Friend,
This November marked my 16th anniversary at the Young Center. I had always hoped that years 2016 to 2020, marked by family separation and increasingly inhumane border policies, would represent the low point for children and families seeking protection in the U.S.
During that time, I met with children forced back from our border to live on the streets of Mexico while they waited months for a hearing in the United States. I visited encampments where fathers lay awake across the tent entrance all night to prevent the kidnapping of their teen daughters. I sat in frigid tent courts where I could see mothers’ unrelenting shivers and hear the deep, dangerous coughs of infants. The judge overseeing their case and the attorney representing the government did not; they were ensconced in a comfortable courtroom a mere 25 miles away, protected from witnessing the families’ anguish in person.
Then in 2017, I had the grim task of documenting the children appointed Young Center advocates after they were ripped away from parents at our border. On weekly calls, my colleagues reported cases of children sobbing for hours, losing their language skills, starting to bed-wet for the first time in years. Children who waited weeks for the chance to hear a parent’s voice, only to be told at the last minute that the immigration official overseeing their parent’s case was suddenly “unavailable” to put the call through. Just weeks into more than two years of chronicling family separation cases, I dreaded opening what I considered my “spreadsheet of child abuse.”
Over the last three weeks, I’ve swung between anger and grief as the incoming administration has made its intentions clear: this time, its campaign of terror will not be limited to the border but will extend to communities across the U.S.. To our neighbors, local businesses, and schools. Neither the unlawfulness nor the inhumanity of these practices seems to matter.
Many people ask why I’m still here. Mostly, it’s because of the kids and families I’ve worked with for almost two decades. They don’t have a choice when it comes to fighting for their safety and I have the privilege of standing alongside them from a position of physical and professional safety.
But it’s also because my incredible Young Center colleagues never stop fighting for change, even in the toughest circumstances. Even when the incoming administration has put a target on our backs—opening the door to civil or even criminal charges for being lawyers or social workers for children—my colleagues don’t give up. The children and families we advocate for and accompany certainly won’t. How could I?
Please show your support early this year with a gift to our Giving Tuesday campaign. Every contribution, no matter the amount, reminds us that we’re not in this alone and that someday, humanity and reason will triumph over hate.
