Photo/Ted Quant
Editor’s note: These are excerpts from “Speed Rail to Love”, by Terrie Best, published in OB Rag in Ocean Beach, California
“After watching my friends at the Minority Humanitarian Foundation (MHF) create a modern humanitarian speed rail—nightly trips getting asylum seekers off the side of the road where ICE dumps them and on to . . . their sponsor families—I have been profoundly moved . . .
Using social media, several resourceful people have created a moving system of care that is changing everything.
The gaps to care are addressing a devastating humanitarian crisis . . . for example, the MHF raised $6,000 in 5 hours on Facebook to pay for an acid burn victim’s eye surgery. The surgery . . . allowed this victim of a terrorist act to close his eye for the first time in months.
What is being torn down is our country’s moral fiber and what is being restored for many is a fast track to love and safety. That’s the work of the MHF speed rail and its enemy is ICE. Jack-booted thugs as obstacles to love and safety? Yeah, I’ve wanted to help for a long time. Like Bernie Sanders said, I will fight for people I do not know.
MHF has a grant that gives them the ability to Lyft folks to wherever the care is. . . . It is a speed rail to home and to love, with care stops along the way.
And today I was just one stop . . . on the journey of Lady 1 and Lady 2.
Both women had just been released from Otay Detention Facility . . . with an unshackling and a gruff “welcome to America.” . . . Along with an ankle monitor and some papers, this is legal asylum-seeking in America. This is “doing it the right way.”
As the ladies stepped onto my street, . . . the smaller one nearly collapsed. . . she explained her dizziness while I tried to take her plastic webbed potato sack . . . to ease her load. . . this potato sack, issued by ICE, was all she owned in the world. . . .
I tried to put myself in her place. I had been to jail, but never for simply seeking asylum and nothing like Otay Detention. I had been homeless but never homeless without a country . . . I always had my family. . . I knew nothing of real fear. . . .
As horrified as I was at what they had endured . . . it was a fast trip on the MHF rail . . . Later, pictures were sent of Ladies 1 and 2 snuggled in their individual beds at the hotel with plates of food. . . they [would soon be] sent to their loved ones across the country. They said it was like a dream.
