What do we owe one another when the harm before us is bigger than any of us can fix alone? There may be disagreements about immigration policy, but we ought to recognize the harm when it is before us.
Mayor Harris speaks on immigration arrests at press conference
Harris spoke during an Oct. 14, press conference alongside an immigration attorney, Colton Bane, and a member of Vecindarios 901, immigration advocate Carlos Ochoa.
What do we owe one another when the harm before us is bigger than any of us can fix alone?
In Memphis, this question has stayed with me throughout the past year as federal and state immigration operations have altered life in our neighborhoods, workplaces and schools. Families have had the people who pay the rent, buy the groceries or drive others to work taken away.
There may be disagreements about immigration policy, but we ought to recognize the harm when it is clearly before us.
The people of Memphis have responded in ways available to them. I was one of the many volunteers in a Signal chat that grew into the Immigrant Pantry and is now part of Latino Memphis, a local nonprofit organization that serves our Hispanic community.
We have provided groceries, joined marches and helped families find lawyers. Although no single action seems enough to overcome the fear, we do what we can.
An ICE raid in Memphis revealed a cost – and courage to ask for help
In late August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carried out a raid on El Corralón, a business in Memphis, and detained 121 people. The Department of Homeland Security made the criminal arrests and convictions of five of these individuals publicly available, but said nothing about the remaining 116.
More than 100 people were suddenly facing a crisis that a few bags of groceries could not touch. The rent would still come due.
Mauricio Calvo has served as both president and chief executive officer of Latino Memphis for 18 years. This year, the need has exceeded every available resource in a state where few people are willing to step forward.
Following the raid, he prepared a plan aiming to raise $250,000 to provide assistance with food, rent and legal help for those families. However, when he sent the plan to me, he confessed that he almost decided not to.
Last winter, my husband and I made a donation so immigrant families could keep receiving fresh food. That money ran out just before the raid.
Now I am in Columbus, Ohio, being treated for chronic leukemia. Mauricio wrote that he had struggled to ask a friend who had already given money and was facing a health crisis of her own. He could not bear the thought of adding to that crisis.
I read his words early one morning and wept.
I thought of what it must cost him to lead a community living in such fear. I thought of parents trying to explain to their children an absence they cannot explain at all.
I thought of the special kind of loneliness a leader experiences when he needs help, but fears that asking is too much.
Mauricio asked anyway. The courage he showed revealed something to me I didn’t want to see.
I let fear eclipse my judgment. I can’t say ‘no’ for others.
I had recently completed an essay on what people owe one another, but I, too, had been reluctant to ask that question aloud.
I know people who have means and influence. Some disagree with me on questions of immigration or politics. Asking would have exposed me and might have cost me the social standing that silence had quietly preserved.
But that standing is small compared with what these families are carrying.
So my husband and I donated again. Then I began to ask others to do the same.
I wrote to people with the means to help answer an emergency of this magnitude. One sees politics very differently than I do, and asking seemed improbable.
I wrote about the harm to our city and to families who had lost the person holding them together. To my astonishment, I got an answer right away.
What has held me back was a verdict I had already reached – that someone who sees politics so differently could not see the harm in front of us. The verdict was convenient. It let my fear pass for good judgment.
I had already said “no” for that person. Mauricio nearly did the same to me, deciding I could not bear to be asked.
We were both wrong. The door I believed was closed, I had closed myself.
Americans owe each other the courage to ask
This is not only a Memphis story. Across the country, immigration enforcement is leaving families frightened and communities strained.
Many Americans feel helpless before its scale, or too divided by politics to know where to begin.
Begin close to home. In nearly every city, someone like Mauricio is running a local organization, facing a need too large to meet alone and wondering whether it is too much to ask.
Find that person. Then think of the people in your life you have avoided asking.
Ask yourself whether you have already answered for them.
What, then, do we owe one another?
Perhaps we owe one another the courage to ask, and the willingness to hear a request without turning away. Surely, we owe one another enough of our own comfort that a family already carrying far too much does not have to bear it alone.
Gayle Rose is a Memphis civic leader who helped bring the Memphis Grizzlies to the city and who founded Team Max, a service movement honoring the memory of her late son. She is a director of the Institute for Public Service Reporting.