My Night in a Mylar Blanket

I have slept on a hard floor wrapped in a Mylar blanket. In a room full of other people similarly wrapped. Similarly trying to sleep. Let me tell you. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t a good sleep.

Small but mighty, the emergency blanket.

In the first place, sleeping on a hard floor with no mattress or pad is, just hard.  I did have a towel underneath me which offered little to disguise the hardness of the wooden gym floor. (And certainly nothing compared to a concrete floor.)

Second, the lights were on all night. That in itself can keep one from sleeping.

AND, it was noisy. Not just the fact that there were a few hundred other people trying to sleep. It was the Mylar blankets.  Certainly, they are wonderful in an emergency. They trap your body heat and give it back to you. But something they don’t mention about these blankets is that every time you move, they crinkle. Want to stretch your arm or leg out a little? Crinkle, crinkle.  Want to turn over?  Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle. Imagine, a room full of bodies trying to sleep wrapped in crinkling Mylar blanket. Never was there real quiet.

I slept in a Mylar blanket once on a hard floor along with a roomful of people.  It was awful. And I was an adult. I did this willingly. Which means I have just the slightest bit of empathy for the plight of immigrants who are forced to sleep this way, night after night.

The image of chain link fencing caging immigrant children is etched on our minds. This happening in our country! But what can we do?

Well, of course we need to call out Senators and Representative and demand they do everything they can to stop this. 
SCRIPT:
Hi, my name is [NAME] and I'm a constituent from [NAME of community]. I'm outraged and appalled by the reports of abuses of detained immigrants, from massive overcrowding to denial of basic sanitary supplies to children. I urge ______________ to demand a robust investigation of immigration enforcement practices and detention conditions, end all family separations, deny any additional funding to ICE, and allocate adequate funding to immigration courts to ensure timely processing of asylum applications.
Thank you for your time and attention.

We can keep ourselves informed about what is happening.

We must hold political candidates accountable. Ask candidates who are running for president or congressional seats about what they are doing and will do to change this situation.

And you can donate money. The immigrant Freedom Fund is a group raising money to make bail for immigrants who are detained. Please donate what you can at www.immigrantfreedomfund.org, and please share this message with friends of yours who might be interested in helping out these victims of our current federal administration.

And we can take to the streets. Two big events coming up:

• Friday, July 12 Lights for Liberty vigils

• Saturday, July 13 Take Action to End Criminalization, Detention, & Deportations, Daley Center, Chicago, from 11 AM to 1 PM

We should let that image of children in cages disturb us regularly. And spur us to action.