On Oct. 27, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers took two children and their father from outside a middle school in Durango, Colorado. The kids and their parents, who were originally from Colombia, had come to the United States seeking safety and opportunity, as so many immigrants have done before them. They had applied for legal asylum, with paperwork to prove it. Now they’re separated, traumatized and afraid.
This is not the first time ICE has severed families in Durango. A few weeks earlier, another father was detained while driving his children to school and was later deported to Mexico in the middle of the night. In an attempt to keep the Colombian family from likewise being whisked away under cover of darkness, a rapid response team put out a call for people to stand watch at Durango’s ICE facility. More than a hundred showed up, linking arms to form a peaceful blockade. Throughout the night, as temperatures fell below freezing, protesters took shifts — huddling under blankets, sharing hot beverages, chanting and playing music. The horror unfolding inside the facility stood in sharp contrast with the love and support from the community outside.
I was part of the Durango community for 12 years. Then, this past August, my husband, daughter and I did much the same thing that the Colombian family had done, albeit under very different circumstances: We left behind the familiarity of home and migrated north to start a new life in a new country, seeking a more hopeful future for our family. We now live in a small town in coastal British Columbia, and it’s from this new vantage that I’ve watched ICE’s recent raids unfold.
As the sun rose over the mesas surrounding Durango and drove away the chill of night, state and local police officers arrived, along with federal officials tasked with breaking up the protest so that ICE could move the children and their father to a detention center elsewhere. That’s when things got violent. Friends began texting me videos, and more streamed in on social media. I felt helpless, watching from afar as people I knew were blasted with pepper spray or shot with rubber bullets, simply for believing that innocent children should not be handcuffed and torn away from their community and family. One young protester was dragged viciously across the pavement by a masked officer wearing what appeared to be tactical military gear. A friend reported that her stepdad, a Vietnam veteran, was pepper-sprayed; another sent a video of an officer roughly throwing a slight silver-haired woman to the ground.
I’ve seen similar videos from protests in Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland, and read about detentions in other small Colorado towns. But to see this happening in my own community and to not be there to help felt surreal and painful. I wrote letters, made phone calls, donated to GoFundMe campaigns. None of it felt like enough.
Schoolchildren in the U.S., meanwhile, routinely go to school and never come home, whether because of gun violence or ICE agents.
As a journalist during the first Trump administration, I had reported on how people were affected by xenophobic immigration policies, and how small rural communities rallied to shelter and protect their neighbors. Living in Canada, I no longer have access to report such stories, but I do have a new clarity on how violence — in large part stemming from federal action or inaction — now permeates life in the U.S. Even in bucolic towns like Durango. And even before the most recent ICE raids.
Since we moved away three months ago, three women have been killed by gun violence in Durango. In September, a gunman opened fire at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado, wounding two students and traumatizing many others. Reading about the shooting in the news made me recall the constant low-level fear of having my own child in a U.S. public school. I remember the police officers posted outside the locked doors most days, and I will never forget the day a threat of violence put Durango schools on a real lockdown. I remember my first-grader, barely holding back tears, running into my arms when I picked up her that afternoon.
All this factored into our decision to move to Canada. Here, gun violence is so rare that my husband, an emergency room nurse, is the only health-care worker in his department who has ever treated a gunshot wound. (And he’s treated many.) The doors of my daughter’s new school are usually unlocked, open to welcome students who have come here from around the world. And while both Canada and the United States share the same dark history of sending Indigenous children to boarding schools from which many never returned, Canadians are doing far more, in my experience, to reconcile that history and make schools safer and more inclusive. Schoolchildren in the U.S., meanwhile, routinely go to school and never come home, whether because of gun violence or ICE agents.
Yet the gratitude I feel for our new home is cut with an undercurrent of grief. Grief over leaving our Colorado community and not being there to fight alongside our neighbors; grief that it took this much luck and privilege and effort simply to send our daughter to school without worrying for her safety. Grief that we have been welcomed into a new country, while my home country is slamming its doors on people in need.
But what I see most clearly, from this distance, is how important community and neighbors are, especially in times of darkness. How we need each other to link arms in the face of brutality — past or present — and say No: Not here. Not on our watch. There is a better way forward, and from my new home, I can see glimpses of what it might look like.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
