Other Stories from the Author

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“Work hard, finish my beautiful wall and I will set you free”

                                                                 -The President of the United States of America.

The audio horn emitted the attention sound.  It was a high pitch noise that lasted three seconds followed by a woman’s voice that gave instructions of some type such as “move to the left side of the yard” or “assemble in a single file line at the entrance door.”  All instructions were spoken in English because English was the official language.  All other languages were outlawed all over America.

“Mail call,” said the woman’s voice through the horn.  Audio horns were mounted at different locations along the roofline of the camp buildings.  Cameras were mounted right next to the horns.  The buildings were modular structures that formed one dormitory.  Another modular building connected to the dormitory housed the showers and toilets.  There were 100 campers per dormitory and there were 100 dormitories per camp and there were 100 camps built all along the southern border.

The campers assemble in three single file ranks outside of dorm 89 and waited.  That’s what they were called, campers.  They were not men or prisoners or inmates or detainees, they were campers.  Dorm 89 was designated for Hispanic males only.  There were no women anywhere.  A very tall white man emerged from the dorm carrying a duffle bag with the words “US Mail” stamped on it in large letters.  He was one of the camp instructors.  There were no guards in the camp, only instructors.  The men in the watchtowers with guns were instructors.  The men who supervised the campers in the large open dorms were instructors.  Heavily armed instructors guarded the main gate and performed routine patrols all along the fenced compound 24/7.

The instructors wore solid desert tan combat uniforms, desert tan combat boots and a tan pith helmet just like the ones worn by range coaches in the Marine Corps.  Each instructor wore a black utility belt that carried a rubber baton, pepper spray, plastic handcuffs, a taser and a Glock G44 semi-automatic pistol.

Luis stood in the line and waited for his mail if he had any.  He hoped that his granddaughter may have sent him a post card.  At 65, Luis’ knees were beginning to hurt because he had to stand up for so long.

Two other instructors followed the mail instructor into the compound.  One carried a duffle bag of mail and the other carried a can of gasoline.  They dumped the bag of mail onto the ground, doused the papers with gasoline and set it on fire.

“That is your contraband mail,” shouted the mail instructor.  “What I have in this bag is your authorized mail.”

He dumped the contents of the duffle bag onto the ground.  He pointed to one of the campers and instructed him to hand one letter to each camper present.

“You may open the letter and read it,” bellowed the mail instructor.

Luis opened the letter.   It was from the president.

“Dear Camper:

As your president, I am writing to remind you of your place in our country.  As an illegal alien, you have no rights here.  The congress is working hard to appropriate the funds needed to send you back to your natural country once you finish building my wall.  It is a lengthy process but I will sign the bill when it crosses my desk.

The great people of our nation demanded that something be done to restore their jobs.  You stole a job from a real American therefore you were declared a “non-American” and given the status of “illegal alien” and sent to a deportation camp.  You are among your own people at the camp with criminals, murderers and rapists.  Soon you will be among your own people in your natural country which is obviously a shit hole.

In closing, I want to remind you that I owe you nothing.  The food, water, shelter and fair treatment you are receiving is because I have a big heart.  I have the biggest heart of anyone in our country and that is why you are still alive.  But that could change if there is a change in public opinion about the camps.  I was elected to serve the people of this great nation and I do what it is my voters want.  If there are riots in the camps, I will be forced to send in the clean-up squads and liquidate all of you.  If you are obedient, then you will be reunited with your wives and children in your natural country.  Remember, work hard, get my beautiful, wonderful wall built and then you can go home.

God Bless America and God Bless my voters,

The President”

Luis felt sick after reading the letter.  It was the same letter he received every month since he arrived at the camp a year ago.  Nothing had changed and he feared that nothing would ever change.

His parents were immigrants from El Salvador.  They moved to America a year before he was born.  He knew no other home than the US.  For him, to be told that he would be sent to his natural country made no sense.  His natural country was America.  He grew up in America, graduated school in America, got married and had children in America.  He voted in every election.  He even had grandchildren.  He just couldn’t figure out what he did wrong.

