Amber Alert! and Other People's Children (A Senator's Inquires)

The Children are Watching

When one of "our" children goes missing, an Amber Alert goes out. Your phone may shake the walls with that urgent buzz that tells you to wake up: a child is gone! Electronic signs along the highway blink the name and age of the child and maybe the license plate of a suspect. The news flashes across the TV screen: one of ours is missing

In her insightful book on teaching African American children, Lisa Delpit wrote that common classroom practices were often a mis-match for African American children, hindered the learning of children who - in the expectations of teachers, in the particular content of the lessons, and in the classroom interactions - were clearly seen as "other people's children."

Her title phrase has become iconic, taking on a life of its own. It reminds us of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we treat children differently if they aren't like us, if they are somehow "the other." It indicts us for accepting these divisions and ignoring their consequences.

The current situation of children coming in desperation to our borders brings into sharp relief what happens when our perceptions - and our policies - paint them as "other people's children." There are at least 1500 children - from infants to teenagers - currently missing, unaccounted for because US immigration officials separated them from their families. In many cases, parents do not know where they are, whom they are with, or when they will see them again.

I haven't been awakened by 1500 Amber Alerts. Have you? Has EquuSearch been dispatched to go out looking for them? Probably not. Because these are not "our" children: they are "other people's children." The US attorney general thinks it's their parents' fault for bringing them here in the first place.

A senator from Oregon decided to inquire: where are the children? What is happening to the children who are being detained in "immigration facilities" and how are they being treated? Where are the children who are missing? He's a sitting US senator with all of the powers of that elected office. He decided to go to the Texas-Mexico border to find out.

They wouldn't let him in! If ICE or the Border Patrol had come across youth who perhaps on a vacation outing, had been separated from their parents, and were now rescued, they would have likely been all too happy to let the Senator and news cameras in to witness their successful mission: "Cancel the Amber Alert! White children found!"

But here we see Senator Merkley being turned away from the "facility," the former WalMart now housing hundreds of kids whose lives have already been traumatized in their home countries and their fraught journey to our border.

A week later, Sen. Merkley and his cameras returned and were let in. Oh, my, the photos show matching linens on the crisply-made beds, and colorful walls. Were those there a week ago? Internment of people within our country should have ended with the Japanese internments of World War II. Separation of children from their families should have ended with the closing of the English-only boarding schools Native American children were rounded up and sent to - and with the abolition of slavery.

I applaud Senator Merkley for bearing witness. For being persistent. And I applaud him and Senator Feinstein and their fellow senators who are joining in submitting a bill to end these detentions and give fair treatment to those seeking safety at our borders.

Here is the bill, the "Keep Families Together Act"

If you agree we have to end this cruel treatment of other people's children, contact your senator to support it. Demand Mitch McConnell let it be heard and voted on. Get all your friends to join in.

Every child has a right to be safe. Every child has a right to have her rights respected. They are all our children. And they are watching.

To share the ways you are advocating for these children, please click on the "comments" pencil and write your story.

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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