Immigration | Family Separation
What Links Mary Tyler Moore and Trump & Co’s Migrant ‘Protection’ Protocol?
Six degrees of Family Separation, and an immigration agenda that, Lizee Cavazos reveals, doesn’t protect anyone at all
I met Elizabeth “Lizee” Cavazos at the kick off of the Witness at the Border #EndMPP vigil on January 12, 2020. Her exuberance matched her infectious ear-to-ear smile. But the day we got together for an extended charla, she was broken-hearted. One of the hundreds of families in the Dignity Village refugee encampment had shrunk from three to two the day before.
Sixteen-year-old “Pedro” couldn’t take it anymore. He and his mother and sister, along with 2,500 other asylum seekers, had been living in tents meant for weekend camping for months. They were not protected from the weather: When the rains came, the tent leaked and the walkways turned to mud; when the winds kicked up, they huddled together, shivering; when the sun baked down, they sweltered atop the grassless floodplain of the temporary “home” that was feeling all too permanent. They were not protected from gang violence: In Matamoros, Pedro and his family experienced the same ongoing threats that forced them to flee Honduras.
Victims of Trump & Co’s Migrant “Protection” Protocol (MPP), aka Remain in Mexico policy, they would have no protection at all were it not for the heroes and humanitarians, like Lizee, of the Dignity Village Collaborative. They would have no tent or mat to sleep on; no access to potable water; no basic healthcare; no legal support; no community; no teachers or books to help them occupy the time. And they would have no guarantee of at least one daily meal.
Despite the tireless and on-going efforts of Team Brownsville and World Central Kitchen to provide breakfast and dinner for the stranded asylum seekers, and of the Angry Tías to keep the free Tiendas stocked with staples for the camp cocinas, there was, however, never enough for a growing boy to eat. Pedro lived with a constant, gnawing pain. The hunger left him cranky and listless and prone to colds and other ailments. His mother could do nothing to help her son, and it was tearing her apart.
She had escaped violence and danger back home, determined to bring her children to safety, to provide for and protect them. Yet under MPP, she could do none of these things. It weighed on her, heavily — a constant reminder of her failure as a parent.
Lizee admits she saw it coming. “He kept asking me for new shoes.” He’d laugh, like he was making a joke, and say that with new shoes he could more easily cross the Rio Grande and escape inside the US. But she sensed a seriousness beneath Pedro’s coy smile.
“I had shoes to give him. But something held me back. Perhaps I knew that if I did, he’d be gone. And if he drowned in the river, that would be on me.”
One of the original Angry Tías y Abuelas, Lizee had taken a rare day away from the camp to prepare a coordination plan for the five Dignity Village NGOs. Tracking who is doing what and where the gaps are is one of her many contributions to the Collaborative. This level of inter-group collaboration was not immediate when MPP descended in Brownsville/Matamoros in the summer of 2019, but it grew organically, suggesting an unspoken reality: that as much as everyone wanted MPP to end, it wasn’t going away as long as Trump & Co remained in the White House, and neither was the encampment.
The previous evening, as Pedro and his family waited in line for dinner, someone accused him of going for a second helping before others had had their first. He tried to defend himself. But he was ordered to step to the back. Pedro turned to his mother, the look on his face beseeching her to do something, anything. He was starving. He had to eat.
“Go,” said his mother, not thinking. Or perhaps she’d been considering this for some time. I imagine her gesturing with a flick of the eyes or tiny turn of the head toward the north. I imagine Pedro looking shocked, not expecting this reaction.
“Can I go, too,” asked and his sister, 9-year-old “Esmeralda.” Her mother’s look of astonishment must have matched Pedro’s then. If Esmeralda had been as miserable as Pedro, she hadn’t let on, at least not to Lizee.
I imagine a tearful goodbye as the three held each other, unnoticed, while the community of 2,500 asylum seekers plus humanitarian volunteers buzzed around them. At some point that evening, Pedro and Esmeralda clasped hands and set off together in the direction of the Gateway International Bridge together, raggedy shoes and all.
There, they turned themselves into US Customs & Border Protection.
Family Separation 5.0: A Sophie’s Choice
Besides managing Dignity Village logistics, Lizee also helps to represent the asylum seekers in discussions with officials of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Migration (INM). By the time I visited Matamoros in January 2020, an organizational structure had emerged among camp residents and NGOs. Asylum seekers had formed into nation-based groups; each group appointing a leader. Leaders brought their groups’ needs and concerns to Lizee, a frequent, welcomed, and trusted presence in the camp.
