It's tempting to believe that no one has ever loved their child like you love yours. But now we have policy being set by someone who likely believes that he invented loving one's children because for him, it was the first time he'd ever loved anyone but himself.
But really, our love is not so special. The joy when they smile, the fear that something will happen to them, the desperate need to protect them? Other parents feel that. Other parents with different skin colors from our own, different languages, different countries: they feel that. And those children rely on their parents for that love and protection, for snuggles and the assurance that they’re safe and cared for.
A parent who carries their toddler for hundreds or thousands of miles to get to the United States to seek asylum has shown that they love their child at least as much as a billionaire who expresses his love by talking about his daughter’s hotness and making his children vice presidents of the family company in their 20s.
A child whose only stability, in the face of violence and poverty and dislocation, has been their parents loves and needs those parents as much as a child whose mother gets widespread media coverage for her adoring mother-child glamour shots on Instagram.
The point that this is exactly why Donald Trump goes so far to dehumanize immigrants has been widely made, but it bears repeating: he wants us to think of these children and parents as not like us, as loving and needing each other less than we do. He wants us to read accounts of what his administration is doing and think these aren’t children like our own who will be traumatized as our own would be, nor parents who will fear for their babies and grieve their absence. But they are. And anyone who thinks otherwise, anyone who has been dismissing this news, needs to understand: This is evil.
Either you’re not okay with that, or you are that.