed, we were told to stay in our seats – then we waited. People donning puffy white hazmat suits came onto the plane and started calling people off in random groupings. Finally, they called for my family to get off the plane and thus began our five-hour ordeal through check after check to make sure we did not have the coronavirus.

China was the first country hit by COVID-19, yet by moving quickly has been able to contain it before other countries. I write this while sitting in my office in Shanghai, wearing a mask. Life is normalizing here. We still wear masks out in public and schools are still closed, but business started to rebound in the middle of March. Many people have asked me what the Chinese government and Chinese people did to contain the virus. Basically, the answer is staying away from other people via quarantine – a much more aggressive social distancing than that being practiced in the U.S.

My neighbor’s son, for example, returned from Peddie School in New Jersey when classes were canceled. His entire family was locked into their home. The local CCP neighborhood committee put tape across their door. Every day, medical professionals came to make sure they did not break quarantine as well as to take out their garbage, check on their wellbeing, disinfect their entranceway, and deliver food they ordered via e-grocery stores.

As of this writing, Shanghai has not had a locally transmitted case in weeks, but the city is still on high alert. To eat in a restaurant, I have my temperature checked as I enter the parking lot, then go through a thermal scanner and have my health code checked on my phone. My temperature is checked again in the restaurant while the hostess sprays disinfectant into each hand.

In many ways, I think the switch to e-learning and being stuck at home has been good for my son, Tom, a seventh grader. He has finished his homework quickly and has been able to focus on the engineering and science projects he likes. He has been using CAD to design a ventilator and also has been building a drone from scratch. For those of you who remember, I barely passed Dr. Ellis’s physics class or Dr. Hoashi’s chemistry class. Tom has also focused on learning how to film and edit. I have long wanted to develop a Netflix-like documentary series on China, so it has been good father-son bonding time discussing how we could do a documentary together.

Of course, nothing can replace in-class learning, especially for those lucky enough to attend St. Paul’s, but a little unstructured time is valuable. One important part of my time at SPS was doing an ISP in the Philippines, which led me on my path to Asia. The coronavirus will forever change the world, but we must not let fear paralyze us.

Shaun Rein ’96 is the founder and managing director of the China Market Research Group, headquartered in Shanghai, China, and is the author of three bestselling books, including the War for China’s Wallet and The End of Cheap China. He was recently elected to serve as executive vice president of the SPS Alumni Association.

Former Diplomat Helps Clients Understand Politics and Policies Involving COVID-19

Lew Lukens '82

The U.K. response to COVID-19 has been similar to that in many U.S. states – all “non-essential” employees are working from home, most shops are closed, citizens are allowed to leave home to exercise once a day (alone or with people from their household only) and to shop at grocery stores or pharmacies. The guidelines are less rigid than those in France or Italy, with Brits (like Americans) remaining proud of their individual rights and responsibilities. Social distancing in parks is being challenged as the weather turns warm and families flock to the green space, but in general people are following guidelines.

Similar to other countries, the British government struggled initially with its response, trying to balance public health and safety with the economic imperatives of keeping the country open. Just as the U.S. Congress has passed record-breaking stimulus packages to assist American workers and businesses, so too the U.K. Treasury announced an enormous package of financial assistance to workers and businesses. And, as in the U.S., healthcare workers have become the new heroes, with the pandemic reigniting pride in the U.K.’s National Health Service.

My life hasn’t changed that drastically. I work for Signum Global Advisors, a New York-based policy advisory firm that helps clients understand the intersection of policy and markets. I specialize in U.S. politics and U.S.-U.K. relations. We have been incredibly busy helping clients understand the politics and policies involved with COVID-19. I am fortunate that I can work from home. I am also fortunate to live a quarter mile from Kensington Gardens, and I take advantage of that most days to get out of the apartment and get some exercise. My wife and I have carved out separate “work areas” at home, and the most difficult aspect of this is the uncertainty of when it will be safe to travel internationally and see our family in the U.S. again.