That’s how Lizee knows the refugees so well. She can tell you everyone’s name. But, she says, “If I heard too many of their stories, I wouldn’t be able to function.” Better they save sharing their experiences of terror and heart-wrenching brutality for their credible fear interviews, says Lizee, so they aren’t further re-traumatized.
The truth is, she doesn’t need to hear what drove them to make the perilous journey to the US. A trained mental health professional, Lizee can see the trauma those stories bear in the refugees’ eyes and body language. What’s more, she is a daily witness to the toll that living under MPP takes on each and every person caught in its trap, no matter their of age.
MPP is a slow dehumanizing grind, an endless purgatory that chips away at the spirit and soul. Behind each asylum seeker is the experience of persecution, violence, or poverty so crushing there is only escape. Ahead of them, the promised land. Or so they believe. In reality, under Trump & Co asylum has become a mirage, a false promise. And from October, 2020, a privilege only to those who can pay.
With the MPP program, asylum seekers are given reason to believe that all they have to do is wait long enough and the gates to the US will open. So they spend months, living in tents or shelters in some of the most treacherous places on Earth, waiting for court dates that may never come. They are exposed to the dangers of inclement weather, venomous pests, communicable diseases, and a ravenous cartel. There is no comfort for the sick, and no rest for the weary. Life spent looking constantly over one’s shoulder has a way of transforming past trauma into toxic stress. There’s no childhood, no sense of control. The future stretches into the horizon, indefinitely on hold. And there’s the constant, gnawing hunger, not just for food, but for freedom.
Weighing the risks of losing their kids to death or kidnapping or hunger or disease, many parents stranded by MPP have grown so desperate they’ve made the awful, dreadful decision of sending their kids across the bridge on their own. Because until the border closed to COVID-19, unaccompanied minors were still being let into the US.
It’s a Sophie’s Choice. And it’s torture.
But it isn’t the first example of family separation at the US Southern border, nor is it the last under Trump & Co. This is Family Separation 5.0.
So let’s go back to the beginning…
Family Separation 1.0: Self-Separation
It’s a tale as old as time — the backdrop of so many American family legacies. Faced with circumstances beyond their control — famine, persecution, poverty, war — one family member strikes out in search of a better life, promising, some day, to bring the others along. It’s heartbreaking — families broken apart unnaturally and often without warning. It’s stories like Sam’s, whose mother sent him to the US via la bestia as a 15-year-old, to save him from the Mara Salvatruche gang, MS-13.
Two decades before Sam, another 15-year-old made the same trek unaware that she was about to make history. Her name was Jenny Lisette Flores.
Jenny fled the civil war in El Salvador in 1984 to join her mother, who had previously escaped the violence and was living in Los Angeles. Jenny didn’t make it across the border undetected, however. She was apprehended by border officials near San Ysidro, California on or about May 16, 1985, and detained, curiously, in a defunct 1950s-era Pasadena motel surrounded by razor-wire-topped chain-link fence. Also held at the Mardi Gras Motel-turned-detention center were 16-year-old Dominga Hernandez-Hernandez and 13-year-old Alma Yanira Cruz.
Conditions at the makeshift prison run by the private, for-profit government contractor, Behavioral Systems Southwest, Inc, were deplorable and unsanitary. Men, women, and youth of all ages and genders, and with no relation to one another, were forced to share crowded sleeping quarters. There was no supervision. Basic necessities, like soap, were few. No recreation was allowed; neither were visitors. There was little food, no educational instruction, no books, nothing to do to pass the time except to play beside a drained pool. In the event of an accidental fall, no medical care would be provided.
At that time, Ana Maria Martinez Portillo was being detained in similar conditions by Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic) in Laredo, Texas. In addition to the daily humiliations listed above, she was also forced to strip and withstand body-cavity searches. She was sixteen.
Both operations were under the control of Harold Ezell, Immigration Commissioner of the US Western Region and godfather of the anti-immigration movement today led by outed White Nationalist Stephen Miller.
Ezell famously said, referring to illegal border crossers, “If you catch ’em, you ought to clean ’em and fry ’em yourself.” His policy was to arrest migrants and detain them as long as possible, as punishment, before deporting them. He felt such practice would deter other migrants from entering the US.
