by Seema Jilani, New York Times, USA- I wasn’t worried about whether the baby would die. I knew he would. My fear was that I couldn’t keep him alive long enough so he could take his last breath in his mother’s arms.
His mother was still in McAllen, a town 10 miles from the Texas-Mexico border — but hundreds of miles and more than an hour’s flight from where her son was, with me, in Houston. She had slogged through coyote-plagued deserts, her seven-months-pregnant belly buoyant in the muddy waters of the Rio Grande. She carried her 4-year-old daughter on her hip as the waters lapped against her, mindful of the copperhead snakes, trudging her way to the promised land: “Tejas.”
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