The separation of children from their parents just because they are seeking asylum as immigrants to our nation is cruel beyond belief. It is immoral, violates international laws and betrays American values. This policy is being justified by outright lies by President Trump, his cabinet and his supporters in both Congress and the partisan Republican media. We are facing the most severe domestic moral crisis in my lifetime simply for political purposes.
At the core of the issue, we have to decide if America is going to be an evil nation or not.
When you create unbelievable levels of emotional pain for parents just because they want to become part of the American Dream, you betray our national American values. When you intentionally inflict lasting emotional, mental and physical damage on children, it is much worse. This is evil. It is not misguided policy. It is purely evil.
No excuses justify such actions. They are not required by any largely imaginary border crisis. There are problems with the immigration process for sure. It often is slow, confusing and cumbersome. We do want the right people to enter and we want to keep criminals out. For most immigrants, our current processes achieve those goals. Of course, no system is ever going to be perfect. Being cruel to children is not going to help improve our immigration system. We cannot do that by making child abuse a systemic part of our immigration system.
Abusing children as a policy of our national government disgraces all Americans. It is not a rational policy. It borders on psychotic behavior. It is deeply, morally wrong.
There is no American law that requires that we separate the children of immigrants seeking asylum from their parents. President Trump is lying intentionally when he makes that false statement over and over again. Democrats never passed a law that required such actions. This is why no earlier Presidential Administration has ever adopted such a systematically cruel immigration policy.
Not entering at approved ports of entry when seeking asylum has seldom been viewed by law as a serious crime. It is a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Often it a violation of our immigration law that arises out of a lack of understanding of our complicated immigration system. We have to realize that many of these asylum seekers are facing death from criminal gangs in their home countries and are seeking safety for their families in America. Does our nation turn them away to die? Do we destroy their families first and abuse their children before we turn them away to be killed by criminals? Is that the America we live in?
Do evangelical Christians really support political leaders who would adopt such policies in the name of the American nation? Is this what Jesus would do? As a Christian and an American, I do not think this is morally right.
The "border wall" is a simplistic idea that will not work. It will make some contractors insanely rich at the expense of taxpayers. We need more immigrants to pick crops in rural areas. We need them to pay into Social Security and Medicare to help keep it solvent. We need more manpower devoted to processing asylum seekers and technology to locate the small minority of real, dangerous criminals crossing the border illegally. We need rational, humane immigration policies. We need to reclaim our morality when it comes to asylum seekers and their children.
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