Hell is a Home Depot Parking Lot

For L.

Hell is a Home Depot parking lot. Hell is B18, a literal basement where for about 24 hours after being kidnapped from a Home Depot parking lot where you were looking for work and taking advantage of the weekly laundry truck that parks outside the day labor center you go to daily. That fenced off space in the back of the parking lot was a place you would seek safety, community, a meal. On your back you carried all you had gathered between Mexico and Los Angeles and that morning, you were walking to get your laundry and you couldn’t make it fast enough inside the blue gates. Masked men in full military gear shook the gates as the staff person of the day labor center wrapped a chain to lock the center and protect the ones who made it inside. That was not you, not today. It was you one the day of a drill. It was you just a few days earlier when there was a training on what your rights are or were supposed to be.

What was once a haven became hell as the agents grabbed you and took you away.

You didn’t recognize me at first when I stood behind one side of the glass in B18. Your hands folded in front of you, as you were instructed by the guards, you smiled a little with I pulled my hair out of the claw clip and I let it fall messily, the way it usually was when I would see you at the day labor center. You told me you wanted to go back. I reassured you that was fine but that there were other options too. I told you that we would fight for release, for bond. That we had the money for bond. You repeated that you wanted to go back. I said ok. Who do I contact here for you.

No-one .

Who do I contact back in your country for you?

No-one.

Where can I go get your things for you?

Back at the day labor center- but you called it by the name of the org. The org that I ultimately am responsible for.

Hell is wherever they will take you next, wherever you are now. I haven’t looked it up on the ICE locator web site before I wrote this. Based on what others have told me and have told their families, hell is actually really cold, a privately run detention center surrounded by barbed wire and later after layer of tall gates and buzzers. Hell is where you may get one meal a day and a cup to drink from a toilet. That’s what the others have told their family.

Before they take you to the next level of hell, away from that glass window and before I have the luxury of leaving into the driveway where families are lined up screaming and crying for their loved one, you tell the guard something in Spanish. He calls me back over because he doesn’t understand.

“I want to sign to be deported, “ you tell him and me. He says that’s not his job. I see the fear in your eyes before they take you back and I tell you that you need to tall someone inside. Hell is a bureaucracy.

All the prayers and acts of penance for sins not mine but of the citizenship I bear from birth couldn’t save you from hell.