As for children, like Jenny, Dominga, Alma, and Ana Maria, Ezell used them as bait. Agreeing to release them only to a parent, in violation of US policy at the time, he dangled the kids in front of their undocumented loved ones to lure them out of hiding. Then he deported everyone right back to the danger they’d fled.
Jenny’s mother knew this, so she refused to step forward. She had self-separated from her daughter to escape the ruthless civil war in El Salvador. The horrific 12-year-long conflict, in which the government side was funded, trained, and supplied by US taxpayers, ultimately cost the lives of 75,000 civilians and forced 25% of the Salvadoran population to flee. Jenny’s mother blazed the trail northward to establish a new life for her and her daughter after her husband was assassinated. She feared for her life if returned.
Fortunately, a friend of Alma’s mother worked in the home of actor and social justice warrior Ed Asner, aka Lou Grant of the legendary Mary Tyler Moore show. When he heard of the government-sanctioned abuse that Alma, Jenny, and others were facing in detention, he called the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights. Run by two lawyers working out of a 1920s-era Craftsman house with bad plumbing and a warped roof, it was ground zero for the 1980s immigrant-rights movement.
Carlos Holguín and Peter Schey, both immigrant sons, agreed to represent Jenny and the three other minors detained in Ezell’s Western Region. They brought a Federal class action lawsuit, in conjunction with the National Center for Youth Law and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, on behalf of 2,000 youths then being detained by Ezell. Jenny Flores was the lead plaintiff.
They filed Flores v. Meese on July 11, 1985, with the goal of establishing policy based on commonsense ground rules regarding the care and release of kids in US custody, while flagging the illegality of Ezell’s practices. But government resistance caused the case to wind its way through the US legal system, without a resolution, for more than a decade.
Finally, on January 28, 1997, after a spin through the Supreme Court, a deal was reached. The resulting Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA) required federal officials to meet minimum standards of “safe and sanitary” treatment of minors in immigration detention; called for their “prompt” release from custody, defined by Federal Judge Dolly Gee in 2015 to be no more than 20 days; and broadened to whom minors can be released. It states that migrant children be in the “least restrictive settings possible” — i.e. not “secured” facilities, including prisons or prisons posing as hotels — with a parent, other relative, approved sponsor, or a provider licensed to care for the needs of children and youth — in that order.
“The FSA does not mention, but it contemplates, that government will act in the best interest of the child,” states Hope Frye, an immigration attorney and Flores Monitor. “Not forcing them to sleep in crowded cages on freezing, cement floors under 24-hour lights.”
More than two decades later, the FSA remains “the main bulwark against the government running roughshod over the rights of [migrant] children,” says Holguín.
Since coming into office, Trump & Co have been working hard to override it, preferring to follow Ezell’s lead instead.
Family Separation 1.0: Self-Separation, Redux
The FSA emanated from the border realities of the ’80s and ’90s, when most unaccompanied youth arriving in the US were teens and when a notable “influx” amounted to 130 kids. But realities change faster than the wheels of legal process turn. And gang violence in Northern Triangle countries caused two spikes in mass migration to the US in the early 21st century.
The first was in 2004–05, when apprehensions of primarily Central Americans doubled to 65,911, then doubled again to 154,995. Of these, 7,000 were unaccompanied minors. After processing by CBP, they were turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), following the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which placed them, per the FSA, with family or in licensed shelters.
But the FSA didn’t say what to do with the 12,000 children that arrived with parents. Some families were sent to a former nursing home in Pennsylvania, called Berks. But Berks was small. So the Bush administration contracted the Corrections Corporation of America, by then the largest for-profit US prison company, to convert a massive facility in rural Taylor, Texas to detain migrant families. They called it a “Residential” Center. But it was a jail. And it was run by jailers.
Ten years later, in 2013–14, another spike in gang violence sent an unprecedented 68,541 unaccompanied children across the US/Mexico border. Younger than ever before, they came with names and phones numbers of relatives sewn into their clothing or written on scraps of paper and stuffed into their pockets or tied to their wrists. Like Sam’s mother, parents were sending their kids to El Norte on their own to save them from “the most violent countries in the world.”
Again, the US government struggled to respond. Beds in ORR-approved facilities for unaccompanied children were in short supply. The Obama administration threw money at the agency to scale up its system. Contractors licensed to care for children 12 and under, like then-bankrupt Southwest Key, created “tender age shelters.” Emergency tent cities were erected to house teens on an unused military bases, like Homestead, in Florida.
