Standing in a giant black cage and wearing shirts reading #ClassroomsNotCages, teenagers outside a United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland, protested the Trump administration’s state-sanctioned kidnapping of migrant children this week. In the background, audio of the cries of children separated from their parents could be heard.
“One year ago,” the American Federation of Teachers said, “as President Trump's cruel family separation policies hit the news, our union sprang into action and led a group to file a human rights complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Council against the Trump administration. The UNHRC has been quietly investigation the situation and this week a committee will consider our complaint.”
The fact that the council is considering the complaint “is huge,” the AFT noted. “Complaints like this don't usually make it this far. Today we held a rally in Geneva as the UNHRC began meeting this week to tell them that they must take this complaint seriously.” The young protesters also “held up enlarged photos of the faces of young children who have died at the border,” said a statement from the AFT. In just one horrific instance, a detained migrant girl died in U.S. custody, but officials didn’t publicly disclose her death for eight months.
The AFT’s complaint, filed last year in collaboration with other civil and human rights leaders, stated that “separating children from their families is a flagrant violation of the supposed primacy of human rights shared by the international community.” Nearly 3,000 children have been stolen from families under the policy, though potentially thousands more were separated before it was officially announced. Separations, border groups note, have still continued in spite of a federal judge’s order that they stop.
“In a single morning last week at the courthouse,” said Efrén Olivares of the Texas Civil Rights Project, “I saw President Donald Trump's ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy tear seven families apart.” In fact, he continues, his organization has counted at least 785 families “that have been separated since then just in McAllen.”
Family separation remains a crisis, a stain on our nation, and a humanitarian disaster that we cannot let become forgotten. “We stand here today in defense of humanity, justice, and morality,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said during the demonstration. “We are here in defense of children.”