Day 504: We Are Sorry

“Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, Irvin Cruz Nape, Alberto Gutierrez Reyes, Jose Guadalupe Ramos Solano… We are sorry.”

She said their names with reverence, witnessed by the desert wind, clutched by those of us with placards bearing their names and pictures.

We fell silent. Standing outside the concentration camp in Adelanto, paying respects to all those whose blood falls on the hands of ICE, but these in particular, have died due to the cruelty and neglect of the Adelanto camp.

It was May 4^th.

When she said, “we are sorry” we all felt it.

I felt the blood on my hands too. Because we couldn’t stop them from dying. From being murdered.

From May 31^st at 6 a.m. to June 1^st at 6 a.m. #NoCampsCA showed up at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in downtown Los Angeles. For 24 hours, we chanted, prayed and fasted in solidarity with the hunger strikers in MDC and other camps across the country.

Yesterday, we returned to honor the year-long presence protestors have held at MDC since the ICE thugs flooded into our community.

It began peacefully, though loudly, and we knew it was a matter of time before the bootlickers came out to pounce.

Which they did. They pepper-sprayed us – some said it was bear mace, which is illegal, but they don’t care. And they pay no price.

I turned to run, and was lucky to only have it hit my mouth. To only suck it in my lungs. My eyes barely stung. Others weren’t so lucky.

My friend and I helped a photographer who’d taken a face-full, was completely blinded.

It’s a helpless feeling to know someone is in agony, and the only thing that will really make it okay is time, and pain grinds time to stillness.

Luckily there were people with saline solution.

“I know it hurts, I’m sorry,” I said, every time I grabbed his eyelids and forced them open to spray more saline in them. I had the right eye, my friend the left.

Two more people came over, needing the makeshift nurse’s station set up on the dirty sidewalk.

He later thanked us for “saving his life” – which felt like too big a compliment for what we did, but it’s gotta suck when you’re completely blinded and running and carrying your equipment and the crowds and batons are closing in. And you’re depending on the kindness of strangers.

It may be only strangers who can help you, who can say they are sorry when they pull your eyelids open and spray a stream of saline into your blood-red pain.

It was a while before he could open his eyes again, and we could see how beautiful they were. And we are not strangers anymore, once we’ve marked this moment together.

We are there, because we won’t let them be forgotten. We are there, because we are sorry, for every person we couldn’t help fast enough.

We are there, and we are not strangers anymore.

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