Care, Resist, Vote

Do you know when children are taken from the care and custody of their parents in the United States?  When they are sexually abused and the offender is still in the home.  When they are physically abused and a professional believes no adult can or will protect them.  When children are abandoned.  When children are so neglected their health or their very life is threatened.

When children are removed from their parent’s care in order to protect them they are placed first with relatives, then with foster families who are screened, trained, and undergo extensive background checks.  As a last resort, when proven they cannot be served in a less restrictive environment, they may be placed in residential or congregate care.  Only in extreme circumstances are children ever placed in a locked setting. 

When children are removed from their parents’ care an inordinate amount of attention is paid to ensuring that parents and children visit one another regularly, that siblings who are not able to be placed together in the same home visit each other frequently, and that whole families meet so that neither children nor parents nor families are alienated from each other.

The federal government provides dollars to the states mandating all these practices.  Family preservation and family reunification are the bedrock of child welfare services.  In addition, juvenile courts across the country go to great lengths to uphold the rights of children and parents to remain together.  Judges order the termination of parental rights only after prosecutors and social workers prove in a court of law that making families whole is impossible. 

Do you know why?  Because we have found that disrupting families, taking children away from the love and care of their parents, breaks a special bond and causes trauma that is very hard to overcome.  Children who suddenly find themselves deprived of the adult or adults who nurture them are sorely challenged to form such an attachment again.  That is why your country’s child welfare system, and the systems of most countries throughout the world, works so hard to repair broken families and keep them healthy and whole.   As Americans: North, Central, and South, we hold creating family, protecting family, and supporting family as perhaps our highest values.  Our culture, our laws, our religions, our very lives all reflect that value.

That is what is so heinous about the deliberate separation of children from their parents at our borders.  It was done willfully, deliberately, and by design.  It was done with the stated intent, by more than one member of our current national administration, to deter our neighbors from seeking legal asylum, in a country that has for many years stood as a beacon of human rights in the world.  It uses children as weapons against their parents, at the risk of doing irreparable harm to those children.  That deliberate separation of children from their parents is a calculation that says this:

“What is the well-being of 3,000 foreign children compared to carrying out new and extreme anti-immigrant policies?”

This is just the latest turn our country has taken against immigrants.  In the Republican nominee’s campaign for president, immigrants were characterized as “rapists, criminals, murderers, drug traffickers.”  In subsequent campaign-style rallies held across the country, our president has called immigrants affiliated with gangs “animals.”  Our acceptance of refugees from war-torn countries, many torn by our intervention, and stigmatized by their religion, has slowed to a trickle.  Workplace raids in harsh low-wage industries across the country where the undocumented labor force is common have swept immigrant parents into detention and deportation while leaving their U.S.-born citizen children to fend for themselves in decimated neighborhoods. 

Making humans among us out to be “the other,” distinct and separate from us, as if we are not all people, God's children if you will, is the first step in justifying brutality against them.  This is your country adopting these policies and practices.  They do this in your name. 

Is this what you signed on for?  Is this the United States of America you imagined it to be?  Do you condone uniformed agents of our country taking children from the arms of their parents?  Was I in their position I would resign rather than carry out such an action.   But here, removed, I search for some meaningful response, some way to show I care, to do something that will make a difference.

I protested family separation at our borders on a hot day in downtown Ottawa Illinois, along with others across my country in more than 700 such protests.  I inform myself, as much as I can, and I try to gauge what my friends and acquaintances are thinking.  But in truth, they are quiet, as I have been up to now.

Is that how it works?  Is this how your country goes off the tracks and runs amok, defying the will of its citizens?  This can’t be the will of the American people, can it?  Surely this is not the United States of America we imagine ourselves to be.  If we believe it to be different what do we do?  We show we care, we resist loudly, but more importantly, we vote.

In 118 days from this writing, November 6, we vote as a country in what is normally known as the midterm elections.  However, this upcoming election will be known as the referendum on the Republican Party.  Our elected legislators in Congress who have failed to speak up failed to stop the actions of our executive branch of government, failed to pass legislation to curb the direction our current administration is headed, and failed to represent our values are responsible for what our country has become.  I almost wrote, "is becoming."  But that’s not true.  Our country has changed in the last year and a half under this administration, and it is up to us to change it back.  We do that by changing those who represent us.

Early voting will begin before 118 days are through.  If you are not registered to vote please do so.  With your right to vote secured, go to your local polling place and cast a ballot for candidates who will make the United States the country you imagine it to be.