“How can a natural born US citizen become a non-American and be declared an illegal alien?” he thought to himself.

He learned of the change in his status when Federal Marshalls showed up at his house, spoke the government’s charges against him and he was taken away.  His entire family were taken away that night.  He never saw his wife again.  The status of his children was unknown.  He did know his granddaughter was alive because he received a postcard from her a month after arriving at the camp.

Life in the camp was nothing to write home about.  It was structured just like army basic training.  Large dormitories with bunkbeds, communal showers and toilets.  There were no dividers between the toilets.  It was just one big room with commodes two feet apart.  The urinal was a long trough made of stainless steel that was the length of the wall.

There were no sheets on the beds.  The mattresses were old and stained by the prior occupant’s bodily fluids.  Campers were given a small pillow, a coarse gray wool blanket, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a bar of Lava brand soap, a towel, a pair of steel-toe work boots, one pair of black coveralls, five pairs of whitey-tightie underwear, five white t-shirts, five pairs of socks, a pair of work gloves and a metal military helmet from the Vietnam war era.  There were no razors or scissors that could be turned into weapons.  Once a month they were groomed by the instructors.

His day began at 0500 hours with reveille and roll call.  At 0530 hours it was time for breakfast at the cafeteria.  The campers were marched as a group everywhere they went inside the camp.  The food at the cafeteria was not great.  Breakfast was the same every day and consisted of two slices of fatty bacon, some scrambled eggs, two pieces of toast and a glass watered-down orange juice.  The orange juice was so clear and tasteless that dissolving a Crayola Crayon in water would have the same effect.  The food was always cold.  After breakfast, the campers returned to the dormitory to clean the bathrooms, mop the floors and take out the garbage.  Everything was cleaned with bleach and water.  Once that was done, they were loaded on to large military trucks and transported to the worksite.

When he first arrived at the camp, Luis was designated as a truck driver.  Every day he drove a truck that carried materials to build the border wall.  Work to construct the wall was performed manually.  There were no excavators or any type of modern mechanical equipment.  Post holes were dug by hand with shovels.  Cement was mixed manually in plastic buckets.  The wall was made of eight-foot corrugated steel panels with barbed wire along the top and concertina wire along the bottom.  The president didn’t want to spend a lot of money on materials to build the wall.  As long as there was a wall along the southern border, that’s all that mattered to him and to his voters.

Luis felt lucky he was a truck driver because he had bad knees.  All he did all day long was to drive the two-and-a-half-ton truck to the worksite, wait for campers to unload the building materials and then drive back to the main camp to pick up another load.  He was watched at all times by a wireless camera.  If the camera malfunctioned in any way or the image was obscured, the truck turned off automatically.

If a driver tried to make a getaway or perform an unauthorized act, the truck turned off automatically, the doors locked automatically, the windows closed automatically, and chlorine gas was automatically released in the cab.  The large tank of poison gas, located under the dash, was clearly visible from the driver’s seat.  It had the letters “CL2” painted on it in yellow.  There was no escape and every driver knew it.  

The work routine was highly regimented.  At the top of the hour, all work stopped and the campers were forced to drink one quart of water from plastic military canteens.  They had one minute to drink all the water.  This kept the campers hydrated in order to avoid any unnecessary work stoppages.  Any camper who did not drink all his water was taken off the line and beaten with a rubber baton.  At the top of the following hour, work stopped again, and campers were instructed to urinate wherever they stood.  This was repeated throughout the workday.  The daily accumulation of urine attracted hundreds of flies and made working in the hot sun even more miserable.

Lunch consisted of expired military meals ready to eat (MRE).  Campers had 30 minutes for lunch and had to eat sitting down wherever they were working.  A team of campers was delegated to distribute the MREs and then collected the trash at the end of the meal period.  This same team collected the canteens, filled them and distributed them when it was time to hydrate.  Water came from several large translucent containers that sat on a flatbed tractor trailer that was strategically parked in the sun.  This ensured the water was always hot or very warm.

