Peanut Butter Burrito

Careless Detention

The Washington Post has just put up part 3 of their 4-part series on health care in immigrant detention. It's absolutely stellar and I hope they win a Pulitzer Prize for it - they've got video, copies of every major document they talk about, it's just great. I can barely keep track of all the thoughts I'm having reading through this series:

- Why is this issue getting so much attention now? I love it, but why not before? Is it because the FOIA requests from the Post and Times just came back? (I suspect so.) Will anyone focus beyond health care on, say, the travesty of lack of counsel that even children, asylum seekers, and the mentally ill are facing?

- Multi-award winning Haitian author Edwidge Danticat (recommended to all) is the niece of a man who died due to terrible care in detention. Wow. I hope she writes a big old novel about it and Oprah plugs it and embarasses DHS some more.

- One of the lawyers for the Korean woman in the series is an Equal Justice Works fellow in Florida whose project was basically the model for mine - she sent me her whole application and was super nice. That made me feel better than I can explain - she's me, two years from now.

- I need to not read the comments on these stories because they anger me too much. I'm especially disturbed by the ease in which people call anyone and everyone touched by the immigration system "illegals" who have forfeited all their rights (including, apparently, being kept on their psych meds so they don't commit suicide) - even if, like the Korean woman, they are actually legal immigrants whose minor crimes have tripped a deportation ground.

- Intellectually, I know that prisoners regularly die shackled to hospital beds, and that people don't get visits with family before they die or are deported. But having to keep reading it in these stories is really painful.

- Is President Obama here yet??

short hits

- It didn't last. Becca woke up at 3 last night to eat, and yelped at 6, although that time her pacifier satisfied her. Oh well. She's not even 4 months old, so I'm not busting out the bells and electrified mazes or whatever to make her do anything yet.

- We went to a breakfast party today, which involved a lot of people in a small apartment, but Becca was incredibly well-behaved, even when the cooking made the fire alarm go off and we had to gather outside to escape the horrible shrieking noise. Only downside: My baby SMELLS LIKE BACON.

- The last paper is 8 pages long, meaning it's halfway done and due Thursday. Dragging...myself....over...finish line....

- Edit: If you like Becca pictures, there are a couple dozen new ones in her 4th month album, thanks in part to a great visit from her grandparents and uncle.

Happy Mother's Day!

BEST PRESENT EVER: On Friday, Becca slept through the night. I woke up at 5:22 full of milk, checked on her, and found her sucking her fingers in her sleep. Yesterday, she did it again. Crazy baby! I also got my first-ever Mother's Day breakfast in bed and a newspaper from Daddy.

Happy day to all the mamas out there!

good times

So yes, I tried out for Jeopardy on Wednesday. It was...well, it was weird, because I knew exactly what to expect, and I recognized the staffers, but this time it was for me instead of for Dan. It was great. I think I killed the written test. I won a mug for knowing the number of games in the 2nd-longest Jeopardy streak ever (not hard when you're married to the guy with the 3rd-longest). Playing a mock game with real buzzers is pretty thrilling, even if it is off a computer screen in a small hotel conference room.

I hope I get on, of course. Dan is convinced they'll issue me the Call, not only for being a human interest story because I'm the Bride of Pawson, but because the number of non-white ladies on the show tends to be, like, one a month, so I'm valuable for breaking up the string of nerdy white dude teachers, writers, and students. Makes sense to me, but if it doesn't happen, I'll try out another year. No worries.

Last night we had a big dinner for the Record where we got a private room at a local restaurant and spent a ton of money, since we had an unexpectedly crazy surplus this year and though we could go out  with some style for once. I was a little worried people wouldn't rise to the challenge of the per-hour spending minumum for the room, but once I saw the first round of oysters and wine bottles come out, I knew we would be just fine. We ended up with a four-figure bill that was crazy, but actually less than the paper gets paid for one full-page color ad from a firm. Thanks Uncle Quinn!

Dan and I had a few drinks (we rarely get to), came home to find Becca had weathered her first bedtime without us very well, and proceeded to engage in a silly iTunes singalong of assorted showtunes and 90s rap before passing out. Just like the old days.

I've still got one more paper. It doesn't exist yet, and the in-laws are in this weekend, so not much will get done.  I'll be one happy girl when I finally get it off my back.

Occupational Hazard

On a much lighter note, yesterday I got a hickey for the first time in...eight years? Ten? FROM THE BABY. Becca has recently decided that everything near her mouth must be apprehended and sucked on, and she doesn't quite have the motor skills to pick up her all of her toys yet, but if something is right in front her her, like MOM'S ARM, all bets are off.

I was carrying her around the house kind of sideways yesterday, and she started gumming my bicep, and then she latched on hard like the biggest, cutest leech you've ever seen, but I still didn't think much of it until I pulled her off and there was a mottled red mark on my arm the size of my thumb, which is still there today.

I was amazed. "Is that...a HICKEY?" I asked the baby, but she wasn't really interested since she had already shoved her fist into her mouth and started sucking anew. This was not in my baby book.

