3/22/21

By Josh Rubin

Somewhere between 80% and 90% of the children who cross the border, many of them parting from family members that Title 42 is forcing them to leave behind, are on their way to other family members who live inside the borders of the United States. There are two huge problems embedded in that statement.

The first is that our “benevolent” policy of allowing unaccompanied children to enter, but not their adult family members, orphans children. Many of the separations thus created persist. They are fateful, traumatic, and sometimes permanent. They burden society with a job it cannot do. Society cannot take the place of family, either in the sacred task of caring for children, or in the hearts of the most vulnerable. And it is not only the hearts of children we are breaking.

The second problem is what we do with those children, the majority of whom are struggling toward the homes of family members here. While we hold them in detention, while we quarantine them, while we place them, often in facilities that have histories of abuse, that have in recent memory been used to prolong imprisonment in order to discourage migration, we ask their family members to prove to us that they are not as evil as our racist assumptions suspect they might be. Those families are held guilty until they prove their innocence to us, self-appointed makeshift guardians of these orphans we have just created.

And where do we, who witness this, find ourselves in the storm of misinformation and lies, and debates about what words to use to describe it all? Struggling for moral clarity, tears always too near, and trying to raise our thin voices above the din, to cry, once and for all, that migration is a human right.