Parents, for the love of our children, resist

As a parent, I am horrified by this country’s violence towards immigrant children. I feel the greatest happiness of my life holding my daughter, nursing her while she periodically breaks to smile up at me and blow raspberries. Today, and every day since learning about these atrocities, I am haunted by the pain of mothers and babies torn apart by this vicious administration. My worst nightmare is knowing my daughter is scared and alone, and I can’t comfort or protect her.

Families go through hell to get to the border, to bring their children to safety; they follow the wealth squeezed from their communities, and we greet them with the greatest pain imaginable. As poet Warsan Shire says, “You only leave home when home won’t let you stay ... you have to understand, no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”

This administration is using babies’ pain as a political bargaining chip. There are no words to describe the ugliness, the hatefulness of these actions. Trump knew his “zero tolerance” policy would result in family separations because of the Flores decision, which prohibits detaining children longer than 20 days. It’s clear the aim of his Executive Order was to roll back Flores (putting the “responsibility” for separating families onto that decision, rather than his policy) and enable indefinite detention of migrant families. Parents: for the love of our children, we must resist this, immediately and wholeheartedly, everywhere and in every way we can.