When 60-year-old Cumberland resident Kali Bird Isis read the harrowing reports of abuse against migrant children, she realized attending rallies wouldn’t be enough. A long-time activist, driven by a deep regard and compassion for the children who had fled from the horrors of home to find themselves once again in danger, Kali was ready to make a more direct demand of her country.
As a mother of three, Kali knows how deeply connected a parent and child are. As an expressive arts therapist, and someone who interned at the Maine Center for Grieving Children, she also knows the psychological scars forced separation and abuse can leave.
“These children are going to have lifetime issues because of what this country has so cruelly done,” she said. “It’s just shaken me to the core.”
So Kali, along with dozens of others, joined Grannies Respond/Abuelas Responden, a movement of grandmothers and allies who are protesting the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border policy by heading to the U.S.-Mexico border themselves.
The journey, which started July 31 from all corners of America, has taken the cavalcade of grannies 2,000 miles and to multiple detention centers. The grandmothers and allies held vigils at each of those centers, and as a “rebellion” of grandmothers, demanded separated children be reunited with their families.
Grannie Kali says she has her “swag” ready for the @granniesrespond stop in Dilley, Texas pic.twitter.com/Mf711Q1aHq
— Holly Honderich (@hollyhonderich) August 6, 2018
On the steps of the state capitol building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania last week, Kali spoke to AJ+, saying she wants Senator Susan Collins to know her constituents “care very much about this issue.”
“We’re standing up and saying ‘No, these are not our values,’” she said. “Not in the state of Maine and not in this country.”
Before reaching their final destination of McAllen, Texas, where they spent 24 hours volunteering, protesting, and holding a vigil, the grannies made an extra stop Monday at Dilley, Texas, where a child reportedly died after leaving an ICE facility. Kali was one of three people selected to approach the facility. They were not allowed in and were given a warning to get off the property.
Kali told Beacon that her responsibility, as also an interfaith chaplain, a member of Mainers for Accountable Leadership, and someone who believes everyone has a “capacity for much greater love and empathy than” they show, is to get people to pay attention to the family separation crisis. Rallies are important, she said, but the country has moved too far in a “dangerous” direction. Going to the border is, for Kali, a necessary step beyond “simply showing up.”
“We’re not allowed to sit in apathy and be afraid,” she said. “We have this opportunity to really rise up and create the world that we want. That’s not going to happen by simply showing up [at rallies]. It’s going to happen because we demand it. We take action.”
And just as Kali has grown wiser over the years, her activism has become more compassionate. When you’re younger, she elaborated, the fight becomes what you’re after. The charge to do what’s right is so big, it can consume young activists, to the point where they can forget who their fighting for in the first place.
“I’m appreciative of who I was as a young woman, and I’m incredibly appreciative of the young activists all over,” she said. “But there’s a difference in the way older people show up: there’s a level of understanding and compassion for the work involved that I sensed as a younger person, but I didn’t live it quite as deeply as I do now.”
She will not allow herself, she added, to lose sight of what the fight is really about: these separated families.
“I’m not going to get lost in the fight,” Kali said. Instead, she focuses on those she’s fighting for: The children and mothers who traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles to get to safety.
(photo: Kali Bird Isis)
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