Supper was at 1900 hours in the cafeteria.  Food was served on disposable cardboard food trays.  There were no utensils.  Campers had to eat with their hands.  There were no condiments available, not even salt and pepper.  Supper consisted of USDA grade 5 meat, a boiled potato, corn and Brussels sprout.  Campers who did not eat their entire meal, were given a light beating.

Beatings for infractions, however minor, was the norm in the camp.  The rule was to force compliance through pain, a technique called pain compliance.  The policy was to keep the campers as healthy and strong as possible while using the most fiscally conservative means.  The most important objective was to complete construction of the border wall.  Unnecessary injuries only slowed down progress.  There were some instances where a more severe punishment had to be administered despite causing injuries that resulted in a permanent disability or death.  One such punishment was the “anti-compliance treatment” which was essentially experimental open brain surgery at the infirmary.  This was reserved for campers who exhibited habitual periodic non-compliance.  Violent campers whose behavior could not be corrected with beatings were taken to the shower room and shot in the head.

To Luis, it seemed as though there was an inexhaustible supply of new campers to replace the ones who died.  In fact, the president had identified more than 15 million “non-Americans” who were scheduled to be arrested and sent to the camps.

The evening routine in the dorm consisted of showers and laundry.  Speaking was strictly forbidden everywhere except when answering an instructor’s question.  Those who broke the rules were punished.  Luis remembered one episode shortly after he arrived at the camp, when one camper was caught talking to the camper in the next bunk.  Instructors immediately emerged from the I.O. (instructors office) and both men were dragged away screaming.  When they returned a few hours later, their tongues and the interior of their mouths had been scorched black with a torch.  The smell of burnt flesh quickly permeated the dorm as both men spent the night howling in pain.

Luis placed his blanket over his mouth and nose to filter out the smell.  It was the worst thing he had ever smelled in his entire life.  Fresh human excrement smelled better than this horrid burnt flesh, he thought at the time.

“Remember, you don’t need a tongue to build a wall,” declared the instructors who returned the scorched-tongue men to the dorm.  The next morning, they were sent to the infirmary where they eventually died of septicemia.  Their bodies were immediately cremated thus erasing them from history.

At 9 pm it was lights out.  Luis often lay on his bunk and tried to piece together how he ended up at the camp.  It was a futile exercise because there was no logic to it.  All he knew is that life changed the day the president was inaugurated three years ago.

“I even voted for him because I thought he could fix all the problems the news media said existed in America,” he thought.  Now it seemed that he was part of the problems in America and incarceration in the camp was how the president “fixed” it.  This made no sense to Luis because he was on the president’s team.  Nothing made any sense to him anymore.

Every night, he prayed and asked God to keep his family safe and to make it possible to reunite with them soon.  In his prayer, he named his wife, his four adult boys, their wives and the three grandchildren.  He also asked God for clarity of thought in order to understand what was happening to him.  As he faded off to sleep, he was woken by shouting and loud machine gun fire coming from the direction of dorm 105.  There were loud screams and even more weapons fire.  After 15 minutes, there was silence.  The clean-up squad had liquidated dorm 105.  With some difficulty, Luis eventually fell asleep.

Because the camp was hastily and economically built, the sewage system did not always function normally.  There was always sewage seeping into the shower room from the other dorms.  Flushing an empty toilet often resulted in a backwash of sewage that overflowed onto the floor.  The next morning, blood was seeping up through the drains in the shower room.  Toilets were overflowing with watery blood every time one was flushed.  It seemed the clean-up squad had taken the time to move the dead bodies into the shower room to drain the blood after the killings.

During the morning assembly before breakfast, a message from the president was played through the horns.

