My younger brother was gay.
He found a haven and a career in New York City, but never spoke of his sexuality to our mother, even though she knew, and they loved each other very much. Before he died, Bill told me he thought he was her favorite child.
I thought of Bill as I watched a recent segment of the long-running CBS news program, “60 Minutes.”
The episode focused on a man named Andry Hernandez Romero, a native of Venezuela, a gay man who fled his native country when he was abused because of his sexuality and his political views. He made the treacherous journey through the Darien Gap, a 60-mile roadless swath of jungle, then trekked across Mexico and presented himself at a legal border crossing — I emphasize the word legal — near San Diego. He was taken into custody while his case was processed.
His attorney told 60 Minutes that he had a good case and “had a real probability of winning an asylum claim.” She called him “sweet” and “funny.”
Andry was a stylist and a make-up artist. He looked as much like a gang member as I do. His fatal flaw was that he had some tattoos which included crowns. According to “The Guardian,” they commemorated the festival of the Three Kings in his hometown. The words “mom” and “dad” anchored two of the crowns.
But in the haste and inefficiency and sometimes cruelty that has marked so much of our government’s actions recently, those tattoos — crowns were vaguely suspected as part of gang artistry — were the alleged proof needed for Andry to be shipped, by our U.S. government, with 237 other men to a wretched prison in El Salvador. A DHS spokesperson later alleged that Romero had social media posts indicating gang affiliation, but various media outlets did not find any such postings after reviewing his social media.
A Time magazine photographer captured a shot of Andry’s head being shaved. He cried, said he wasn’t a gang member and pleaded for his mother. Perhaps he was his mother’s favorite child.
There were no trials or due process for any of the men, although the Supreme Court has since decreed future deportations must involve due process.
Our government acknowledges they made an “administrative error” with one man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, and the Supreme Court says the government must “facilitate” his return to his American family. As I write, he has not yet been returned.
I remember Andry and Kilmar in prayer daily. I think of the men in that prison — even the worst among them doesn’t deserve the barbarism being committed in our name.
This week, we observe Holy Week and look forward to Easter. I have been reading the Passion narratives, and marveling at Jesus’ integrity and courage as he struggled with rejection, torture and death.
It’s so easy to take this suffering and project it onto the immense suffering going on in our country and world now. We live in dark times, but there has always been darkness. In John’s Gospel, three words rivet me: as Judas leaves the Passover meal to betray Jesus, John says simply: “It was night.”
We yearn for dawn. I love this quote from a biography of St. Ignatius of Loyola: “Laugh my son, and be joyful in the Lord, for a religious has no reason to be sad, and has a thousand reasons to rejoice.”
It’s difficult to think of laughter when you see the suffering of the men who languish, none of them having access to due process, in a brutal foreign prison. But as Christians we are called to hope, even in the midst of night.
When Mary Magdalene hears her name spoken in the garden, I hear Jesus speak Andry, Kilmar and Bill’s names as well as my own. I must remember to laugh. To laugh with joy, hope and prayer. It is morning, and Jesus banishes the darkness.
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