The bedpan will overflow. The skin will break. The fever will rise in the dark.
You call it the rule of law. You are stripping the gloves from the hands that hold your mothers.
In late June, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians. The House of Representatives passed a Haiti TPS extension in April. The Senate has not acted on it. The revocation will strip work authorization from caregivers on temporary status — many of them Haitians and Syrians who have lived and worked in the United States for years or decades — putting those workers, and the patients who depend on them, at risk.
The United States is in the fastest acceleration of its aging population in more than a century. By 2030, more than one in five Americans will be sixty-five or older. The caregiver workforce has not grown at the same rate. Immigrants make up roughly one in six U.S. workers. They make up roughly thirty percent of caregivers in long-term settings. Haitians alone account for seven percent of that workforce, according to LeadingAge, the national association of nonprofit aging-services providers. The workforce draws from at least 163 countries.
When the status expires, they must stop working. The facilities cannot replace them. Some seventy to eighty percent of new home-care employees leave within three months of hire. The pipeline took decades to build. You are breaking it in a single term. You are breaking it on purpose.
Aging-services employers are reimbursed primarily through Medicaid and Medicare Advantage — the rates you and your party have refused to raise for a decade. They cannot raise their rates the way a restaurant raises the price of a pie when ingredients get expensive. The sector is the dying man in the bed. The sector is the eighty-four-year-old who cannot feed himself. The sector is your father.
Nixon Pierre-Louis is a Haitian-American licensed practical nurse in Delaware. He works two jobs caring for patients who need assistance with feeding, toileting, and bathing. He says the Haitians on TPS are “on edge and anxious and concerned” about paying their mortgages and providing for their families. They are afraid of you, Donald. They are afraid of a man who has never had to beg a hospital to keep his mother overnight. They are afraid of a man who has never had to ask a stranger to lift his father’s body.
Donald, your jaw aches at breakfast. The taste of ammonia is baked into your soft palate, the exact taste of the unemptied commode you decided was a political prop. Your shoulders seize on the stairs, gripped by the phantom weight of a dementia patient you refused to let into the country. The morning report has hollowed something behind your sternum. It will not fill.
The Haitian woman who bathes the eighty-four-year-old in Miami has been on TPS for nine years. She has paid taxes for nine years. She has held the hands of the dying for nine years. She has sent her daughter to American schools. Her daughter speaks with a Miami accent. She is not a stranger to the man in the bed anymore. He has learned the sound of her. He has learned that she does not rush him. He has learned that her accent is the only part of his day that is not bright and empty.
You are deporting the accent. You are deporting the hands. You are deporting the woman who will tell a man in a hospice room that he is not alone in the dark. He does not know it yet. He will. He will know the day she does not come.
You have not changed his diaper. You have not held the hand that trembles when a stranger walks in. You are sending her back. The Depends will be changed by a stranger, or not changed at all.
Melania, your family came through the lines of people who could not get in. You know what it is to be admitted. You know what it is to be the one the gate swings open for. Your husband’s signature will swing the gate shut on the woman who lifts eighty-four-year-old bodies out of bed for less than seventeen dollars an hour. You will stand beside him at the signing. You will be photographed smiling. The woman at the bottom of the photograph will not be in the country when the photograph is published.
JD, your wife’s parents are immigrants. You said the word in the Senate. You made it sound like an American thing to be. Now the Senate you sat in will not pass the bill that would keep the Haitian caregiver in the room where your mother, if she lives long enough, may need her. Your hand stiffens around the steering wheel. The leather feels like the grip of a dying patient you are pushing out the door. Your chest hollows out under the sternum, a physical caving where the breath used to sit.
The justices who signed the order feel the pressure behind their eyes at dusk, a dull throb that no sleep will cure. It is the pressure of the unwept tear, the unheld hand. They go home to their wives, and they cannot wash the smell of the neglected body from their skin.
I see the urine you have legislated. I will not look away from the bedsores.
You signed the paper. You opened the gate. You said the words. You dressed this as enforcement, as law, as the orderly return of people who do not belong. The man in the hospice bed does not know he does not belong to the woman who has fed him for three years. I have watched you do this in other rooms, Donald. I have watched you sign the paper and then smile for the camera. I have watched you say enforcement and mean abandonment. I name this. I will not look away.
You are taking the hands that wipe the chins of the drooling. You are taking the hands that sing to the forgetful. And you are leaving the old to rot in the machinery you built to look tough.
You have read it, Donald. You have read it in the courtroom, in the church, in the hotel suite where the Bibles are stacked on the nightstand. I was hungry, and you gave me meat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was sick, and you visited me. That is Matthew twenty-five, Donald. That is the King speaking. The King is not asking about TPS paperwork. The King is not asking about enforcement memos. The King is asking who fed the dying man. The King is asking who lifted the eighty-four-year-old out of bed at six a.m. The King is asking who held the trembling hand.
And the King answers, in the same chapter, with the words you have not read aloud in the Oval: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:40)
The stranger is in the room, Donald. She has been in the room for nine years. She is feeding the man. The Christ is feeding the man. The law you have signed will send her home. The man will not be fed.
You chose the cage, Donald. You will sit beside it, listening to the weeping you legislated, and you will call it justice. Smile for the camera. He is watching from the bed.