Kiddie Cages and Baby Wall

The Children are Watching

I’m so proud that Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, has told ICE in no uncertain terms that he does not want a detention center for young children separated from their parents at the border to be in our city. Here's our mayor in his own words:

“I do not want to be an enabler in this process ”

“There comes a time when we must draw the line, and for me the line with our children”

“I don’t want our facilities and property owners to participate in this process”

“There comes a time when Americans, when Houstonians, when Texans, have to say to those higher than ourselves: This is wrong”

He is joined by Catholic nuns, rabbis, African American protestant ministers, parents with their young children, people representing the myriad nationalities and cultures that make up this, the nation’s most culturally diverse, city.  Many voices, one message:  No Baby Jail in Houston!   No “tender care facility.”  No facility is “tender” if the children have been taken away from their parents.  And it is definitely not “caring” if it exists to hold children hostage to force their parents to leave our country, no matter how strong their claims for refuge and asylum from the dangers they have so courageously fled.

Houstonians are not demonstrating to keep one baby jail out of our city.  We demonstrate to demand that families be united, that families crossing our border be granted just and lawful hearings, that parents not have to bargain their own safety away to get to hold their babies again.  Here are plans for this Saturday’s community protest: 

We do not want Donald Trump’s border wall paid for by the blood of Central American families:  No border wall! No baby wall!

And no cages!  The sight of very young children huddled under thin mylar “blankets” inside cages made of cyclone fencing has shocked the nation.   Tough reporters have been moved to tears and members of Congress rendered speechless at the sight—when they have been permitted to enter and see for themselves what it means for a powerful government to “detain” powerless children.

Ross D. Franklin/AP

The horrified and generous responses to the sight of those cages --from pro-bono lawyers, from ordinary families setting up go-fund-me sites to raise money for assistance in re-uniting families, from church groups and human rights activists -- has been immediate and inspiring.

But I fear another, less noticed, response: it is the impulse to see anyone incarcerated as probably guilty.  We know that defense attorneys don’t want the jury to see their clients in that orange prison jumpsuit – and definitely not in handcuffs or those clanking shackles.  A person accused of a crime who’s dressed in prisoner garb looks much more guilty than a guy who’s had a haircut and wears a crisply ironed shirt to the courtroom– maybe even a suit.  

My point here is that people in a cage, or being marched into a detention center’s maze of cages can look to an uninformed observer like a prisoner – like a guilty person – not like a person who is waiting for a legally required, Constitutional hearing on his reason for being in our country.    The sight of a woman in a big wire cage may prompt in an observer not a gut-punch of sympathy for the violence she left to protect her children from, but a twinge of suspicion of some terrible thing she must have done to warrant being so brutally locked up.

I hope I’m wrong.  But the anti-immigrant press (and shouters) don’t use the term “illegals” lightly. They mean the people themselves and the laws they (supposedly) break just by crossing the border.  The term allows them to ignore the very legal act of seeking asylum, of being afforded a legally required assessment of the danger and persecution they are fleeing. 

The sight of those cages and the exhausted, often terrified people being pushed along in lines by uniformed guards creates a powerful visual of criminals getting what they deserve.  A visual of tall wire enclosures keeping these “others” out of our neighborhoods, out of our country.

At a time when so much fear has been fomented, so much hate shouted from the White House as well as by traditionally whites-only, anti-immigrant groups, we can’t assume that everyone is seeing those cages, those faces, the same way.  That’s why smart, steady, sustained action is demanded by all who value the Constitution, who understand the need for children to be with their parents, who are grieving the terror and fears our officials – and these detention center profiteers – are exploiting.

The president claims to want a safe border and no crime. Right now the crime is in denying legal due process to asylum–seekers.  The crime is in “processing” people without a legally-required hearing to determine the validity of their claim.  And our borders won’t be safe until these families are re-united and the baby wall comes down.

To share your thoughts, click on the “comments” pencil.