Can you imagine?

Jun 30, 2018
3 min read

Written June 20:

Can you imagine? I want you to close your eyes and imagine the need and desperation that one must feel in order to flee their home and risk everything in order to live where you are now, in the United States of America. You are privileged. You can hug your mother, father, son, daughter. You can kiss them goodnight.

Fortune, Natasha Bach. “Someone Added US Immigrant Detention Centers to Wikipedia's List of Concentration Camps.” INSIDER, INSIDER, 20 June 2018, www.thisisinsider.com/american-immigration-detention-centers-added-to-wikipedias-list-of-concentration-camps-2018-6.

According to Homeland Security, nearly 2,000 immigrant children were separated from their families during a six week period between April and May 2018. Overall, more than 10,000 children are currently in shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

We are the land of the free and the home of the brave. Are these family separations what we, as Americans, embody and find acceptable? Will we allow for children to be stripped from their family’s arms, thrown into detention centers, and treated as if they are criminals? To say they had a choice in the matter is simply a lie… Children are thrown into cages. Yes, cages. I couldn’t believe it either, until I went from website to website, news channel to news channel, fact checking and looking at images. Human beings are given a mattress that is on the floor, blankets, and portable bathrooms. This is not a portable problem. This is an extensive problem we, all together, are facing on the southern border.

On average, a child will spend 51 days in an Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services. Can you imagine? I would not allow my dog to be kept in a center, such as the ones we are housing people in, for 51 days. These people have names. They have stories and loved ones. They need help and refuge.

These aliens, because we most definitely are not treating them with the common decency to call them people, are then placed with parents or family members, if they are in the country, regardless of if they are legal or not. How do we find these individuals? Why would they come forward to the government, other than to save their loved ones? What is the long term result for doing such, if they are found to be here illegally? Can you imagine that moral dilemma? If that person does not come forward, the child is then placed with a sponsor that is deemed suitable. I want to know who is “suitable” to care for a child that is in a foreign country, separated from their family, and enduring such trauma. Thank you, to those that have come forward and offered care, love, and support to these individuals, however, you shouldn’t have to. They should be comforted by the embrace of their guardian, mother, father, siblings.

Kirstjen Nielsen, Homeland Security Secretary, said, “That’s no different than what we do every day in every part of the United States when an adult of a family commits a crime. If you as a parent break into a house, you will be incarcerated by police and thereby separated from your family. We’re doing the same thing at the border.” Well, Ms. Nielsen, for an individual, this isn’t something that happens “every day.” They have come knocking on our door to ask for help and savior. What are we to do? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that separating families is in no way acceptable and ethical. John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff, says, “But a big name of the game is deterrence.” Mr. Kelly, what is the other option for the thousands of individuals flooding our borders?

What will YOU do?

Protest at Ohio Statehouse June 30: