We Need Our Little Brother Back

The Children are Watching

When my father’s father was five years old, he was orphaned.  His parents died three years apart, each at age 42.  Everything changed. My grandfather recalled standing on the back stoop bawling while Old Bessie, the beloved family milk cow, was led away – and she was bawling!  The three older boys went to live with an aunt and uncle.  My grandfather was quite literally “farmed out,” sent to live with a farm family “down the road.”

He was too little to remember how much time passed, but he loved to tell this story:  at some point his next-oldest brother, then about 9, hitched up the horse to the wagon and set out for that farm down the road.  His purpose was clear:  “We need our little brother back.”  And so he took him home.

A sweet story of family ties.

The story is not so sweet for the thousands of families at our southern border whose children have been ripped away from them. Their already perilous lives are being shattered by the cruel, arbitrary and completely unnecessary decrees of a callous, un-American attorney general who, for whatever reason, is afraid of people who don’t look like him.   Jeff Sessions, defying all human decency, international human rights, and morality, has completely upended the American tradition – and laws – of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers.  People who are fleeing the immediate hazards of war, persecution, kidnapping, drug cartel violence, and other dangers may by law present themselves at the border to immigration authorities to request asylum.  They are, by law, entitled to a review of their situation and their plea, without prosecution.  The proceedings are not criminal.

That is, refugee and asylum petitioners are not themselves breaking a law; they are not criminals.  But their current treatment under the new Sessions directives is criminal in its cruelty and perhaps its illegality.  Sessions has declared that adults coming into the US are presumed to be lawbreakers, “illegal.” And to be “processed” as “illegals,” they must be taken into adult custody where they cannot take their children.

Most of the migrants coming to our borders are families with children, many of them young , even babies.   

Here is what is happening:

1,475 children are unaccounted for between October and December of 2017. According to the Guardian between May 6 and May 19, 658 children were separated from 638 parents bringing the total known separations to over 2,400.

Here is what the president’s own chief of staff said about where the children are being taken:

On May 11, John Kelly assured the American people, “The children will be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever.” 

Here’s what this means:

The children – and their separation from their parents – are the new border wall.   We as Americans, as parents and grandparents and heirs to the stories of our elders as they built “family” over the generations, must join together to stop this cruelty.

My next posts will highlight two heroes in this effort:  a senator who demanded to see – and show the nation -- the conditions of internment and detention these migrants face, and the lawyer nun who can tell us ways to intervene.

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