The Sounds of Children

This is audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, made available by ProPublica. If children crying for their parents bothers you, this will bother you, but you need to hear it. There are subtitles.

The Trump administration instituted a new policy a couple of months ago that every person crossing the border illegally will be arrested. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor. Since children cannot be sent to jail, they are sent to separate holding facilities without their parents, which are defined as "not jail." Over 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in this manner since April, and so many more are coming in every day that a new tent city was erected overnight in Texas to hold the overflow.

It is legal to cross the border at an official port of entry to ask for asylum. Many of the people arrested are seeking asylum, but the border patrol is not allowing people to cross at an official port of entry for the purpose of asylum. So they enter elsewhere, ask for asylum, and are arrested. 

The current administration has stated that this tactic is being used as a deterrent, so that people will not come to the US for asylum. Put yourself in a refugee's place. If your home country is so dangerous that you'd walk to the US to escape it, any haven is better than no haven. If I were forced to choose between my child dying or being separated from me, I'd choose the separation. But it's still evil and unnecessary, and our federal government is only doing it to inflict pain upon these families. Trump says he will lift the child separation practice if Congress gives him an immigration bill that includes $25 billion for a border wall. Does that not sound like ransom to you?

There are plenty of people who think arresting refugees is a fine tactic, that we can't have so many immigrants here. Their ancestors who came to the US as refugees ...well, they say that's different. I am a white woman born in the US, but there is nothing at all that makes me any more deserving of safety and freedom than someone fleeing a lawless country to seek safety for their family. God loves the refugee children as much as He loves me.

Twenty years ago today, I took a child out of a Communist country and brought her to the US to grow up in an intact family. When I, an American, walked into the US Consulate at Guangzhou, our group passed through hundreds of Chinese citizens outside who had been waiting for weeks just to get an appointment to ask for a US visa. We walked right in, privileged because of an accident of birth. And now we have children being separated from their mothers and fathers right here in our country, sent to their own jails and camps, with no protocol in place to reunite them with their parents, who could be deported without them. That ain't right, no matter who you are.

What kind of nation have we turned into?

If they will do this to children, on the flimsiest excuse, they will do it to anyone.

Including, on the flimsiest excuse, you.

— Charles Soule (@CharlesSoule) June 18, 2018