“Dear campers, this is your president speaking.  Yesterday, I had to make a very heart wrenching decision that affected me more than it will affect anyone else, ever.  I had to order the liquidation of dorm one-oh-five.  The campers in this dorm were all black and as we know, blacks are lazy.  The section of my wall they were building was not progressing as fast as I wanted.  So, I had to make the heart-breaking decision to have them liquidated.  As we all know, blacks are very dangerous, some of the most violent and dangerous people in the world are the blacks.  Science tells us they’re closer to being apes than humans and apes are violent.  So rather than delay building that section of my wall, I got rid of the violent and lazy blacks who were hindering the progress of my big, beautiful wall.  Luckily there was no loss of life during the liquidation.  New white illegal aliens will work a lot harder and faster to finish that section of my wall.  Continue to work hard to build my wall and then you shall be free to live in your natural country.  Enjoy your Saturday grooming.  God Bless America and God Bless my voters.”

Luis was confused.  How can 100 dead campers not be a loss of life, he wondered.  The president must be wrong, surely a hundred dead campers is a tragedy, he thought.

The monthly Saturday grooming was not a happy affair.  Luis hated it as did all the other campers.  They were told it was necessary in order to maintain personal health and to keep the dorm safe from infestations.  After breakfast, the campers stripped down to their whitey-tightie underwear and stood in line inside the dorm.  They were given paper medical slippers to wear.

Stage one grooming consisted of visiting the barber.  Inside the barbershop, there were ten metal folding chairs and ten instructor barbers.  They all wore air-tight medical suits just like those worn by hospital medical professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The instructor barbers used extremely sharp electric clippers to shave the campers’ heads and faces.  The eyebrows were also removed.

Stage two grooming was conducted in an adjoining large room where ten campers were groomed at one time.  This was where all body hair was removed.  There were two instructor groomers per camper.  There were also several instructor medics present.  Campers were suspended from a metal pipe near the ceiling.  Their wrists were locked to the pipe with shackles three feet apart.  Their legs were immobilized by ankle shackles, three feet apart and chained to the floor.  The chains were tightened in order to fully extend the camper’s body until it made an “X” shape.  The underwear was cut off and thrown away.  If a camper resisted, he was beaten in place with rubber batons until he complied.

To save time and avoid unnecessary clean-ups, campers were fitted with urine drainage catheters that had a shut-off valve on the end.  They were also fitted with a rectum plug that was inflated by a small hand pump similar to an old-fashioned blood pressure device.  The tube attached to it was left dangling for easy access.

Dressed the same as the instructor barbers, the groomers used the same type of sharp electric clippers.  One groomer worked on the front of the body while the other worked the backside.  It was efficient, it was systematic, it was orderly, it was brutal, it was humiliating.  Cuts to the genitalia was common.  Screams were ubiquitous.

After grooming, the instructor medics connected a urine bag to the catheter, opened the valve to evacuate the camper’s urine and then removed the catheter.  The rectal plug was deflated and removed.  The campers were then sprayed with alcohol from head to toe, released from their bindings, given a new pair of underwear and sent back to their dorm under the supervision of an instructor.

As ordered for all campers, Luis had a shower after grooming.  He felt the sting of water on every cut on his body.  His scrotum was still bleeding a bit and it was tender to the touch.  After his shower, he lay on his bed in a state of shock as did everyone after grooming.  Some of the new campers curled up on their beds in the fetal position and cried like babies.  Despite going through these sessions every month for a year, Luis still could not get accustomed to it.  He felt as though he had just been raped.

To ensure there was no shortage of camp instructors, the president appeared on television, on the internet and in radio commercials asking for his voters to volunteer.

“Hello to all my wonderful voters and to all the great Americans out there.  This is your president speaking.  I need you to volunteer to be a camp instructor in my deportation camps.  You’ll get FREE training, FREE lodging, FREE medical and a GREAT paycheck.  Thousands and thousands of illegal aliens poisoned the blood of our country and now I need YOUR help to clean it up.  The best thing about this job, is that you’ll personally help ME to make America greater than it’s ever been.  Sign up to serve in the camps today.  It’s the most patriotic thing you can do.”

