Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance.
But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain.
He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend’s car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again.
He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages.
Of course, I understand all of this. The point I was trying to make was simply that, the fact that he’s gotten this far and seems to be doing as well as he is, his doctors deserve a lot of credit for that.
I wasn’t trying to criticize anybody
Oh, no! My apologies, I did not intend the combative wording.
I was, well, venting from my own horror, I guess? Shit’s fucked up.
Oddly, a lot of of the interactions here are combative, even if they are not intended to be.
No worries!
It’s because text conveys no emotion and a lack means we, as the reader, are left to interpret the emotion ourselves and the world sucks so that emotion almost always skews negative. It’s why I use emojis a lot in text messages. I feel putting them in may seem silly, but if I’m being a cheeky fucker, my winky face will help express what I was really trying to convey! 😉