April 19, 2017
Page 15
Help Our Immigrant Brothers and Sisters
c ontinued from p age 7
our children so we could arrive on safe
ground. While here our children have con-
sidered committing suicide, made desper-
ate from confinement. The teenagers say
that being here, life makes no sense. One
of our children said he wanted to break the
window to jump out and end this nightmare
. . . They grab the chord [sic] that holds
their ID cards and tighten it around their
necks, saying they want to die if they don’t
get out. And the smallest children, who are
only two years old, cry during the night be-
cause they cannot express what they feel .
. . We left our homes in Central America
to escape violence, threats and corruption.
We thought this country would help us, but
now we are locked up with our children in
a place where we feel threatened, including
by some of the medical personnel, leaving
us with no one to trust.”
The new executive orders on immigra-
tion could mean locking up more fami-
lies and building more detention centers.
This may be fantastic news for the private
prison stock business and for-profit pris-
on industry but it is terrible news for the
thousands of innocent children at risk of
inappropriate cruel and unusual punish-
ment. Now there is another cruel twist:
the Department of Homeland Security is
considering separating children from their
parents at the border. Parents would be de-
tained while their children would be placed
in the care of the government or sent to live
with relatives in the United States.
It’s hard to imagine separating children
and families even in familiar surroundings
— and certainly not in a new country and
in the horrendous situations we have seen
these families face. I can still remember the
overwhelming panic I felt the day I became
separated from my mother at New York’s
large Abyssinian Baptist Church right before
a worship service began when I was about
seven. In the bustling crowd going up into the
balcony, I let go of my mother’s hand. Hap-
pily I was among friendly people who sum-
moned an usher who took me down to the
pulpit where the preacher embraced me and
asked the congregation if anyone knew this
child. My mother who had been frantically
looking for me in the balcony stood and said
yes and an usher reunited us immediately.
But I remember the panic and fear. Nothing
is worse than feeling abandoned and sepa-
rated from a parent in a strange place with
strangers. Is this how our nation is going to
treat “the least of these” — our little ones?
Surely we are better than this!
Marian Wright Edelman is President of
the Children’s Defense Fund.
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