News Americas, FORT LAUERDALE, Fl, Fri. Sept. 7, 2018: More than a month after a court ordered the U.S. government to reunite children it had snatched away like vicious kidnappers from the arms of their fathers and mothers, with their parents, 528 remain separated over three months later.
Think about that as a parent, an aunt, a human being – for just one moment – and then think about the trauma you will feel if your child or your relative or even the child of a friend was snatched from their parent and sent to an unknown location for months.
That is the plight many immigrant parents and their children find themselves in; all because they tried to seek a better life in the US by applying for amnesty. All because a xenophobic leader of the free world decided they were simply too brown for America and would darken the country further, so they should be harshly detained and sent back to where ever they came from.
Who cares if they could be killed in the process, raped or maimed? That is not the concern of the xenophobe-in-chief, or for that matter, America’s concern any more.
Now if they were from Norway or Sweden it would be another story. But these poor, brown Central American children may never see their parents again, and for now, the mainstream media has moved on to covering all the other lunacy that the xenophobe-in-chief generates daily.
And so 528 children, or 44 dozen children, remain scared and separated from their mothers and fathers, in strange places far from their homes and in the custody of strangers who are merely contracted by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Among them is a 6-year-old Honduran boy and a sixteen-year-old Honduran teen. Their parents were deported from the United States without them and these poor children are now being held in federal detention facilities in Texas and New York, respectively, where they have been for the past three months, according to DLA Piper and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice.
The families have had limited contact with their detained children, and there is no set date yet for the children’s release or reunification with their parents.
“The harm to these children is compounding daily, and the families are terrified and unsure about their children’s future,” the advocates say.
To make matters worse, the six-year-old boy is scheduled to appear in immigration court – alone – without adult supervision or legal counsel – on September 27th. The 16-year-old was told she would not be reunited with her parents until at least October 2018.
It is unclear what the future holds for these kids but what is clear is that the Republican administration of the United States of America is showing the world it has become devoid of a heart, a soul and a moral compass and the human rights of brown and black immigrants seeking refuge is of no more a concern than the human rights of those brown and black immigrants who call the US home.
The writer is CMO at Hard Beat Communications, Inc. which owns the brands: NewsAmericasNow, CaribPRWire and InvestCaribbeanNow.