More Tales from Detention

I have to link to the NYT's big story on detainee deaths, which includes the full list they got from their FOIA request and a disappointingly boilerplate statement from ICE. The stories are absolutely heartrending. Three years, 66 deaths, and 1 out of 5 were suicides.

I keep thinking about what I could have done for Maya Nand, who is the kind of person I'll run into far too often during my work, a family man who made a mistake that turned into the kind of deal dozens of people take every day - plead guilty to misdemeanor domestic violence, serve no time, take anger management classes. No one is supposed to end up dying, shackled to a hospital bed, at the end of this. But he did.

I keep thinking that maybe if I were his lawyer, if I called and shouted and got colleagues in Arizona to show up at the detention center and raise holy hell, I might have been able to help save his life. Maybe. What I couldn't do, though, is keep him from being deported to Fiji. The criminal sentence probably made him an "aggravated felon" (a lovely Orwellian term when applied to a misdemeanant who served no time), which is game over for almost everyone. This exact situation is not even new. Maybe if I had seen him before he applied for citizenship. All I could have said, though, is don't apply, and hope that ICE never catches up with you. But they could, any time. The moment you pled guilty, you gave them a reason to show up and take everything from you.

I keep thinking that there's only so much lawyers can do; a few new agency heads and strongly worded memos could change things a dozen lawsuits would take years to affect, and a new executive and Congress could change things that lawsuits can never change. I keep thinking that we need a new president who has the decency to be ashamed of what we've done.

Roasted Veggies on Whole Wheat Pasta

Dan and I went to Houston's recently to have the best veggie burger in existence, and when we went they had some sort of gas line problem that resulted in their fry-making doohickey being out of order, and so I got roasted vegetables instead. And they were AMAZING. I thought I'd try it for myself.

The first attempt was only partially successful because I cooked everything together and so the broccoli was overcooking before the carrots and potatoes were even soft in the middle. I fixed it the second time, though, by baking the carrots and potatoes for about 15 minutes by themselves. I used red potato, baby carrots, broccoli crowns, and red onions (and I think sweet potato, asparagus, and/or brussels sprouts would be lovely), and tossed the veggies with olive oil, salt and pepper before cooking, and with a few spoonfuls of balsamic vinegar and Italian seasoning afterward.

I served the veggies over whole wheat fettucine that had been tossed with a LITTLE olive oil and margarine, and crumbled feta cheese on the top. Sweet and healthy - good stuff.

Saturday Night

The graduation update is as follows: the 3L paper is submitted, and I've got two more 15-20 pagers due by the 14th. The good news is that largely due to Dan kicking me out of the house again today, the first one is 12 2/3 pages long (every fraction counts!) and due to be killed off tomorrow. The baby is sleeping peacefully and I should have been in bed an hour ago.

Instead, I'm sipping wine and studying world capital flashcards in anticipation of my Jeopardy audition on Wednesday. Is this remotely necessary? No. But it's really fun, and we're revisiting our awesome mnemonics. I linked Malawi with its capital, Lilongwe, via the UB40 song "I Want to Make You Sweat" (A la la la la long!). I linked Grenada with St. George's because George Bush wants to throw grenades all over the world. Dan reminded me that Eritrea is choking the air of Ethiopia so it gets asthma (Asmara); you can gamble (Gambia) with jewels (Banjul); and when there was genocide in East Timor, the world dilly-dallied (Dili).

I might have had my husband completely screw up my expectations by becoming a superchampion on my favorite game show, but damn it, I'm getting the chance to try out, and I'm going to have a great time.

And now, to bed.

Baby Galactus

I will lick this planet first, and devour it later...

Tales from Detention

PT-Law Mom's post reminds me that I haven't posted about immigration in a while - spending all those hours writing my 3L paper about it kept it off the blog inadvertently. Although I did mention the general crappy state of the court and detention system in my last Record column ever last week.

Rest assured things have not gotten any less outrageous. Here are a just a few charming stories I learned while writing my paper:

- In Jan 2007, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against overcrowding at the Otay Mesa detention facility in So Cal; and in response, officials transferred 200 detainees out. Good, right? Except they were allegedly awoken at 3 AM, put into a holding tank so small they had to take turns sitting for 20 hours, and then bused to San Diego or Arizona, and there was evidence they hand-picked the transferees as the ones who had spoken with the ACLU.

- In a youth detention center in Texas, children were beaten and sexually abused, and then when they tried to report it, officials allegedly transferred the lead whistleblower teenager away and punished others with lack of food and sleeping on the floor. One guard was already sentenced to seven years in prison, but a lawsuit filed in Feb is trying to prove it went much deeper than just her abuse.

- Just yesterday, ICE actually admitted negligence in the death of a detainee (and asylum seeker) from untreated penile cancer. The doctor at the facility disagreed with an outside oncologist's recommendation he be hospitalized for a biopsy because the procedure would be "elective" since he wasn't in imminent danger of dying.

Yeah, I think we've got some work to do.