My British friends and colleagues are mystified by what they see in the U.S. at this time. The notion that some of our states have strict lockdowns and others have no policy in place seems counterintuitive to them. Like many people around the world, they watch President Trump’s daily press events with a combination of fascination and horror. Many Brits have spent the last three years confused by Trump’s dismantling of the multilateral, international world that the Brits helped us build and that contributed so much to the U.K.’s prosperity, and the British government has struggled to balance its always- important partnership with the United States with its still-relevant relationship with the European Union. On a range of issues – climate change, Iran, 5G technology, trade disputes – the U.K. has come down on the side of its European allies (often to the chagrin of the Trump administration). President Trump’s handling of the pandemic and his suspension of contributions to the World Health Organization has added another irritant to the “special relationship.”

COVID-19 has also been a wake-up call for British people about potential negative effects of Brexit. The fact that the British government lost out on shipments of critical equipment for healthcare workers because of a disconnect between European and U.K. bureaucrats brought home to people here the reality that, by this time next year, the U.K. will be much more alone in dealing with crises than it is now. This feeling has been exacerbated by a sense that the U.S. is no longer the reliable partner it once was, leaving Brits to wonder what the U.K.’s place is in a post-Brexit, “America First” world. All that said, these folks are professionals at “keeping calm and carrying on” and that’s what they are doing.

Lewis Lukens ’82 served as a career diplomat for 30 years, including as a deputy assistant secretary of state and U.S. ambassador. He is now based in London as senior partner with Signum Global Advisors. His piece was written in mid-April.

Reflecting on Life in New Orleans, a City of Caring and Resilience

Whitney Stewart ’77

Spring is festival season in New Orleans, but the city is oddly calm for the first time since Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure shut us down 15 years ago. Near-empty streetcars rattle down St. Charles Avenue, and mockingbird songs echo through unbusy neighborhoods. The French Quarter is a still zone, but the CBD is bustling with front line heroes scurrying in and out of hospitals.

Our gorgeous weather now invites runners and walkers into our parks, but people weave this way and that to stay six feet apart. The golf courses are playgrounds, where friends wave and smile beneath masks. “Let’s have a crawfish boil when this is over,” they shout. But nobody knows when that might be, or what losses we’ll suffer between now and then. Many in New Orleans are already struggling to eat and pay rent. Social distancing is an alien concept in this convivial town. Staying home means saving lives, but what is New Orleans without jazz at Snug Harbor or dine-in fried chicken at Willie Mae’s? Without dancing at Greek Fest, or, for the first time in 50 years, without music at Jazz Fest? This spring, New Orleans is hurting.

We’re mourning many deaths, including that of our beloved jazz pianist and educator, Ellis Marsalis, Jr. As of today, May 5, 2020, 6,575 people in New Orleans have been infected; 453 have died. The overall daily rate of new infections has declined, and for that we can give credit to Governor Edwards and Mayor Cantrell for taking strong measures. We also give thanks to our champions – medical, grocery, pharmacy, food service, and delivery – who keep us safe. Any death is a tragedy and, in this city, the horror is made worse by the fact that the virus has hit the black and brown communities the hardest. Statistics highlight persistent health disparities in low-income communities that result in loss of lives. Our city can’t be declared healthy until all communities are thriving.

New Orleans is a tight-knit family, a city of resilience. Members of the SPS Form of 1977 saw that firsthand when they volunteered to build houses for musicians left homeless by Katrina. Now, chefs such as Isaac Toups of Toups Meatery are cooking free takeout meals for people in need. The Chef’s Brigade is feeding healthcare workers and first responders while supporting local culinary talent. Nola Brewing Company and Porchjam Distillery are making hand sanitizer, while GoodWood Nola, a design and fabrication firm, is crafting personal protective gear. Local musicians perform “Live from the Porch” to raise funds for gig workers, and Defend New Orleans supports Southern Solidarity, an organization that makes food and hygiene packs for unhoused community members.

These are but a few of the ways we help each other. New Orleans has come back from disaster once, and will do it again. As Chef Toups said on Instagram, New Orleans is a “take-care-of-ourselves city” that “always puts it back together and puts people first.” Just yesterday, we learned that 10 of the best chefs and restauranteurs in New Orleans made the James Beard Awards short list, including Chef Toups himself. When the time is right, socializing won’t be distant any more, and the food, culture, and people of this unique city will be back in full force.

Whitney Stewart ’77 is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction books for toddlers to young adults. When she is not writing, she teaches mindfulness and meditation to children.