In 2019, I was running an award-winning teen theater company in Dallas. We’d made our mark by creating original plays from first-person interviews on particular issues.
In 2019, there was no more pressing issue than the border crisis. That spring, I joined two intrepid adults and 10 teens, traveling to the border to collect interviews about the child separations that were happening under the first Trump administration.
Mara Bim
It isn’t an overstatement to say the experience of collecting those interviews and creating that play changed my life.
Shortly thereafter, I decided to leave my career in theater in order to devote myself full-time to standing against the Christian ethno-nationalism behind the events I witnessed.
Today, we are all watching in horror (or, at least those of us with consciences are) as the new Trump administration escalates its assault on the rights and human dignity of the most marginalized among us.
The stories are flooding back
Since the administration began deporting to an El Salvadorean gulag — without due process — any immigrant they deem a threat, the stories I bore witness to six years ago have been flooding back. Just last week, I went by ambulance to the hospital because my heart rate jumped to 200 and wouldn’t come down. The last time that happened was six years ago when I was standing in a tiny Catholic church on the southern border watching a group of 40 detained teen migrants weep at the feet of the Virgin Mary icon on their once-per-month outing there while armed guards stood around by the church exits.
In recent weeks, the focus of media has been on telling the stories of some of the men we know were transported to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison from which no prisoner has ever left. But just this week The New York Times published the story of a Venezuelan immigrant, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, who has truly been disappeared by our government. He is nowhere to be found and isn’t on the published list of names sent to El Salvador. The fear is that the administration has sent more immigrants than we know of to be permanently swallowed up by CECOT.
This is truly horrific. This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen in the United States. And yet, this isn’t the first time Trump has overseen the disappearances of people.
The student actors of Cry Havoc Theater in 2019
The first child separations
During the first Trump term, 5,500 children were separated from their parents. More than 500 of them were under the age of 5. And today there are still about 1,400 who never have been reunited with their families. The administration had no intention of ever facilitating reunifications, so they didn’t bother keeping the records necessary to do so.
The point six years ago, as it is now, is unimaginable cruelty — the cruelty of being ripped from family and sent far away to never be found or reunited with loved ones again. That is the goal.
“I need you to understand this. This is one of the darkest chapters in American history.”
In 2019, one of the interviews we conducted was with Azalea Aleman-Bendiks who, at the time, was assistant federal public defender in McAllen, Texas. Here’s her description of the very deliberate choice to inflict pain and dodge responsibility in its aftermath:
I need you to understand this. This is one of the darkest chapters in American history. I need you to understand that the government of the United States of America did this to these, to these families. … They were trying to send a message to the northern triangle countries that they should not be coming and that they should not be bringing their children. But in the process of trying to send the message, what they really did was that they tortured them knowing that they would irreparably damage these children, because they will never be the same.
The parents will never be the same. The children will never be the same. They have brain damage, they have psychological damage, they have spiritual damage and they will never be the same. …
But the incredible thing about this is that the government never had to answer to anybody. And, never had to explain it to anybody. And we demanded lists and we said, “Tell us who you’re taking and who they belong to because we know you’re not taking good records. How are you tracking? How do you know who goes with who?” These are babies, 18 month olds, 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds. Who’s your mom? “Mom,” right? Como Se Llama tu Mama. What’s your mom’s name? “Mama.” You know, they don’t know. They don’t even know their own names, right?
And the incredible thing is this: The shelters were calling our office when they found out we were trying to track them to say, “Do you know who this child that we have is? Do you know who this is? Because we’re trying to find a parent and they didn’t give us that information. The government didn’t give us this from — Yes, we’re the custodians of these children, but we don’t know who they are. We don’t know their full names. We didn’t even know that they were traveling with a parent. We were told they were an unaccompanied minor.”
Teen actors from Cry Havoc Theater Company depict immigrants being held at the border in “Crossing the Line,” their co-production with Kitchen Dog Theater. They traveled to South Texas and Mexico to observe the immigration controversy first hand and interviewed people on all sides of the issue to create the verbatim theater work.
It’s happening again
Once again, we are living in a time in which this administration is disappearing people.
This is our government. These are our representatives. If we remain silent, then we, the people, have blood on our hands, too.
I want to leave readers with one of the stories that still haunts me. This story was relayed to us by Terri Burke, who then was executive director of the ACLU of Texas. She offered a snapshot of life for one of these babies separated from his parents:
If you were going to do this, wouldn’t you have a plan? I mean, when you were born — if you were born in a hospital in this country at least — your mother got a wristband and the baby got a wristband and every time they brought you to your mother, they matched up your wristbands. That’s not that hard to do. …
They separated babies. I mean, there was a congressional delegation I met with. This was in June, and they had gone to Casa El Presidente, the big former Walmart. Two congressmen started telling about this baby, Roger, who was 9 months old. They broke down in tears telling the story. Nobody really knew where Roger’s mother or father was. And these two congressmen had rocked Roger. I mean that’s just nuts. So, you know, thankfully somebody comes through every now and then and rocks Roger.
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as program director at Faith Commons. She is a spiritual director and a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.
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