Up to 100 kids, parents, and advocates marched to the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., Thursday, on the court-mandated deadline to reunite migrant children over age five who were kidnapped from their parents at the U.S./Mexico border.
“With crayons and Play-Doh,” The Hill reports, “children drew pictures and sang songs in the building. They wore T-shirts and held signs that read ‘I am a child,’ a reference to the ‘I am a man’ posters during the 1960s civil rights movement.” Their demands were clear: the reunification of all migrant families, and in safety, now.
Despite the fact that as many as 3,000 kids were separated from their families due to the administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy, the government has outrageously deemed that a much smaller number are eligible for reunification, and possibly hundreds others will not be reunited by the end of the day because the parents may have already been deported. This is a human rights crisis.
“Throughout this process, it’s very clear that the Trump administration has never had a plan to reunify these families,” said “Families Belong Together” leader Jess Morales Rocketto. “The only thing that made a difference is our pressure.” The advocates had the ear of several members of Congress, who appeared at the rally in solidarity.
“These are our children,” U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California told the advocates. “We should each think of them as being our own, and we should treat them that way. We should understand the love that a parent has for their child. It doesn’t matter where that parent was born. It doesn’t matter what that language is that they speak.”
Inside the Hart building, advocates dropped a large “I am a child” banner as they “committed to seeing through every single family and making sure that they're supported and, and have legal representation, find housing, etc,” said Rocketto, who has also led a “Flights for Families” campaign ensuring flights and other accommodations and support for recently reunited families.
Another advocate, Katie Ham said she was protesting with her two-year-old son Nathaniel, “even if he did not understand immigration policy now,” telling The Hill that “I hope that when he does understand one day, that he will look back on this time and I'll be able to tell him that, as a family, we stood up and we did something. We'll have a story to tell.”
Judge Dana Sabraw’s reunification deadline is today, but this crisis will continue tomorrow. It should not be up to this administration, which cannot go a day without stating a lie, to determine who is and isn’t fit to be reunified. Families should be reunited, free and out of immigration jails, and if parents were coerced or misled by immigration officials into being deported, they should be brought back for reunification.
“It’s inhumane. It’s criminal,” Harris continued. “The United States government is committing an act that is absolutely one of the most inhumane acts, which is to take babies from their parents, and it is important that we all stand up and say we, as a country, are better than this.”