The Bridge to Nowhere

When one missed turn on the highway can mean detention or indefinite disappearance at the hands of our government

My dad and I recently finished a road trip across the country. We passed through Buffalo on our path to the East Coast. At some point on I-90, my dad pointed out a sign that said something like “last exit before Canada.” It was the sort of highway turn where—if you weren’t looking carefully—you could accidentally end up driving into a different country. We laughed about what an inconvenience that would be.

This past week, the New York Times ran a story about someone who made exactly that mistake. But because he was an asylum-seeker, rather than a U.S. citizen, this one wrong turn became for him and his family a nightmare, rather than an amusing anecdote.

He was here with permission. He has a legal right to stay in this country while his case is pending before the immigration courts. But because he had to cross back over the U.S. border— after accidentally taking the Buffalo “Peace Bridge” to Canada—U.S. authorities ended up hauling him and his sister into detention for three weeks in an ICE cell, while officials searched their phones and social media accounts.

The Times story also mentions—meanwhile—a similar but even more disturbing incident from earlier this year:

Another asylum-seeker was driving for his delivery job, when he made a wrong turn onto the Ambassador Bridge in Michigan. He also ended up accidentally driving into Canada. But because he was Venezuelan and had tattoos, his fate was even more horrific than the man on the “Peace Bridge” in Buffalo. The Trump administration essentially disappeared him into oblivion.

Months later, the man’s family still have no idea what happened to him. He may have been one of the hundreds of people Trump officials abducted and illegally rendered to a secret prison in El Salvador. But his name does not appear on the lists of prisoners sent to the CECOT detention camp. In his case, there is simply no record of his fate. His family and friends do not even know if he is alive.

Moreover—not that it should matter to whether his basic human rights are respected in either case—but Mr. Prada—the man the government disappeared after he made a wrong turn onto the Ambassador Bridge—was not even undocumented. He had permission to be in this country. His formal authorization to work as an asylum-seeker with a pending case had arrived just before his disappearance.

Like the other people whose stories we know or can reconstruct who were deported to El Salvador’s prison, he also had no criminal record. The government’s narrative that he was a “gang member” seems to have been based solely on the fact that he was Venezuelan and had tattoos. (Experts on the Tren de Aragua gang, meanwhile, note that the group does not use tattoos to identify its members.)

So that was his “crime”—having tattoos, and making a wrong turn on the highway. A wrong turn that he made while trying to bring a McDonalds delivery order to some hungry citizen, as part of his job. For that: indefinite disappearance.

That is what our country is doing to people—that is the thanks we bestow for people willing to work and deliver our food at the bottom rung of our social ladder. They miss a turn, while bringing someone a hot meal they just ordered, and we blot them off the face of the Earth for it.

A recent opinion piece in the New York Times has described Trump’s illegal renditions to El Salvador’s CECOT prison as an attempt to create a “legal abyss”—a black pit in which people can be banished from the reach of our legal system and Constitution—and simply disappear forever.

The metaphor could not be more literal in Mr. Prada’s case. He drove onto a bridge—and it was like he drove into thin air; someplace that is “nothing and is nowhere and is endless,” to borrow a phrase from Philip Larkin. A bridge to nowhere.

The late Pope Francis once famously called upon the U.S. government to build “bridges” instead of “walls.” During Trump’s first term, he remarked: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”

But now, Trump is also turning our country’s bridges into walls. Bridges that are named for “Peace” and dubbed “Ambassador”—bridges that are meant to symbolize our openness and friendship with the rest of the world—have been repurposed as snares to catch the innocent.

Step over this invisible line, in Trump’s America—and suddenly you are bereft of all legal rights. You are homo sacer—the public scapegoat—a person with no rights the government need respect—and any violence whatsoever can be inflicted on you with impunity. You can be deported to a gulag with no way ever to return; or just vanish altogether. You can be disappeared into the “legal abyss.”

But when I woke up this morning, and saw the sun break through from the clouds, I thought—that can’t possibly be where the story ends. That can’t be the sum total of the American experiment. That “abyss”—that oblivion—can’t be where all our bridges lead.

I thought back to Hart Crane’s epic poem “The Bridge.” In an era in which every other modernist poet was writing despairing, cynical accounts of modern decadence—when the other major American poets of his generation had become expatriates (ex-patriots, too, in some cases) and were flirting with fascist ideologies in Europe—Crane used the image of the Brooklyn Bridge to pen an actual hymn of praise to America and hope for its future.

It’s almost impossible to summarize the poem’s sweeping emotional power or to explain why it is so effective—but Crane succeeded in making the Bridge into a quasi-religious symbol of the American promise.

In his hands, the Bridge becomes also a rainbow; a new covenant; a resurrection from the senseless mass slaughter of America’s wars. Invoking the shade of Walt Whitman, he wrote:

What memories of vigils, bloody, by that Cape, —

Ghoul-mound of man's perversity at balk

And fraternal massacre! Thou, pallid there as chalk

Hast kept of wounds, O Mourner, all that sum

That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme!

But above all that waste of slaughter—of America’s “fraternal massacre”—there arises the Bridge, stretching up to the heavens—symbolizing that we are still capable of aspiring.

And see! the rainbow's arch — how shimmeringly stands

Above the Cape's ghoul-mound, O joyous seer!

And I know, then, when I think of it, that we will not stop until the injustice against Mr. Prada and all the others is undone and every cruelty that this administration has inflicted on the innocent is made right.

I know that the people fighting for the men in El Salvador “won’t stop until we bring them back,” as one of their attorneys said in a recent press conference. I know that the “ghoul-mound” of our government’s kidnappings and disappearances and grotesque violations of the law will not be the end of the American story, but rather that, from out of the “fraternal massacre,” a new birth of freedom will eventually arise—just as Lincoln foretold.

I know that we will yet live to see a day again when the name of the “Peace Bridge” is sincere, and not a hollow mockery of what our government is doing to the people who accidentally stray across it. As Hart Crane said of his Bridge—his rainbow—his new covenant above the wreck of war:

O, upward from the dead

Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound

Of living brotherhood!