In November 2016, waking up to the dystopian reality of Trump being elected, I told myself: complacency is no longer an option. I’ve been an activist all my life, though in the years leading up to 2016, I hadn’t done that much. But all of a sudden, everything took on a new frantic urgency.

Of all the horrible things Trump was doing, the issue that spoke to me most was immigration. While the babies in cages broke my heart, what scared me even more was the way Trump continues to talk about immigrants—as “invaders poisoning the blood of America,” language which edges far too close to my Jewish roots and the collective generational trauma we carry from the Holocaust.

So, when volunteers were needed to spend time at a local church that was harboring a man in sanctuary, I signed up. And this was where I saw the note seeking people interested in traveling to Florida to witness at the children’s detention center in Homestead, a horrid converted air force base, whose fenced boundaries were now lined with black paper to keep on-lookers from seeing what lay within.

For three days in June 2019, the eight of us who made the trip stood on ladders in the heat so we could look over the barrier at the children. We held up paper hearts and waved at them when they came out in their bright orange hats for 15-minute stints of exercise. Te amo (I love you) we shouted. Occasionally the children would take off their hats and wave them at us, though they were always reprimanded by the guards when they did.

When we came home, we spread the word about what we’d seen in speaking events with a variety of community groups. We also organized our own educational events and demonstrations, and started planning a trip to the border. This involved working in conjunction with a number of immigration support groups based in that region, including Witness at the Border, Team Brownsville, and the Resource Center of Matamoros. We prepared and served meals, observed the infamous tent courts, stood at the bridge with signs, and spoke to many of the people who were stuck in Mexico as they waited for their turn to apply for asylum, which they had an extremely low chance of getting. We also led a writing/drawing workshop for children to express their feelings about leaving home and a similar workshop for the women in the camp in a room filled with tears as each woman shared stories of loved ones killed by gangs or children left behind.

On the morning of Valentine’s Day, we woke before dawn to stand at the fence and stare at the wing of the deportation plane, (the only part not purposely blocked by a truck). Then we linked arms and headed for the parking lot, trying for a few moments to block the bus of deportees from arriving until we were warned by the cops to disperse or get arrested. Unfortunately, we were not in a position to engage in civil disobedience, so we had to settle for supporting the people on the bus with hearts and words of encouragement as they walked shackled into the plane’s belly and departed under the cover of the night.

The cover Here in Sanctuary—Whirling is from a photo taken at the refugee camp, where children followed us through the maze of crowded tents, as eager as their grown-up counterparts to talk to us.The poems in the book were born directly from our experiences. While I’ve written the occasional political poem over the years, this type of writing was a departure for me. For most of my life, my writing and my activism were separate. But my writing has always come from my heart, and my heart is now intrinsically linked with these people who are far braver than I am. While I recognize that their stories ultimately belong to them and not to me, I’m glad they gave me permission to share these hard truths about their lives, which counter the rhetoric of even the supposedly liberal people in our government, because these stories need to be heard, loudly, by as many people as possible.

(Originally posted on my publisher Querencia Press’s Blog: in response to why I wrote this book. )

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