We Have a Choice in Canada
He was 15 with the most hopeful and cheerful attitude. He was excited to go back to school and when we met in a make-shift temporary shelter for migrants along the US-Mexico border, he asked me to bring him books so he could learn English. Over the days I spent at the border giving people legal information about the refugee process, he slowly opened up to me about the violence he had been threatened with because he wouldn’t join the gangs back home in Honduras. “I want to come to the US to go to school, but also, I really just want to live.” I lost him for months in the US immigration system—a system designed to exact suffering to deter unwanted migration. This child would spend over 4 months incarcerated. He was released in the middle of the night having been transferred to New Jersey, with an ankle monitor and a paper with his next court date. We found each other through Facebook in April and he shared over breakfast: “I’ve had to take a job washing dishes a