If there is just one article you read today, this one by the NY Times is a must read. It describes the devastating cost of Trump’s brutal child separation policy.
This inhumane policy basically stole children from their parents and as described in this piece. It has exacted a terrible cost on the lives of thousands of children.
Before they were separated at the southwest border, Ana Carolina Fernandes’s 5-year-old son loved playing with the yellow, impish Minion characters from the “Despicable Me” movies. Now his favorite game is patting down and shackling “migrants” with plastic cuffs.
After being separated from his mother for 50 days, Thiago isn’t the same boy who was taken away from her by Border Patrol agents when they arrived in the United States from Brazil, Ms. Fernandes said last week.
When they first got home after being reunited, the boy — whom she hadn’t nursed in years — pleaded to be breast-fed. When visitors showed up at the family’s new home in Philadelphia, he crouched behind the sofa.
“He’s been like that since I got him back,” Ms. Fernandes said. “He doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”
Thiago is among nearly 3,000 children who were forcibly removed from a parent at the border this spring as part of the Trump administration’s new “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. After a national backlash, President Trump ended family separations on June 20, and more than 1,800 separated children have been reunited with their parents over the past few weeks.
But many of the children released to their parents are exhibiting signs of anxiety, introversion, regression and other mental health issues, according to reports from lawyers, immigrant advocates and volunteers working with reunited families.
“Our volunteers are seeing the significant and real toll that these traumatic separations have had on these children’s and these families’ lives, which persist even after reunification,” said Joanna Franchini, who is coordinating a national network of volunteers working with migrant children and their parents called Together & Free.
Children who were happy and carefree, are now withdrawn. They suffer from mental trauma, because of being forcibly separated from their parents. Hiding behind couches and sadly re-enacting the events of their inhumane separation and incarceration.
We can never forget this brutality that was perpetrated by Donald Trump and his cronies and never forget the silence from the majority Republicans, as only public outrage finally forced them to act. They are complicit as well.
Many, if not all, of these children will end up suffering during their lives.
This is not the America I know, but this is exactly the America Donald Trump craves. Incredibly brutal, without a shred of empathy or humanity. An America that fans the flames of racism against brown people and literally destroys lives.
Never forget.