Luis remembered seeing the recruiting commercials that played constantly on TV.  There was no way to get away from it as there was only one cable news channel.  All the other channels were shut down by executive order of the president.  Every news anchor, journalist, camera operator, and producer right down to the receptionists at the front desks of the former cable news channels were arrested, charged with insurrection, convicted and deported to Siberia.  Luis remembered the president explaining how those people were too dangerous to remain on American soil.

All the newspapers in the country suffered a similar fate.  From the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal right down to the local mom and pop weekly newspapers in all the small towns in America, every single publication was shut down.  The employees and owners were charged, convicted and sent to Siberia.  The only newspaper that remained was USA Today which was taken over by the federal government with the president as the head of the editorial board.

Luis didn’t care if the media was purged.  He believed it was all fake news, just like the president told the American people.  As for the camps, he believed what the president told the voters, that it was a necessary evil to clean up America.

“I’ll never end up in one of those places. I’m a US citizen and a supporter of the president,” he remembered thinking at the time.

One morning during clean-up, Luis was called to the I.O.

“Aguilar, zero, three, one, one.  Report to the I.O.,” bellowed a very loud and forceful sounding voice through the horns.

Luis reported as ordered.  He was handed a telegram folded in half.

“Read it out loud!”  Shouted the instructor.

Luis read aloud the contents of the paper.

“Begin message:

To: Camper Aguilar 0311, Luis

From: Dept. Homeland Security

Dear Camper Aguilar 0311,

The United States Government informs you that your wife, your four sons, their wives and your three grandchildren are presumed dead after flight 699 to El Salvador crashed in the jungles of southern Mexico.  The crash site is inaccessible due to the remote location.  Recovery is not possible.

End of message.”

As the last words left his mouth, Luis fell to the floor.  His entire body was shaking as he went into shock.  He was transported to the infirmary where he was heavily sedated for two days.

When Luis returned to work, he felt numb.  Depression had taken over and he could barely perform his driving duties.  It took all his strength just to do the basics.  Eating was difficult and he received a few beatings for not eating all the contents in his expired MRE.  At the dorm, he showered but it was difficult.  At night, he cried into his pillow until he had no more tears left.  Every day was the same.  Weeks went by.  He no longer said his prayers at night.  He was in a state of despair.

“There’s no God here.  He can’t hear our prayers from this place,” he thought to himself.

One morning after breakfast, Luis was summoned to the I.O.

“Today is the last day of your present assignment,” shouted the instructor.  “Tomorrow, you will work on the line.  Robots will drive all the trucks.  That is all.  Go away.”

As he returned to his morning clean-up duties, Luis went into light shock.

“If I can’t drive, I’ll never survive on the line with my bad knees,” he thought to himself.  “I’ll be declared habitual non-compliant and sent for the brain operation.”

As he swabbed the floor, he remembered one camper who returned to the dorm after receiving the anti-compliance treatment.  His left arm no longer moved and there was a deep depression in the skin on the right side of his head.  It looked as though a piece of skull was removed but never replaced.  He was the dented-skull-camper and he was nearly useless.  Luis remembered how two instructors took the dented-skull-camper to the shower room and shot him in the head.  

Luis had tears in his eyes while driving the truck for the last day.  He was trying to enjoy every moment of it, but he couldn’t get the image of the dented-skull-camper out of his head.

“I don’t want to be like that,” he thought to himself.

He returned to the worksite with a fresh load of construction materials just as the lunch period began.  Without even thinking about it, he floored the accelerator, crushed half a dozen campers siting on the ground and drove through the wall.  The truck’s automation stopped the vehicle.  Luis heard the loud “click” of the doors and windows automatically locking.  His heart raced as he realized what he had done.  Then there was a loud “pop” and highly concentrated greenish yellow chlorine gas filled the cab.