Keep Families Together — Blog

Over the past few days quite a few of my friends and acquaintances outside of the country have asked how they can help reunite migrant children with their families. I understand that it can often be hard to navigate through the sheer amount of information and links that are shared with us via different sources, and US legislation is often hard enough for citizens to wrap their heads around, let alone those who live in other countries.

This is what has been happening recently.

Before I go into more detail on US immigration issues below and lose you, here are the ways you can help from abroad:

1). Join a protest in your city in your country, or organize one. For example, a friend of mine just protested in front of the US Embassy in Wellington, NZ. There are massive demonstrations planned in the UK in July when Trump visits.

2). Continue to talk about the terrible things that the US administration is doing in terms of human rights. There are many of them, so feel free to pick the one that affects you the most. But don’t stop sharing, discussing, and talking about these major issues. Children who are being ripped from their parents is something that we cannot allow to be normalized. We know what happens next. Black kids being shot in the back by law enforcement is another. While news outlets have been focused on family separation another unarmed black teen, Antwon Rose, was shot in the back by a police officer this week.

Here are some news outlets that I find helpful when it comes to sifting through the news, but of course you can use your own: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Shaun King

3). Donate to different charities that are raising money to pay for the bonds and legal representation of those who are currently detained and separated from their children. Bonds go between $1,500 to upwards of $10,000 so every little bit counts. RAICES is one of these organizations who are trustworthy, and have hit the ground running. KIND help protect migrant children, whether they arrived with parents or unaccompanied. There are quite a few others listed in this article here and here.

The fastest way for parents to get out of detention centers in order to search for their kids if is their bail is posted.

4). Sign petitions. A friend was concerned because she thought that she wasn’t allowed to sign an ACLU petition because she isn’t here in the US. I told her that I sign petitions and contact my representatives all the time band I am not American. Sign away!

Here are some good ones:

5). You can email Trump if you want to get a load off your chest here, but honestly, I doubt he reads anything that isn’t less than 280 characters long anyway.

6). If you speak any Meso-American indigenous languages such as Zapotec, Nahua, Ma’am, Quich’e, Maya, Mixe, Mixteco - not Spanish), contact RAICES to volunteer your skills as this can be done remotely.

7). Follow activists such as Shaun King, Allison Brettschneider, Linda Sarsour, Women's March, Cosecha, United We Dream, Moveon.org - they can guide you on how to help and share information.

In a nutshell the current president based a lot of his campaign on cracking down on immigration from the southern border and from countries where the main religion is Muslim. He also promised to build a wall along the southern border to “protect” US citizens from the people that he seems to think are running in droves across the border every day. Obviously anyone in their right minds knows that his rhetoric is false, ridiculous, and disgusting, but unfortunately many people believe it. Trump and his sidekicks are white supremacists and are working hard on implementing the promises they made in 2016. For the past year Congress has been in a deadlock on immigration reform, with the Republicans holding first the Dreamers, and now migrant minors, hostage. Most of the Democrats (currently in minority) refuse to pass hardline bills that include sections such as funding a border wall, and ending family immigration processes that currently exist (what Trump likes to call “chain migration”). So while these bills keep getting shut down and discarded, Trump and his cronies try to find loopholes by implementing new policies such as the recent “zero tolerance” policy. And while he signed an Executive Order this week to end the separation of families at the border, it hid some other dark new policies that we need to continue to fight. In addition to this, the thousands of children who have already been separated from their parents have not been reunited with them, and no one can tell us if they will ever be.

The immigration system in this country is a huge mess, and a mess that the government profits from, whether it be from the millions they recoup in immigration fees, the billions they collect in taxes from undocumented immigrants, or from the private prisons where they detain immigrants for months on end for the sole misdemeanor of crossing the border illegally. Having lived here for well over a decade on a temporary visa, undocumented, and finally with a green card, I have seen the system in and out and I know what it’s like to live in the shadows, on the edge of my seat fearing deportation. I still breathe a sigh of relief when I come back into the country without being sent into the secondary room for interrogation.

But I have never had to fear my children being taken from me when I leave the house (although I do nowadays because I know where this administration is heading). I am not running from violence, abuse, and/or poverty. I can’t stop thinking of these children screaming for their parents, thrown into cages, of the parents, ripped away from their little children, some still exclusively breastfeeding. Who does that? Evil does that. If you didn’t believe it before you had better believe it now.

You can read more of my immigration stories and articles here. Feel free to contact me if you would like me to add yours to the collection.

The definition of the word cruel is “wilfully causing pain or suffering to others, or feeling no concern about it”. Separating children from their parents is just that: cruel.

I can tell you for a fact that no parent leaves their home with their child(ren) to make a dangerous and extremely difficult journey to another country for fun. It’s not a decision that any parent would make lightly. I’ve written about the border crossing experience before, a true life story from 15 or so years ago, and it’s not something that anyone does just because they woke up that day feeling like taking a little trip somewhere. The conditions of immigrant detention centers are a lot worse today, bordering, and frequently crossing the border of, inadmissible. Prisons are a major business in the US, and immigrant detention centers are also part of this business. People are held for days, weeks, years even, in cells and cages, some even in tents, in freezing cold and boiling hot temperatures, without the ability to communicate with family and friends outside the centers. I’ve known people to disappear suddenly and reappear again 6 months or so later, unceremoniously dumped on the other side of the border. What good is it to anyone to detain someone for so long for the sole act of trying to walk across the border? Because it’s a business, and many people are profiting from it.

