Tag: family separations
Melania Trump, Go To The Border — And Be Best

Melania Trump, Go To The Border — And Be Best

On Monday, first lady Melania Trump sat between stacks of large white cubes emblazoned with “BE BEST” and read a children’s book to the littles ones gathered around her for the 141st annual White House Easter Egg Roll. At each new page, she smiled and held it up for them to see.

What a contrast to her husband, the president, who briefly sat at a table of coloring children and brayed about his imaginary wall to keep away children who are fleeing for their lives.

“Oh, it’s happening; it’s being built,” he said with his face partially obscured by plastic eggs bobbing on springs attached to the headbands of two little girls. He smiled. “A young guy just said, ‘Keep building that wall.’ Do you believe it? He’s going to be a conservative some day.”

Immediately, I thought of the late first lady Barbara Bush. I’m sure this had something to do with my having just read a particular section of Susan Page’s new biography of Bush, The Matriarch.

In 1989, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Bush, a Republican, took on her husband’s virtual silence about the growing crisis as only a first lady could. She visited “Grandma’s House,” one of the first hospices in the country for children with HIV and AIDS, in Washington, D.C.

The address was a secret, to protect its young residents from being targeted for violence. At this time, many people still believed they could be infected by merely touching someone with the disease. Bush knew this wasn’t true, and she set out to prove it.

From Page’s book:

Barbara Bush played with three of the children on the floor and then went upstairs to the bedroom of an infant too sick to be brought downstairs. Donovan began whimpering in his crib, and Tate picked him up. “Debbie and Joan, you’re providing great care and services, but give me that baby!” Barbara Bush demanded. “You don’t know what you are doing.” She cradled Donovan with the confidence of experience, and he quieted down.

The photograph of that moment, taken by Dennis Cook of the Associated Press, became iconic. It was remarkable precisely because it was so ordinary. Barbara Bush held a sweet-faced baby against her shoulder, her face pressed against his flushed check and her hand stroking his back. His eyes are closed, his mouth is open; his body is at ease…

With one grandmotherly gesture, cuddling a baby, the first lady forced the world — including her husband, the president — to see what she already knew: Uninformed bigotry about HIV/AIDS was causing additional, unnecessary harm to infected children and adults.

Baby Donovan died soon after, but Bush’s visit changed hearts and minds. Grandma’s House co-founders Debbie Tate and Joan McCarley writing for the Washington Post after Barbara Bush’s death last year: “Thanks to the spotlight (she) afforded us, we became an international model for 24-hour residential care for HIV-infected infants and children.”

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that Trump is considering returning to his cruel and dangerous program of separating children from their families at the southern border.

Also last month, government officials told a federal judge that it may take two years to identify possibly thousands of immigrant children who have already been separated at the border.

Countless doctors and children’s advocates have sent letters to the Trump administration about the dangers of these long-term separations. Nearly 8,000 mental health experts signed a petition with this warning: “To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma.”

Journalists have chronicled how, after just three months’ separation, some of these young children no longer recognize their parents. Grieving parents describe bright and engaged kids changed by the wounds of trauma.

There is one person in this administration who could force his hand.

Go to the border, First Lady Melania Trump.

Take the reporters and photographers with you and go cradle the babies that your husband wants to rip from parents’ arms. Hold the hands of those mothers and fathers, and listen to them describe why they have risked everything to flee and save their children’s lives. Hear the anguish in their voices. See the fear in their eyes.

At the Easter roll, you read Emily Winfield Martin’s book, The Wonderful Things You Will Be. You held up that page and asked the children gathered around you, “Will you stand up for good by saving the day?”

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Family Separations: DHS Secretary Nielsen Accused Of Lying To Congress

Family Separations: DHS Secretary Nielsen Accused Of Lying To Congress

During her disastrous Wednesday hearing on the Trump administration’s inhumane family separation policy, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Congress that she didn’t know of any parents who were deported without being given the chance to bring their children with them.

But just hours later, TPM reports, Trump’s own Department of Justice filed a court document that contradicted her testimony — and indicates that Nielsen may have lied to Congress.

The court filing admits that up to 471 parents may have been deported without being given the chance to reunite with their children. The filing was part of an ongoing class action lawsuit against the government on behalf of those parents — many of whom say they were tricked into signing away their rights to ever see their kids again.

But during her testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee, Nielsen acted like she had never heard of this lawsuit or those parents.

Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY) asked Nielsen, “Can you confirm that there has never been a parent deported, under your tenure, without finding out if they want their children to go with them?”

“To the best of my knowledge every parent was afforded that option,” Nielsen responded, under oath.

The question from Rice was a follow-up to an earlier question along the same lines from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), to whom Nielsen responded, “There was no parent who has been deported, to my knowledge, without multiple opportunities to take their children with them.”

After Nielsen doubled down on her denial, Rice accused her of breaking the law by lying to Congress.

“This is a lie,” Rice said on Twitter. “Lying to Congress under oath is a felony. The last person who did that is going to prison.”

Rice was likely referring to Trump’s longtime attorney and “fixer,” Michael Cohen. Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about Trump’s involvement in business dealings about a proposed development in Russia.

Evidence contradicting Nielsen’s testimony has been available in news reports for months. But the DOJ’s court filing that same day put an especially fine point on it.

In a joint status report filed in federal court hours after Nielsen testified, DOJ lawyers admitted 471 parents may have been deported “without their children, and without being given the opportunity to elect or waive reunification in accordance with the preliminary injunction.”

471 parents is significantly more than the zero parents Nielsen claims she knew of.

During the height of the Trump administration’s cruel family separation policy, many parents complained that they were tricked into agreeing to be deported without taking their children with them. Buzzfeed reported that some parents who did not speak English were pressured to sign documents they could not read, which gave up their right to reunite with their children. Other parents signed documents thinking it was the only way to be reunited, only to find out later the documents meant the opposite.

Evidence of these atrocities have been in the public domain since at least July 2018.

Nielsen either knew this — which would mean she lied to Congress — or should have known this yet somehow didn’t. That means that at best, she was neglecting one of the most high-profile issues facing her department.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

IMAGE: Kirstjen Nielsen is sworn in at a hearing on her nomination to become the 6th Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee in Washington, D.C., Nov. 08, 2017.