Campaign Action
Tuesday night’s bombshell that the Trump administration is holding the youngest children it’s snatched from their asylum-seeking parents in what it calls “tender age” shelters, including one where a reporter saw babies sitting unattended in a cage, will reverberate for a while. Every time you think the story of Trump’s child-stealing policy has gone as low as it can, it gets worse—but every revelation is built on the same evil foundation.
“The shelters aren’t the problem, it’s taking kids from their parents that’s the problem,” said South Texas pediatrician Marsha Griffin, who has visited many.
Those kids could be in the Four Seasons and they’d still be hysterical and frightened at having been taken from their parents.
There are three existing “tender age” detention centers, and Houston city leaders are fighting a proposed fourth such facility, with Mayor Sylvester Turner saying that “there comes a point in time we draw a line, and for me, the line is with these children.” Children are also being sent to other states for temporary foster placement, and the Michigan Department of Civil Rights said that, as those children arrive, it is considering its “duty to make sure their civil rights are protected.” The agency’s executive director, Agustin Arbulu, continued:
“We have received reports and are very concerned that the children arriving here are much younger than those who have been transported here in the past. Some of the children are infants as young as three months of age and are completely unable to advocate for themselves. While we commend the work of resettlement agencies in Michigan attempting to serve these children with dignity and compassion, nothing can replace the love, sense of security and care of a parent.”
The United States government is tearing babies out of the arms of their parents, holding them in cages, and shipping them around the country with no plan to return them to their parents. And rather than backing off of the policy, it’s looking to build more shelters to hold more babies and toddlers and young children. This is unspeakably evil.