One of my favorite Eleanor Roosevelt quotes is, "Do one thing every day that scares you." This week I found myself with a little extra time and an inexplicable compulsion to purchase poster making supplies. Our church is preparing to participate in a local PRIDE event... but apparently that was not the reason for this.
Upon returning home, our internet connection was not operational. I could however, access facebook on my cell phone. The first post I saw alerted me to a protest occurring the next day within 30 minutes of my home at a time I had nothing planned. If you believe in God winks, I was about to get a swift God kick in the backside. This protest was about closing the family detention camps that our government is using to detain children in cages. Oh. heck. yes.
I now had the location, the time, the materials and the means to participate. Ever since I first heard of Nazi Germany in grade school I have been unable to fathom how people didn't provide enough opposition to obliterate this awful part of history. I now understand that those who opposed usually joined the population IN the concentration camps until no one was left to protest and all protesters were silent to protect themselves and their own families.
But I have this elusive thing called white privilege and what better way to utilize it than to defend those unable to defend and speak out for themselves. I went to the SeaTac detention center when all of this immigration, wall rhetoric and closing the border crap started. AND WE'RE STILL PROTESTING this policy.
We had MONTHS of monitoring people forming a walking caravan to approach our border to escape horrendous conditions in their own countries. And we couldn't come up with a better plan than separating families and holding children in cages? With insufficient basic human necessities? You think concentration camps made Nazi Germany look bad? The US is going to have a hard time living down this atrocity.
2,363 children separated from their parents at the border.
A portion have been deported.
Some have chosen to stay and pursue citizenship without their parents.
Few have been reunited with their parents.
In WA, we have 167 detainees in the federal detention center. Beds have been requested for up to 12 months. There is no record of how many of these people are parents who have been separated from their children.
$145.19 per day to detain adults in Washington
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/07/236724/help-migrant-children-at-border-crisis
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