Immigration Justice Is A Jesus Issue

It was a muddy and miserable Saturday night in the Autumn of 2015. Cold. Rainy. The kind of rain that caresses the earth all through the day and leaves your bones shivering at night. I found myself on the slippery slope of an invisible border between two European countries.

While thousands of people waited on one side of that fence, we ran back and forth through the slippery, thick mud to a station offering diapers to mothers. It was a trek, even in the best of conditions and these weren’t the best of conditions. Carrying a size 0 diaper to the mother of a very new human, I heard the sharp ‘Go. Go. Go.’ The sound tore jagged rips into the air. They were loading the buses again with refugees.

With permission to be present, we took our assigned positions behind the uniforms, behind the cattle fences, behind the sharp, stacatoed orders of, ‘Go. Go. Go.’ and we waited.

The cattle fences were moved. The guard gave the order. The crowd pushed. The guards barked and they pushed back on the people. And then the scream came — the scream of a mother being separated from her 8 year old little boy. In the sway of the crowd, the boy tried to go back to his mom. The mom tried to come forward to her son. But the tides of humanity wait for nobody and the boy was pushed through the gate. A volunteer picked him up and tried to hand him back over…