Andi is sitting at a Southwest Airlines gate in Oakland waiting for a flight to Bakersfield. Her day is back-to-back visits with detainee clients at the ICE Processing Center.
The Venezuelan mother of two who woke up with a fellow detainee’s hand down her pants.
The twenty-year-old Haitian woman who’s pregnant and claiming the child is the result of having been raped by one of the guards.
The group of young women mysteriously subjected to monthly vaginal swabs.
It’s enough work to justify a two-or three-day stay in Bakersfield, but she’s doing it in one, booked on the last flight home tonight. Ever since the episode with Cam’s long-overdue English paper, she’s vowed to be more present in her son’s life. The paper earned a C, but the teacher’s final comments set Andi’s maternal flares aflame. This could have been an A paper, Cameron. Next time, take the assignment seriously. And don’t forget—deadlines are deadlines!
Andi was failing her son. Or, maybe not failing yet, but at risk of failing him. All her time on the road dropped the lion’s share of parenting on Dominick’s shoulders, and though he was a good father, he wasn’t superhuman.
This perspective of hers was newly found, of course. Born of an argument that began less than five minutes after walking in the door from a four-day trip to San Ysidro, a town just north of the Mexican border. Dom was in the kitchen hollering at Cam, who’d locked himself in his bedroom.
“No more excuses, Cameron! I’m sick of this shit!”
It was the swearing that triggered her. “What are you doing? Don’t speak to him like that!”
“Oh, yeah? What language would you use after telling the kid more than a thousand times to write that damn paper?”
“I don’t know. But clearly swearing at him isn’t the answer!”
And just like that, they were all yelling. Dominick at the end of his rope. Andi, bleary-eyed. And Cameron too angry to come out of his room.
That night in bed, she and Dom had their sixty-fourth discussion about her ICSW work.
“This is a new level of stress, Andi. The tragedy associated with these cases drains you until you’ve got nothing left, and we’re the ones paying the price. You’re hardly ever home, but when you are, you’re either falling asleep or picking a fight.”
The accusation came hot as an iron rod straight from the fire. “Me? What do you think it’s been like to live with you? The year you were gunning to make partner was like trying to avoid a bear in the forest. There was no telling when you’d show up or what kind of mood you’d be in.”
The fact that she’d made countless concessions to Dom’s career was seemingly all too convenient for her privileged, well-educated white male husband to forget, and her body seized on the rage it provoked, back stiffening, the muscles in her neck and jaw twisting and knotting.
Dom reached for her, hand on her arm. “But making partner was a goal with an end point. What’s the timeline here, Andi? When do we get you back?” He softened his voice, slid his fingers from her arm to her middle. “When do I get you back?”
His hand may as well have been a snake.
“Are you effing kidding me right now? You go from ‘Hey, Andi, why are you always in such a shitty mood?’ to ‘Wanna have sex?’”
He winced, clearly stung, though not badly enough to satisfy her.
“Can’t I miss you for multiple reasons?” He had not, she noticed, moved his fingers off her belly.
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I’m not having sex with you. I’m too mad. And I’m bloated from the plane.”
He smiled, saying nothing.
She still wasn’t in the mood. But something about him being such a fool calmed her. Cooled the fire inside. “Cam’s lucky his teacher didn’t give him an F on that paper. You know, I offered to help him with it. Said I’d read and edit it, even if I had to do it on the plane.”
“I offered, too,” said Dom.
“What is happening with him?”
“He misses you.” The words weren’t meant to hurt, but they did. “At his age, I could hardly stand to be in the same room with my mom, but the minute she wasn’t available, I didn’t know what to do. She could be at the grocery store shopping for my favorites, and I’d still get pissed that she wasn’t right by my side the second I needed her.”
Cameron still needed his mom. It was as simple as that. If only the solution to this dilemma was as easy to come by as the insight.
Andi’s flight boards in ten minutes. Just enough time for a call with her legal assistant, Issah, to distribute a stack of new cases that came in over the weekend.
“ICSW wanted to give us thirty cases,” Issah reports. “I talked them down to a dozen.”
“Where does that bring the numbers?” Andi’s phone is pinging. A text from Fern.
Has Emma returned any of your calls or is it just me?
Issah clicks her tongue while doing the math. “Rivera settled two cases last week. O’Neill had her summary judgment come through...so with these new ones, we’ve got ninety-eight cases in the pipeline.”
The cases are divided among Andi and the three lawyers she snagged for her dedicated ICSW team. They share three legal assistants, including Issah. By Sanders and Wiggs standards, the workload is ridiculous. Compared to the average public defender, though, it’s nothing. In the two years Andi spent in the Federal Public Defender’s Office following law school, she regularly juggled a hundred or more cases at a time. Constitutionally, everyone in the United States is entitled to legal representation. The constitution does not say anything about preventing such representative from being hideously overworked and woefully underpaid.
Issah reviews the new batch of cases. There’s a woman suffering debilitating third-degree burns after fellow detainees at the Ciudad Juárez detention center started a fire in their unit to protest the poor conditions. The tragedy has been all over the news, several detainees died, and the Mexican government is facing responsibility. The woman named in this case, however, wasn’t meant to be in Ciudad Juárez at all. She’d mistakenly been denied amnesty by US officials who misidentified her in the California facility where she was housed. They were supposed to deport Madelena Torre-Flores. The woman in this case is named Madelena Flores.
“Give that one to O’Neill,” Andi says. “What’s next?”
“Four rape cases,” Issah reports.
The twenty-nine-year-old mother of four.
The fifty-nine-year-old grandmother.
The sixteen-year-old girl.
The nine-year-old boy.
Those go to Rivera.
Andi assigns herself the case involving a ring of contract ICE officials accused of taking and trading naked photos of detainees. Victim complaints would likely have continued to go unaddressed had the guards not been brazen enough to transfer the images onto a deck of playing cards.
The details are so familiarly enraging that Andi goes numb upon hearing them. Every one of these people is real, their lives inexorably changed by violence and vulnerability. And yet, seen as cases, they’re reduced to numbers.
A lawyer is never supposed to flatline emotionally. Nearly every lawyer eventually does.
Andi tosses her bagel in the trash. She no longer has the stomach for it.
“Anything else?” The gate attendants begin their pre-boarding instructions. Andi has flown to the backwaters of California, Arizona, and New Mexico so often recently she’s got top-priority status. A privilege perverse enough that she sometimes feels like a hooker.
“Just that I was finally able to line up an interpreter for your court appearance on the thirteenth. I’ll get the details to your assistant.”
“Thanks, Issah. You’re a rock star.”
“Not a problem. Text me when you get to the facility if you need anything.”
Andi’s phone buzzes as she enters the Jetway. This time it’s Dom.
Heading home. Cameron overslept. Driving him to school myself.
On a scale of one to ten, Andi wonders, how likely is it that ordering a Bloody Mary on a 9:00 a.m. flight qualifies me as a problem drinker?