Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

It's exhausting, emotionally. It's not necessarily the emotions of why he is in prison and what he experiences in prison -- that's another discussion and I separate those emotions from the visit itself. The gates open for visitors at 7:00 a.m., but that means I need to get there at 6:30 to get in line; I arrived in Beeville the previous evening and just captured a hotel. The town has limited food selections (and poor beer selection), so I have no reason to get outdoors except to appreciate a nice spring day of south Texas. That morning, the moon was near full and brilliantly shined on the flat fields around the prison, a mix of brush oaks, and the grasses for hundreds of acres on the unit property. The chilled air made the morning even more pleasant and while I waited for the gate to open, I thought about camping down here. Ultimately, the gate guards permitted visitors to approach the gate, the first of the all-grey officers: turn off the engine, open the trunk and ho

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.  Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.  No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”  ― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History Review and Updates We would like you to build on our previous two articles to explain the threat to migrants in our community after the current executive ending of DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — and the federal Administration’s attack on all undocumented migrants. Further, our previous articles focused on the State of Texas’s threat against undocumented migrants, including college students, th

A version of this is published in the current issue of the LSCS  Advocate . Part 1 is here. Our Undocumented Students -- Part 2 The Threat of the State It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. ― John Rawls, A Theory of Justice In May 2017, Texas Governor Abbott signed a bill meant to ban “sanctuary cities” in Texas by requiring that all local police — including college campus police — cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The bill makes it illegal for a local authority to have any policy that stops an officer from requesting information about immigration status, and it threatens jail time for any leaders who don’t honor requests to hold inmates who may be subject to deportation. Opponent

A version of this is published in the current issue of the LSCS Advocate . Part 2 is here. Our Undocumented Students and the Union’s Responsibilities Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account. (Jacques Rancière) On 5 September 2017, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III announced that DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) will be rescinded in six months. We’re going to address this issue to clarify what DACA is (and what it isn’t), why this should matter to us as members of a labor union, and what we can do. In his announcement , Sessions repeated multiple specious claims and “alternative facts” about DACA, migrants, jobs, and public safety: Sessions repeatedly uses the terminology “illegal aliens,” which, although we may hear it frequently, is not a legal term in the Immigration and Nationality Act, and it conflates the act of crossing the border illegally with an ongoing le