Congress member Pramila Jayapal of Washington state said that when she told a group of detained migrant moms and dads that over 350,000 people all across the nation had signed up for June 30 events in their support, “they cheered and cried.”
Jayapal’s visit with migrants detained at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac last weekend was her second this month. While she was only able to meet with women during her first visit, she was finally able to speak with detained men at this recent one. Like the women, many had fled violence and persecution in their home countries only to be persecuted by the Trump administration, despite trying to follow U.S. laws.
“Two of the men who I met with had also come with children,” Jayapal said, “including one with a 3-year-old son in his arms who said Border Patrol agents pushed him and blocked him from entering at a legal port of entry—even when he told them he was seeking asylum—and so he had to cross at the river.”
Advocates have long alleged that U.S. border agents have routinely—and illegally—barred asylum-seekers from legally asking for asylum at U.S. ports of a entry, and these agents have only become more emboldened under Trump.
Another man said that he was college-educated and worked at a bank, but when he refused to turn over private bank information to corrupt police, “they attacked him with a machete. He had visible scars on his neck and showed me his thumb, which had been partially sliced off. He tried to report the crime but nothing happened. When he was ‘left for dead,’ he managed to flee to the United States.”
Now, many of their hopes rest in us and what we do. “The women told me they have seen me on TV telling their stories and they begged us to keep fighting for them,” Jayapal continued. “One woman who is fleeing political persecution in Cuba said, ‘Watching the news, we still believe we are being embraced by Americans and we have hope for freedom.’”
Jayapal said that nearly all of the 26 migrant men detained at SeaTac “were seeking asylum and escaping terrible violence and persecution,” but that “the vast majority still had not had credible fear hearings,” even after spending weeks in prison. “Like the women I had met with,” she said, “these men also broke down and wept, sometimes so emotional that they could not finish their stories.”
During that first visit, detained women told Jayapal that they were humiliated and abused by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents after their initial arrests, telling her that they were called “’filthy’ and ‘stinky,’ and told them that their ‘families would not exist anymore’ and that they would ‘never see their children again.’”
Seeking asylum is a right enshrined in U.S. and international law, but instead the Trump administration has been punishing asylum seekers for exercising this right, and using them as a warning to others from coming to our nation for similar reasons. But parents, facing dire and deadly situations in their home countries, will risk anything to save their child, a fact reiterated to Jayapal.
“One of the men asked me why they were being treated like criminals when they had come seeking asylum,” she said. “I told them about Trump’s zero tolerance policy. When I asked if this cruel treatment they were receiving would stop people from trying to come to America, they all said no. Because they were facing such hopelessness and death, people would continue to come.”
We should be so lucky to embrace and welcome parents who would literally walk thousands of miles to protect their families, and bring with them their hopes and dreams. It’s those complicit in mass deportation and family separation policies that need to be driven out of power. We have to fight back for these families—and that includes getting out to the streets on June 30.
“After hearing even more of their stories,” she continued, “I am crystal clear that our call to action for our mass mobilization on June 30 must still be for Donald Trump to end his cruel and inhumane zero tolerance policy. We simply cannot allow this to continue.”