After the fake-President's latest decree ending the practice of separating parents and children seeking refuge at our border, there are two major points to keep in mind.
Families seeking refugee status at the Mexican border will still be treated like criminals. Families may not be separated, but they will together behind bars -- indefinitely.
Secondly, US government officials claim they have no way to help families reunite and no intention of offering any assistance to parents (who are, remember, criminals) seeking to find their stolen children. The lack of accurate records reveals our government's unwillingness to treat refugees as real human beings with names and personal histories, and family members such as parents who also had names.
Here's my poem about the practice of separating families and the implications of America's attitude toward those seeking refuge here.
The American Gulag:
An Elegy
O, weep for America -- she is dead!
O weep for Liberty's long shuttered flame!
Weep not for the family of Márcio Goulart do Nascimiento
who crossed the river for fear of being murdered by the neighborhood
drug house
in Brazil, where police told him, 'if you complain
you will be killed.'
For now they are safely jailed in Texas, Marcio and his wife
in one place,
his two children somewhere else in the American gulag,
convicted of infringing on the peace and security
of the great Land of Liberty
because, as he himself confessed, "I did not wish us to
be killed."
Weep not for Juan Francisco Fuentes Castro, fleeing the
violent streets of El Salvador,
who sought only, he pled ("may it please the
Court") to bring his children to
safety,
for surely they are safe now behind bars.
Some day, perhaps, he will see them again.
Nor weep for poor José de Jesús Días of Mexico,
who fails to understand why the court cannot tell him
where his daughter is.
And so he alone will not accommodate the Court with the obligatory
guilty plea
until someone can tell him where in this land of freedom
they have placed her, safe behind bars.
For it is a simple thing, is it not, to declare one's guilt
for wetting one's feet in the sacred waters of Destiny's
Dividing Line
in order to preserve the lives of one's own family members?
The Madonna would understand. The Savior would understand.
The judge too sympathizes, but his hands are tied by the bonds
of Liberty.
Weep not for José de Jesús Días, for he is patently 'illegal.'
His daughter too is illegal,
but now no doubt safe in a place made of bars and uniforms,
among the tribes of lost children.
Nor let us shed our tears for the sufferings of Elizabeth
González Juárez,
who alone among so many, knows where her daughter is.
She crossed the River of Tears from Guanajuato, Mexico,
to protect from harm a three-year-old child, abused by her
drug-dealing father,
and sought the healing Balm of Gilead in the home
of her own mother who dwells among the kind and peace-loving
souls
of Fort Worth, Texas.
Alas, the Land of Liberty could spare no refuge for a single
infant more
upon a camel's back of three hundred million souls,
and so delivered the child straight into the hands
of her rightful, family-abusing, drug-dealing father.
It is the American Way.
Weep not, I say, for the 17 defendants dispatched by the Court
in
an hour-plus session, finishing in time for lunch.
All are guilty.
But, in the quiet watches of the night,
lend a thought for a thousand children, and yet a thousand
more
(by unofficial count at best)
young minds and hearts below the age of legal consent
ripped from the arms of their parents in a few weeks' time
on the strength of a Liberty-abusing Demonic Decree.
How many more victims, both old and young,
lie in separate hells
among the thousands denied refuge in the Home of the (no
longer) Free?
Now is the time for your tears.
(Names and other facts taken from The Guardian newspaper: see
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/18/us-immigration-court-parents-separated-children-families)
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