In Romania in the early 1990s, the world saw children warehoused in orphanages, crowded in spaces that were too small, without enough people to care for them. Some even had cages.
The world was outraged, and rightly so. No child should be warehoused. No child should be in a cage. But the federal government has created orphanages — complete with cages. The world should be outraged.
I have not been able to sleep for days. I’ve cried buckets of tears over the immoral situation on our southern border. The audio of children crying themselves hoarse just ripped my heart out. I was glad to see the LDS Church and Catholic Church weighing in. Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox also weighed in with an awesome Twitter thread that starts:
Our federal delegation has weighed in on the side of humanity and for that, I thank them.
There are 11,785 migrant children in the United States without their parents. No one knows for sure how many are under age 13, but it’s enough that three “tender age” shelters have been opened and a fourth is planned to hold up to 240 young children in a Houston warehouse. Some of the children are just a few months old.
Children are also being exported to other states. There are 100 shelters in 17 states. Michigan is being sent children younger than they’ve ever seen before. Agustin Arbulu, executive director of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, said, “Some of the children [arriving here] are as young as 3 months of age and are completely unable to advocate for themselves.”
Their parents did not go with them.
This administration knew exactly what it was doing. Within days of announcing a new “zero tolerance” policy, the government issued a request for proposals from shelter and foster care providers to provide services for the influx of children.
Yesterday, federal officials said that since May 1, 2,342 children have been separated from their families. They’ve also been reclassified from members of a family unit to “unaccompanied alien children.” Let that sink in. They are separated from their families and then labeled as having no family. Even if they are so young they are nonverbal — clearly not children who took off on their own.
This issue has caused an uproar on more than one front. One is the immediate and growing public backlash from instituting a “zero tolerance” policy that really is a “zero humanity” policy. But another uproar is occurring because of either the silence of those who can and should weigh in on this issue, or even worse, those who have spoken in favor of this abhorrent policy.
Let’s be frank. If you have stayed silent on this issue — or have supported it — you’ve lost the right to call yourself pro-life and pro-family.
I’ve seen and heard far too many people say, “It’s complicated,” or, “Well, someone else started it,” or even, “That’s what you get for breaking the law.” It’s not that complicated. I don’t care who started it. And, please, let’s stop conflating crossing the border with felonies. It’s not. It is legal for asylum-seekers to cross the border and request asylum. There are multiple accounts of families seeking asylum being separated at the border. That is illegal on the part of the federal government. At worst, it’s a misdemeanor, like speeding. We are not in the habit of yanking kids away from their parents and throwing the parents in jail because they have a lead foot on I-15.
In the time I’ve been working on this column, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to end the practice of separating kids from their families. That is good. It’s also just a start. We cannot create internment camps with indefinite detention. There are literally thousands of children who need to be reunited with their families and not remain lost in the system. And no one should ever forget that this administration is willing to break the tender hearts of children to use as a bargaining chip.
The last words of the Old Testament are “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”
Families belong together.
(Photo Courtesy Holly Richardson)
Holly Richardson is currently volunteering at an orphanage in Belize, a country that is working on eliminating orphanages because children should grow up in families.