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A pink rose garden. A landscaper trims a hedge.

Sometimes we just need a good hug and a good cry. That's most certainly what happened when a woman who goes by the name Lady Ak (@Ladya2thek) on TikTok was able to hug her beloved friend and landscaper, after he was detained and incarcerated by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Rewinding a few days prior, she posted a video of all the wonderful work her landscaper, Fernando, had done in her garden. Under the chyron: "Our landscaper is not a criminal, but ICE took him away anyway," she gives a tour of the beautiful rose bushes, oranges, pears, marigolds, sunflowers, and more. She then asks, "Why am I showing y'all a video of my garden? I'm showing y'all because this morning, the man who planted all of this, built that garden bed, and has cultivated food and beauty for my family for the last few years, got deported this morning."

@ladya2thek

He was more like family....

She explains how her family met Fernando and how her husband reached out to him when they bought their first house. Her voice quivers as she continues. "When we moved in, our garden looked like this." She pans the camera from an empty cement square to a flower bed full of blooming flowers and fruit, "And Fernando did this."

In tears, she relays, "Now he's gone. He's headed to Mexico. His children live here. His wife is here. And the way I know that he's been deported today is because my husband is a police officer. And they locked him up in the jail my husband works in. And my husband couldn't even talk to him or tell him everything was gonna be okay."

Her empathy extends to her husband, as well. "I feel bad for my husband because I know this is really hard on him too. He's a really great guy, and a great officer. He's kind, he's compassionate, he's courteous."

landscaping, garden, strawberries, fruit trees, gardeningRed strawberries in a garden. Photo by Oliver Hale on Unsplash

Half a million likes and thousands of comments flooded her page. One TikToker writes, "Thank you to you and your husband for caring so much. We need more people with compassion like you. Thank you so much."

But it's the follow-up video that truly exemplifies the good in humans. Simply captioned, "We got Fernando back," we see the original poster hugging Fernando in a sweetly protective embrace. She writes, "Thank you to everyone who helped us get him back. We still have an uphill battle ahead, but we won't do it alone. Fernando is our family, and family fights for one another. Fernando is no criminal. He's a father, husband, and entrepreneur."

@ladya2thek

Thank you to everyone who helped us get him back. We still have an uphill battle ahead but we won't do it alone. Fernando is our family and family fights for one another. Fernando is no criminal. He's a father, husband and entrepreneur.

The first of tens of thousands of comments is: "That's my Dad!" And after quite a few messages back and forth, it would appear to be so. The OP writes, "We got your all, Liz."

Another family member vulnerably shares, "From the moment my father was detained, you and your family have shown us tremendous support and stuck by our side. We are extremely grateful to have Fernando back and fight this uphill battle. Thank you for all the support, we are grateful to have you guys in our corner."

The comment section continues to glow with love and support, not only for Fernando and his team, but for the woman and her law enforcement husband too. The idea that these bridges across all walks of life are being built, simply by looking out for one another, is a hopeful one. The two people in this embrace aren't bound by a political matter, but a human one.

Though she's been dead for nearly 70 years, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is famous around the world. She is best known for her colorful self-portraits, her bold artistic statements involving pain and passion, and her feminist activism. She is more easily recognizable than most visual artists, thanks to her own face being her main subject matter and the unibrow that served as her most prominent identifying feature. She is, in fact, arguably more well-known than her mural artist husband, Diego Rivera, who is famous in his own right.

That has not always been the case, however.

Diego Rivera was one of the most well-known artists of the early 20th century, his large-scale murals launching a revival of fresco painting in Latin America. He earned a place in a prestigious art academy in Mexico at age 10, went on to study in Spain, then settled for more than a decade in Paris. Rivera was friends with Pablo Picasso, and he lived in the U.S. for a handful of years. He painted some of his huge murals here, for the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1931, the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932, and Rockefeller Center in New York City in 1933.

While Rivera was a household name in the 1920s and 30s, Kahlo was not, despite being a prolific artist. In fact, the headline of a 1933 Detroit News article highlighting Kahlo's artistic endeavors referred to her simply as "wife of the master mural painter," patronizingly describing how she "gleefully dabbles in works of art." In hindsight, oof.



The article itself is far more gracious towards Kahlo—perhaps in part because it was written by a female writer, Florence Davies. (It's highly likely that the headline was written by an editor, not Davies herself.)

Davies asked Kahlo if her husband had taught her to paint. "'No, I didn't study with Diego," Kahlo replied. "I didn't study with anyone. I just started to paint.'" Kahlo got a twinkle in her eye before adding, "'Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.'" Then she exploded into laughter.

Neither Davies nor the world knew how seriously true her words would become, though Davies did describe Kahlo's formidable talent in glowing terms.

"Senora Rivera's painting is by no means a joke," Davies wrote, "because, however much she may laugh when you ask her about it, the fact remains that she has acquired a very skillful and beautiful style, painting in the small with miniature-like technique, which is as far removed from the heroic figures of Rivera as could well be imagined."