Obviously immigration detention centers have never been “nice” places to stay, and undocumented immigrants were arrested before Trump was elected president. However, the spike in arrests and deportations of law-abiding people, people who have been here for decades, and the deterioration of conditions in detention centers are just some of the proof that this current administration’s agenda is more about dehumanizing the non-white immigrant, demonizing entire populations, and targeting those who are the most innocent, than actually making the country a safer place.

The family separation policy is not even a law, but already over 2,000 children have already been separated from their families at the border, breastfeeding babies included, in less than 6 weeks. The administration has created a loophole in the system, deeming that every person who crosses the border illegally should be prosecuted, and as you cannot let a child go to jail with their parents they are taken from them and thrown in detention centers, often under horrific circumstances. It is then up to their parents to find them and get them out again, usually with little help or recourse to help. Also, if you have been following what’s been going on in Congress for the past year or so you will have noticed that when it comes to immigration policies, hardcore Republicans have been using immigrants as bargaining chips to get what they want. Up until now it was the Dreamers, but you can be sure that it will soon be immigrant children and how they are separated from their parents. “If you give us the wall we will let the kids stay with their parents”.

We all know this is completely immoral, wrong, insanely disgusting, cruel, and abhorrent. I don’t need to explain why, because those who are up in arms about this know full well why, and those who aren’t are not only being gaslit by their government, they also won’t change their minds anyway. For centuries this country (and many other European countries for that matter) have been in the habit of dehumanizing races other than white in order to maintain white supremacy, so the sheer amount of people who are able to look away from the inhuman practice shouldn’t be that surprising. This should however just make us want to fight all the more to make sure these policies and this government are run into the ground.

Those who are throwing up their arms in mock outrage proclaiming how “unamerican” this policy is need to understand that it has existed for centuries. Children of slaves were taken from their mothers (while their mothers were forced to nurse white babies), Native American kids were removed from their homes and shoved into boarding schools or adopted out into white families. And this is just the US. I don’t think we need to explain how the Nazis in Germany separated children from their parents. It was one of the first things they did when they rounded up families. Or what Stalin’s officers did when they were rounding up Poles and sending them to Siberia in 1939-40. It’s not that we don’t learn from history, it’s just that we seem to refuse to believe that atrocities can happen again, so they just keep on happening, hashtag “no more” and “never again”.

This isn’t just Trump though, it is also all of those people who are around him, all of those people who have been waiting in the sidelines for their moment to arrive. Remember, Hitler himself didn’t come up with the “Final Solution” (mass extermination of Jewish people): Himmler, Goering, and Heydrich were the ones who devised the main plans. We have to be aware of all of these people, some of which were elected a long time ago, way before Trump. Keep an eye on people like Stephen Miller for example. It’s in everyone’s best interest to know who is representing us. It’s even more important that those of us who are immigrants know who are representing us (and not representing us at all).

Saying that, I noticed something a long time ago, but it’s become way more apparent now... So many immigrants from Europe whose situation is considered “safe” lower their eyes and look away when you try to talk about immigration policies and human rights issues with them. They wave their green flag far and wide on social media, but if you ask them to sign a petition or join a march they disappear. I don’t think it’s because they don’t care, but their “safety” is a privilege that they don’t want to lose: “we are OK now, we can’t afford to think of others”. Thing is they never really had to fear ICE knocking on their door, never had to fear losing their children, their livelihood, their lives anyway. It’s a privilege that makes me slightly sick. There is also often that back thought of “well you know you could have done it the “right” way”. I’ve seen it flash in people’s eyes when I tell my story or when I tell someone else’s story. Privilege. Even as an immigrant it is your fundamental right in this country to benefit from freedom of speech, and you cannot be penalized for standing up against what is wrong. Every voice counts when it comes to rising up and fighting against injustice. A lot of what is happening in this country hits very close to home for my family, and I can’t just stand back and watch it happening just because I finally have a green card. No one is safe.

This is why I ask ALL immigrants to stand up and fight against each and every damning immigration policy. Especially those who have their green cards, or those who are naturalized. As I said, no one is really safe.

“This is what happens when you operate on emotions” is a phrase that caught my eye on Twitter this past weekend, a phrase voiced by a troll trying to tell us all that separating families is OK. But if we don’t operate on emotions then we cannot claim to be humans anymore, can we? If a child crying for their parents doesn’t make YOUR heart hurt then there is something intrinsically wrong with you. If you believe that one person has more rights than another based on where they were born then you are just perpetrating the hate that is rotting our existence from the core. If we use our privilege and standing to hurt and destroy others rather than protect and aid them then we are the problem. But staying silent and turning our heads away from everything that is happening makes us just as complicit. The only solution I see is standing up and fighting against all of this.

It’s not enough to just share articles on social media or talk about it with friends. We need to STAND UP AND RAISE OUR VOICES. Here are some ways to help. But really, keep calling and writing to your representatives, and ask them to support Senator Feinstein’s Keep Families Together Act. Even if your representatives are aligned with your beliefs write to them anyway: the more support they have the harder they will fight.

Apathy is the bane of our society. We have to be better at protecting each other.

You can read all of my immigration stories and articles HERE. If you are interested in having your own story told, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

How Can I Help From Outside the US?

The Definition of Cruelty