Dear Carlos. There’s unfairness and tragedy in the way you died, at 16 in a holding cell at a border patrol station in Weslaco, alone since family separation policies took you from the older sister you came to the US with. You’re the sixth minor to die in custody. Like them you shouldn’t have died. You had the flu and your fever reached 103 and yet instead of sending you to emergency they put you in a cell with another sick boy so you wouldn’t contaminate others. The guards were supposed to check on you per the orders of the nurse practitioner who had seen you but didn’t. There are a lot of irregularities that have and will continue to surface as a result of your death. Already border patrol agents have been ordered not to rely on video to check on someone who is sick, but need to go in and see for themselves and take their temperature. You wanted to come to the US to be with your older brother who is here and works in construction. You didn’t make it, you didn’t get to see the joyful side of life, you didn’t get to experience love except from your family. But you accomplished a lot you didn’t expect to accomplish. ProPublica wrote a long article about you and through it hopefully through other such articles and the press it generated you are becoming an example and a symbol of how we treat minors at the border, and because of that, maybe things will change more than just ordering agents go into cells to check on those who are ailing. On behalf of all those who will end up benefiting from your short life, I want to thank you. I am sure that doesn’t make up for the loss you are to your parents and siblings, but even they would feel gratified by what amounts to a sacrificial life. Your death contributes to putting our system of treating migrants and refugees to shame, and that’s why to me at least it was not in vain.
December 2019
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Where Nuclear Fallout and Climate Change Meet
In 1954 the US conducted nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, 67 tests in fact. Before leaving they took the radioactive materials and plutonium and buried them under a dome on a low lying atoll. But climate change has come to the Marshall Islands, and the rising seas are a threat to that dome and may destroy it because rising seas could unseal the toxic bomb inside the dome. But nothing is being done. Meanwhile the Marshallese are experiencing a much higher level of thyroid cancer. Many families are and have been affected. It is safe to say the conditions have created a crisis for them. Climate change is affecting the whole of the islands, no more pristine coral reefs, high water temperatures, as high as 96 degrees, are killing thousands of black angelfish, pufferfish and other marine life, and the rising sea threatens inundations. The government is planning to build sea walls, but how long they will last is not known, nor how long before another nuclear disaster occurs. Several countries now have nuclear weapons besides the US, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, France, several are on their way like Iran and North Korea, or are now trying to obtain them like Saudi Arabia, not to speak of non-state entities like terrorist groups. While the Marshall Islands is an example of the consequences of what the pursuit of those weapons and the accompanying testing inevitably entails, they also stand for what happens when the unforeseen happens, when those consequences intersect with climate change and the problems it brings. Hopefully the whole situation and the dangers it poses will be a reminder of how dangerous nuclear weapons are for the world, for the survivors, for the countries involved and for how unpredictable disposing of radioactive materials can be. And perhaps in an oblique way it will also be a reminder of how imperative addressing climate change now is.