That Kahlo made a name for herself as an artist in her own right, especially in the time period in which she lived, is a testament to both her style and her spirit. Her personal story, too, is one for the ages. She was badly injured in a bus accident as a teenager and endured 35 surgeries in her short 47 years. She was married to Rivera twice—a tumultuous that was rife with infidelity. She wrote dramatic love letters and indulged heavily in drugs and alcohol. It's hard not to be curious about such an intriguing life.

However, it's her meteoric rise in popularity since the 1970s that has made Kahlo into a household name. Her star of fame may have emerged more gradually than Rivera's, but it's proven to have outshone his.

Indeed, her "dabbling" was actually the creation of a massive body of artistic work that most of us can recognize on sight. Undoubtedly that headline writer would be embarrassed now to have written about one of the world's most famous female artists in such quaint, condescending terms. Especially when the more common question now is "Who was Diego Rivera?" with the answer being "Frida Kahlo's husband. He was also a famous artist."


James Baldwin said, "The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers."

What an apt description of a new art installation at the southern border.

A set of bright pink teeter-totters extend into both the U.S. and Mexico through the barrier between the two countries. Children and adults on both sides of the border can play together, seesawing up and down, their view of one another partially obscured by the vertical steel slats that separate them.



RELATED: Over two dozen scientists have proposed a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border that we should start building right now

Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, associate professor of design at San José State University, came up with the conceptual drawings for the "Teetertotter Wall" in 2009. With the help of others, the two professors created the scene this week near El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and shared images and video of it on Instagram.

"The wall became a literal fulcrum for U.S.-Mexico relations," Real wrote on Instagram, "and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side."

Raell said the event was "filled with joy, excitement, and togetherness."

The images are beautiful and uplifting, yet heartbreaking and tragic at the same time.

The current administration's answers to immigration questions are to build a bigger wall, to severely limit people's claim to asylum, to stoke the fires of fear and prejudice about immigrants from certain ethnicities, and to deter migration with inhumane detention practices.

RELATED: An actual engineer explains why the wall is 'a disaster of numerous types waiting to happen'

This art installation brings to the surface the deep questions those answers hide.

What is the difference between the children on this side of the wall and the children on the other side?

Does the geography of our birth really determine whether or not we deserve safety and freedom?

How do children playing together—as they do universally—become adults who make desperate journeys, adults who create unjust policies, adults who forget their humanity and steal people's babies from their arms?

Will history view this wall as it does most other walls built throughout history—as relics of a less evolved past when humans insisted on dividing themselves into artificial groups and factions?

Turning the much-debated border wall into a playground, even temporarily, reminds us of the axiom that children are children are children. It reminds us that no matter how complex we think immigration issues are, we cannot ignore the simple truth that we are all human beings.


NASA

When we look at our planet from space, we see no borders. That doesn't mean that borders don't or should never exist in any way, but it does mean that those separations are completely man-made and malleable. Here on the ground, it's easy to forget that. It's easy to start thinking of "us" and "them" as if those lines on a map are of greater importance than our shared humanity.

Watching innocent children play is a good reminder that nothing trumps the fact that we are all human beings, all deserving of the same basic human rights, regardless of what side of a border we come from.

via Brandt Witt / Twitter

via Brandt Witt / Twitter

The vaquita is an innocent bystander that may go extinct as Mexican cartels battle for the "cocaine of the sea."

Less than two dozen of the smallest porpoise on Earth exist due to gill net fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico trying to catch the endangered totoaba fish. Totoaba are falsely believed to have medicinal purposes and China and can be sold for up to $100,000.

Cartels in Mexico purchase totoaba from poachers and then sell them to Chinese traders.

In 2016, the Mexican government banned gill nets from most fisheries in the Gulf of California, but they haven't done enough to hold the poachers accountable.

The gill nets used by the totoaba poachers are anchored to the sea floor floor so when the vaquita are snared they are unable to get to the surface to breathe. "These nets are anchored to the seafloor and so they can't pull those nets up to the surface to take a breath," Cynthia Smith, executive director of the National Marine Mammal Foundation told "Nightline." "So, a marine mammal or a sea turtle — they're going to drown really quickly."

via NOAA / Wikimedia Commons

Today, less than two dozen vaquita live in the gulf. The species is experiencing an 8% to 19% decline per year.

The vaquita or "sea cow" in Spanish, is the smallest species of porpoise on earth at about five feet in length and they live for around 20 years. It has a distinct body shape and a dark eye rings and lip patches on its face that resemble goth makeup.

They tend to live in groups of three and live on small fish and squid.

According to ABC News, the vaquita may only last for another six to eight months.

While the odds are stacked against the vaquita, a new documentary "Sea of Shadows" chronicles the two-front war being fought for its survival. The film chronicles the work of conservationist Andrea Crosta as he fights the cartels and traffickers on land and Smith's battle to rehabilitate them at sea.

"From the outside it looks like an environmental story, right? But if you dive in, you understand the role of transnational crime, the narco trafficking, working with Chinese traffickers," Crosta said. "They form what we call Totoaba cartels because they work in the same way, with the incredible power to corrupt, all over the place."

For more information on how you can help fight to save the vaquita from extinction, please visit vivavaquita.com.