A lark who is learning to pray

"Do you have a rubber band?" Michelle asked me after clearing the metal detectors and before passing through the door made of metal bars that opened upon direction of one of the guards. "Umm, a silly band" I answered, handing her a red one shaped like maracas. It seemed pretty festive and completely out of place in that shithole.

The metal bars slid open. We passed through, along with a little pack of Hispanic people carrying small children, and waited as the doors slid shut behind us. The second set of bars slid open.

Small, urinal like stalls faced a series of windows. On the other side of the windows, a series of young, Hispanic men sat in prison clothes, smiling eagerly with phones in hand. Alejandro, a young man who attended the high school where I began my teaching career, smiled excitedly at his former teacher through the glass. I sat back on the small plastic chairs while she spoke to him, staring at the ground until the embarrassing tears cleared my eyes.

Immigration Status: "U.S. Citizen" I wrote on the form that allowed me to visit detainees. No wonder no one in his family had come to visit. "I need state I.D." the guard barked at us. Number two reason no one in his family had been able to visit him. "Hey, what can you bring them in here?" I asked a woman sitting behind us in the waiting area. "Clothes" she answered "only clothes. Not even a belt". "Phone cards?" I asked "Food? Money?" "Clothes" she answered "not even a phone number. Like they gonna try to kill someone with a piece of paper" she mumbled. Just Tío Sam making sure that when they're dropped at the border in some town they've never seen before that they have exactly zero resources. Not even a phone number. Just making sure they're fucked.

Alejandro has a face that looks like it's always smiling. I really thought he was smiling until I spoke to him over the phone and through the glass and realized no one would be smiling while they talked about the things he was talking about. People pressed babies up to the windows. Desperate hand prints smudged the visitors' side of the window from top to bottom.

Alejandro stood up abruptly. "I have to go" he told Michelle. I looked furtively at the other guys. They were all standing up. And then they were gone. An older, Hispanic visitor with a definite abuela vibe comforted Michelle as we waited for the bars to re-open. "It will be okay" she said in English. I am glad that she thinks so and hope that it will be true for her, and her detainee.

We exited through rows of fencing topped with razor wire and enclosed with barred gates. It was hard to believe that this deportation holding tank was built so um, sturdily simply to house non-violent offenders, people whose only "crime" was illegal entry to the United States, as opposed to murdering a few folks, as the level of security seemed to suggest. I found myself wondering if Charles Manson might have less security that your average person awaiting deportation. We made the two and half hour drive back to Atlanta.

I stood in our morning meeting on Monday feeling a little dazed. The music teacher announced that the kids would practice "The Sound of Music" for their upcoming performance. I have always hated that song. The music slowly started and the kids began to sing. As they sang they made their hands into flying birds and touched their hearts. They sounded like angels. I watched as one of the most cognitively damaged kids I have ever experienced made his hands into the shape of a bird, gazed upward and sang.

And then I was crying again and quickly exited, eyes on the floor.