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Free the Children: Keep Families Together
Posted on Jun 19 2018
June 19, 2018—The past weeks’ images hurt our hearts: children crying in cages, assembly lines of shackled mothers and fathers pleading with judges who cannot tell them where their children are, anguished mothers deported without their children. The United Nations calls the Administration’s zero-tolerance policy “unconscionable” and Amnesty International called it “nothing short of torture.” What has happened to our country?
“Senior Trump strategists” told the Washington Post that family separation is a strategy to gain funding for a border wall and the rest of Trump’s anti-immigrant platform. The Attorney General says families are torn apart as a deterrent to others, to frighten people into staying away. Whatever the reason for the policy, the administration cares so little about the sacred bonds between parents and children that they fail to keep good enough records to ensure eventual reunification.
“The number of people crossing our border is lower than it has been since Richard Nixon was president, and we are intentionally putting children in cages,” says John Keller, executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. “Holding children hostage to extort funding for a border wall is unconscionable. We do not have an immigration crisis, we have a crisis of cruelty, a crisis of leadership, a crisis that threatens the soul of our nation, not its border.”
With denunciations of the Trump family separation policy mounting, House Speaker Paul Ryan claims that Republican “compromise” immigration legislation will end family separation. It will not. Instead, it will remove the current, limited legal protections for children held by immigration authorities.
Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced the Keep Families Together Act (S. 3036), which would stop the separation of children from their mothers and fathers at the border. Some 39 other senators, including Minnesota’s Senator Amy Klobuchar and Senator Tina Smith, have signed on as co-sponsors. Senator Klobuchar says that “each and every one of the 49 Senate Democrats“ supports the bill.
“Congress must not only talk about this crisis – it must exercise its independent oversight as a co-equal branch of government. It must pass this single-topic bill to end family separation as quickly as possible. Period,” says Keller. “These children and their parents should not be used as a bargaining chip for a border wall or anything else. They deserve our care and protection now.”