Friday afternoon, Donald Trump posted a tweet about wanting to help out his friend, Kanye West, by helping rapper A$AP Rocky (Rakim Mayers) regain his freedom. Mayers and two of his friends have been detained for assault in Sweden for several weeks. It’s perceived by some in the U.S. that A$AP Rocky is being held because he’s African American. Kanye and wife, Kim Kardashian, used their Trump card and Donald couldn’t be happier to help out take advantage, especially being under a cloud of some of the most racist public statements he’s made since being in office.
At this time, Trump has garnered over 700k Twitter likes for his “gallant” Friday afternoon tweet. Here is that tweet.
Enter Justin Bieber, who’s worked with some of the biggest rappers in the world and who is friends with A$AP Rocky. Bieber is not known to be political. In fact, Friday night might have been his first big stab at politics and it was big. Besides his tweet getting an incredible response, it was the humanity in his tweet that put Trump to shame. Bieber basically said thanks for helping A$AP Friday, but how about releasing the migrant kids in cages along the U.S./Mexican borders.
Here’s Bieber’s tweet.
Justin Bieber’s has 106 million Twitter followers. At this time, Bieber’s Friday night tweet has garnered over 800k likes and growing—trumping Donald with some serious shade and some serious heart.
Here’s to the celebrities who stick their necks out to stand up for what’s right in this country and in this world. They are well aware of the risks and know they could lose a substantial amount of fans, if not the majority of their base. But, as I like to say—what they lose for the good is often rewarded tenfold or more with new fans.
I wasn’t a Bieber fan. I am right now. Not only because he publically mowed down Trump’s grossly opportunist tweet, but also because he brought more worldwide awareness to the atrocities for which Trump, and the Republicans who allow it, are responsible.
Some things we can do.
Human Rights Watch published some suggestions that one can do to help attenuate the problems with the border detention of children and innocent people simply seeking asylum and refuge—some from war-torn, deathly-violent, hunger-stricken and/or drug cartel-infested conditions. Here are four things you can ask the US Congress to do now:
1. End family separation. Yes, it’s still happening. Congress can and should require US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to stop separating kids from parents and extended family members like grandmothers, aunts, and older siblings – people who are in many cases their caregivers.
This means also asking Congress to insist US agencies expedite family reunifications.
2. Make sure funding for CBP and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is responsible for long-term care of unaccompanied children and those separated from their families, is conditional on the agencies’ adherence to strict protection standards for children.
That means detention time limits in holding cells with toothbrushes, soap, showers, and mattresses for children while they’re in those holding cells.
3. Fund community-based alternatives to detention for kids who can’t immediately be placed with family members. That includes foster care arrangements and small, state-licensed group homes for teens, with appropriate supervision by social workers.
Lastly…
4. Write child rights protections into law and ensure the law is followed. CBP and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, have consistently treated their own standards as optional and disregarded court orders. They’ve just proposed regulations that would give them even more discretion to detain children indefinitelyin abusive conditions. What’s needed is a statute on the books and a way to compel compliance.