FINAL UPDATE:
Trump, under immense worldwide pressure and criticism for his inhumane policy of separating migrant children from their parents at our southern border, has finally done the right thing, has finally done what he could have done weeks ago.
The New York Times, just before the order signing:
But the president, furious about the pummeling he has taken in recent days, has been casting about for an escape from the crisis, people familiar with his thinking said.
Are we supposed to drop to our knees and thank this man for helping put out a humanitarian fire he himself started?
Read the Executive Order generously “Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation” here.
UPDATE II:
America can breathe easier now:
• Compassionate Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen assures us:
…children in D.H.S. and H.H.S. custody are being well taken care of. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement provides meals, medical care and educational services to these children. They are provided temporary shelter, and H.H.S. works hard to find a parent, relative or foster home to care for these children. Parents can still communicate with their children through phone calls and video conferencing.
We now care for them. We have high standards. We give them meals, we give them education, we give them medical care. There is (sic) videos, there is (sic) TVs, I visited the detention centers myself…
• Empathy and tolerance authority Laura Ingraham has now clarified that the detention centers where migrant children are being kept are “essentially summer camps.”
• Tenderhearted Ann Coulter has identified the distressed migrant children to be “child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now…” and warned our all-caring president to not fall for it: “Mr. President, get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV…These kids are being coached,” she said. “They’re given scripts to read by liberals…Don’t fall for the actor children.”
There you have it is all just another conspiracy by the “fake news.”
UPDATE I:
Normally the United Nations weighs in when human rights abuses occur in countries such as Myanmar, North Korea, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Russia…
Today, the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights felt the need to once again (the UN had already this month condemned the practice of separating children from their parents) call for an immediate halt to and to condemn the “Trump administration’s policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents.”
Citing an observation by the president of the American Association of Pediatrics that locking the children up separately from their parents constituted “government-sanctioned child abuse,” the High Commissioner said, “The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable,” according to the New York Times.
While the present First Lady called on “both sides” to end family separations, the former First Lady Laura Bush minced no words calling the heinous policy “cruel” and “immoral,” and calling the images we see at the border “eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.”
In the meantime, Trump continues his attempt to use this shameful practice as leverage to get his border wall and other immigration policies so near to his heart.
Mr. Trump, one does not negotiate on Nazi-like tactics. One does not get to set the house on fire and then try to negotiate terms for the fire department to respond.
Original Post:
This article is dedicated to those migrant fathers along our southern border who will not be spending this Father’s Day with their sons and daughters.
As an immigrant to the United States, the land of opportunity, I know firsthand what a blessing it was when I first set foot in America in search of a better life.
Thus, I have a soft spot in my heart, rightly or wrongly, for those who attempt to come to America, not always following every rule and not always just to improve their chances to lead a better life but, in too many instances, fleeing the horrors and violence back home, literally fleeing for their lives.
As we approach World Refugee Day, a day to “commemorate the strength, courage, and perseverance of millions of refugees,” a day “for the public to show support for families forced to flee” I hardly have words to express my grief and anger at what our government is perpetrating on those who are seeking refuge and asylum in the land of the free, the land of the brave.
While our State Department has the gall to proudly describe the mission of its Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) as one of protecting refugees, other migrants and conflict victims “who are often living in quite dangerous conditions,” as one to ease their suffering and to “resolve the plight of persecuted and uprooted people around the world on behalf of the American people,” another branch of government is doing just the opposite and certainly not on behalf of the majority of Americans.
Under instructions from the Justice Department and blessed by the President of the United States, children are being cruelly — certainly not “Christianly” — ripped apart from their immigrant parents’ arms and “warehoused” at detention centers, abandoned buildings and tent cities along our southern border.
As of Friday, the Trump administration had separated 1,995 children from the adults they were traveling with at the U.S. border between April 19 and May 31.
Not only does the president falsely claim that “Democrats law” mandates the inhumane separation of children from families seeking asylum in our country, but his Attorney General equally falsely cites the “rule of law” and heretically invokes the Bible in an attempt to justify such a cruel aberration from the “Rule of God.”
The president’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, herself a mother of three, incredibly echoed Sessions’ shameless manipulation of the scriptures, surely suppressing her motherly and humane instincts in order to support her boss’s political agenda and machinations — to justify what cannot be justified.
In the past, Republicans have used the Bible to promote unbiblical practices such as justifying “more stringent food stamps requirements.”
Sessions’ citing of Romans 13 to suggest that God supports such heartless acts by our government becomes even more repugnant when one recalls that this same passage was misused in the mid-1800s by the defenders of slavery.
Dana Milbank at the Washington Post minces no words:
The attorney general’s tortured reading of Romans is exactly the strained interpretation that others have used before to justify slavery, segregation, apartheid and Nazism. The same interpretation could be used to justify Joseph Stalin, or Kim Jong Un.
If we are going to invoke the Bible, a much more appropriate passage in this case would be the verse from Exodus 23:9, “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in Egypt.”
Many religious, political and civic groups and organizations have denounced the administration’s actions along the border as disgraceful, immoral, inhumane, un-American, even as a “unique form of barbarism.”
So have numerous news sources.
My hometown newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, close enough to where the inhumanities are taking place, implores:
…we cannot forget the horrific scenes at our nation’s borders, where infants and children are being taken from their parents’ arms by U.S. government agents.
::
This is not who we are as a nation. We cannot be silent when our immigration policy terrorizes families and tears them apart. Separating children from their parents is barbaric and it must end.
I for one will not forget and will not be silent.
Lead image: CNN screen grab
