Please, tell me more about the phony war on Christmas, and how traumatizing it is for you to see black Santas, Holiday Trees, or someone trying to wish you good tidings without the word “Merry.” While you are enjoying your first-world privilege outrage, there is a young child in a cramped cage, wearing the clothes she came in with, trying to calm down a sick toddler crying out for mom and dad. The toddler can’t fathom what’s happening, and there is a good chance they will never see their mom and dad again.
That’s the image stuck in my head today as I watch my children opening presents by a roaring fire.
The parents only “crime” was fleeing criminal violence, and for that, they had their children taken away, and in some cases, lost. As for the kids, I have absolutely no idea what they did to justify this extreme abuse. According to Donald Trump, the poor conditions and the family separations serve as a “deterrent” for others seeking asylum here. Child torture is a feature of his plan, not a bug:
When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, which should happen, you have to take the children away.
-Donald Trump, June 19, 2018
Under Trump, Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller were allowed to completely rewrite our immigration policy. Now, anyone who seeks asylum is immediately regarded as a criminal and treated as such before the asylum claim can be evaluated. No exceptions are allowed, even if the family is targeted for persecution or someone is fleeing domestic violence. Children and even babies were ripped from their parents and crammed in caged holding cells. Right now, there are thousands of families behind bars, and hundreds of children are still languishing in for-profit concentration camps.
The horror is real, as one non-profit director, Hope M. Frye, testified before Congress:
“Some children were too traumatized to even interact with us. Children who were lucid enough to interact with us were glad to see us. They were grateful for the opportunity to sit in an office which was warmer than their cages, to sit on a chair not on a concrete floor.
The children we saw were filthy wearing the same wet and mud stained clothes in which they traveled. Many were covered in mucus and vomit. Babies had soiled diapers.”
Pope Francis called attention to their plight in today’s Christmas message, which will likely fall on unhearing ears. It is really something that self-professed Christians are willing to listen to a golden-haired demon preaching hate over the pope and other religious leaders preaching love. We are in a battle for the soul of our nation, and I plead with everyone to do everything they can this coming year to make sure this is the last Christmas where inhumanity and cruelty define who we are.
Just to be perfectly clear: You are no Christian if you support this administration’s continued policy of harming these children. If you claim to worship the foreign child featured in your nativity scene, I ask you not to ignore the children still suffering terribly at our border.
“And whosoever shall offend one of the little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.”
Mark 9:42
"Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”
Exodus 22:21
That is all. Merry Christmas.…
Unless you are Donald Trump or one of his enablers who enjoy hurting children.