Campaign To Help Children On The Border

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Last night when I put Anna, my 8-year-old daughter, to bed, she surprised me with a question: "Dad, could the police separate us?" It was time to close the book, make the summary of the day and turn off the light, because the next morning she had to get up early to go to school. Knowing that she would open an endless dialogue at that time of night, I asked her where she had gotten that idea. At school she heard, she told me, that on the border with Mexico they were separating the children from their parents. She even confirmed that she had heard us talking about American citizens who had been separated from their children.

My three children were born in San Diego, California. I left Cuba in 1991, I came to the United States as an exile, and for more than 20 years I have been, like them, a citizen of this country, where I work and have created a family. If my children had been born in Cuba, and in my desperation to give them a better life and away from a dictatorship where there is no right to vote, to think differently, or to have an ideology of their own, I would have arrived in this country today, now I would be like thousands immigrants who, fleeing violence and despair in their countries, crossed the border in search of refuge. And like them, they would have separated me from my children to confine them, like criminals, in a cage. Now I am the one asking myself: what crime did they commit? In what law is the most democratic and developed country in the world protected to separate a father from his son?

Thousands of families have been divided on the United States border with Mexico. Every day, about two hundred children are thrown into makeshift prisons as blackmail of citizens, Congress and the United States Senate, to reach the partisan agreement to build a border wall that will cost billions of dollars.

A son is not, nor can he be, a political bait. I see myself in the faces of every mother and every father, and I feel like every child thrown into abandonment.

We have learned that history, at some point, will be accountable to all: to the intellectual author, to the executors and to those who accepted in silence. After other great barbarisms in history, we have seen that, at the time of the trial, the criminals defend themselves, alleging that they only followed orders. From the president to the border agents, from the senators to the congressmen, everyone, someday, will have to give an account to humanity for this atrocity. But also we, the citizens, children, siblings, parents, grandparents, friends or neighbors, if we keep quiet, if we turn our eyes elsewhere, if we close our eyes because it does not concern us personally, we will be guilty.

Those caged children, separated from their parents, screaming in despair, can also be ours.

Shortly after responding to my daughter that no one could separate us, I fell asleep. After a while I woke with a start: can I really keep my promise?

Join our campaign, because those border children can also be your children.

#wherearemishijos

#wherearemykids