The Administration's "zero tolerance" policy for people coming to our border to be charged with a crime and jailed. Those traveling with children have the kids taken away and also jailed. There are CHILDREN IN CAGES who were put there by the U.S. government.
I've scrolled Twitter reading in horror and even seen a few posts on Facebook (my FB feed trends neutral since most people I know IRL are conservative to right wing and I've blocked most of their propaganda posts). I've had agitated conversations with my husband (just the awfulness/not that we disagree).
I know people in my life applaud the "zero tolerance" policy and separating families, and I honestly don't know how to reconcile that. It's been bad enough being family with people who celebrate white supremacy, bigotry, racism, sexism and hatred. Child abuse wasn't something I was expecting. How can you convince someone that other people matter?!?!?!
I do plan to gather the girls and take them with me to a protest next Saturday. I'm not sure how to explain this to Jane or what's really appropriate, but I also know we need to stand up for what's right. And this policy, even this backpedaling that's happened, just is not right. Families belong together (and NOT in jail for seeking asylum)!
Here are some of the tweets I've liked or retweeted over the past couple days:
Trump signed an executive order yesterday in the hopes that people would move on:— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 21, 2018
There are still babies in cages
There are still 2500 kids who have been separated from their parents
There is no plan to fix any of this
Things are as bad today as they were yesterday.
“We need to speak up because after they come for them they’ll come for us” is absolutely the wrong line of thinking. Absolutely positively.— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) June 20, 2018
We need to speak up because they are coming for anyone.
Full stop.
The great @repjohnlewis is one of my all-time heroes. Thank you, Congressman: https://t.co/Ai6j59Ra75— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) June 20, 2018
Make no mistake: Today’s executive order fails to address or end this moral crisis. It merely replaces the unacceptable evil of family separation with the unacceptable evil of child detention. https://t.co/eNPDcNhokM— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) June 20, 2018
In other words: the children who woke up in detention centers without their parents this morning will also go to sleep in detention centers without their parents tonight and for many nights to come, despite the paper the president signed this afternoon https://t.co/YfyrcbYO00— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) June 20, 2018
hot tip: don't detain families either.— andröid wk (@UnburntWitch) June 20, 2018
"but people illegally coming to the US will strain our social support structures blah blah blah my tax dollars abloo bloo bloo"
my dude, I've got bad news about where prisons get their funding from for you
Let’s not get sucked into a moral vortex where something less than diabolically evil is somehow acceptable.— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 20, 2018
If the new policy puts kids and parents in cages indefinitely that’s better than kids in cages alone, but still illegal and immoral.
The phrase that keeps coming back to me this week is "hardened hearts." It goes hand-in-hand with the refusal to see others as fully human. And for Christians, that is also a refusal to look for the imago Dei in every child of God.— Amy Sullivan (@sullivanamy) June 18, 2018
And this one, which is so true in my experience as a full-time caregiver I can feel it in my teeth:
And basically this:I'm going to let you in on a big old secret no one talks about enough: it's not that easy keeping little kids alive, even when you love them with every cell in your body. Putting toddlers and young children in cages is a sure-fire recipe to kill a bunch of them— Asher Wolf (@Asher_Wolf) June 20, 2018
I guess i'm a single issue voter now and the single issue is not putting babies in cages— Megan Amram (@meganamram) June 20, 2018