But a new challenge crossed the US/Mexico border at that time as well…
Family Separation 2.0 & Family Detention: Unintended Consequences
In addition to the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors, nearly as many “family units” crossed into the US at that time: 68,445. Not only did this new reality stretch the boundaries of the FSA, which contained no provision for dealing with accompanied minors, it also bumped into one aspect of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA).
Signed by George W. Bush in 2008, the TVPRA seeks to protect child migrants from being trafficked for sex or labor. It puts a burden of proof on adults traveling with kids: demonstrate your parental relationship or lose them. Those unable to prove parent-child ties were separated, sparking Family Separation 2.0. Children were labeled unaccompanied and transferred to the custody of ORR, the agency entrusted to safeguard their best interests rather than enforce immigration laws.
Those who could show proof of family relationship were kept together. But no US administration had ever had to deal with this many families at once. More facilities were built to detain them until they could be processed: Dilley and Karnes in Texas, and Artesia in New Mexico joined Berks in the business of children and parents. (Hutto was closed to families at this point due to gross human rights violations. Artesia would soon be shut down too, for the same reason.)But because the FSA stressed the prompt release of unaccompanied minors in ORR custody, detention for accompanied children stretched on and on and on.
Holguín and Schey got back to work. In July 2015, US Judge Dolly Gee, who has been overseeing the FSA since 2009, expanded it to include accompanied minors as well. She ruled that all children still in family detention be released “without unnecessary delay.”
The Obama administration complied, releasing 1,700 families together, for everyone knows that it is “in the best interest of the child” to remain with a loving parent. To do otherwise would have forced these families to separate.
The lack of stated rights for migrant parents, however, left a convenient loophole for an administration with a penchant for cruelty to exploit.
Family Separation 2.0: When Cruelty Is the Point
If Family Separation 1.0 is characterized by self-separation, Family Separation 2.0 is forced. And while such forced separations occurred under previous US administrations, possibly wrongly and probably disastrously, Trump & Co embraced the practice with the intentional, expressed purpose of inflicting pain.
Within days of the 2017 inauguration, Trump & Co’s war on immigrants began with twin campaigns: deter immigration and accelerate deportation. First came the “travel ban,” aka “Muslim ban,” which caused chaos at the airports and in the courts. While we were all busy being outraged by that, Trump & Co were giving Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) new marching orders: You are no longer limited to arresting and deporting those foreign nationals convicted of serious crimes. Get ’em all, even jay-walkers. Grab them at Church or while waiting for the school bus. Warrants? What warrants! Raid their homes. Pick their locks, if you have to.
Ten-thousand additional ICE officers were hired. Racial profiling, previously anathema, became the norm. Along with a few hardened criminals, former Marines who’d put their lives on the line for the USA, and many law-abiding, taxpaying fathers were shackled in front of their terrified kids and banished from the only home they’d ever known.
The surge of ICE arrests rendered millions of American children orphans over night, inflicting life-long psychological harm.
Meanwhile, from the summer of 2017, a new crop of Border Patrol agents effectuated the deliberate, forceful separation of children from their parents, tearing even nursing babies from their mothers’ breasts as they suckled. They did it, by their own admission, to send a message to other migrant and asylum seeking families: Don’t come here, you are not welcome.
Trump & Co knew tearing families apart was cruel. But cruelty was their point. More than 5,000 children were thus kidnapped before public protest and legal action brought Family Separation 2.0 w/Cruelty to an end, by executive order, on June 20, 2018.
But their practice of separating families did not then stop. It just got more insidious.
Family Separation 3.0: Other Relatives
The moniker “unaccompanied” suggests that children show up at the border all alone. This is seldom the case. Children arrive, if not with their parents, then in the company of aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, even siblings. To cultures south of the US border, and many points beyond, this is “family.” Yet, the culturally insensitive practice of limiting the notion of “family” to include only mom, dad, and the kids has characterized US immigration policy going back decades, certainly as far back as the 1980s and Harold Ezell.
In April 2019, CBP confirmed its practice of separating all children crossing into the US with a relative other than a parent, labeling them “unaccompanied,” and placing them in the custody of ORR. In that year alone, Trump & Co detained 69,950 migrant children, a 42% increase from 2018 when Family Separation 2.0 w/Cruelty was out in the open.
That’s more children detained away from their families than in any other country in the world.
If the system had been allowed to work, these kids would have been released to their families and sponsors within 20 days. Instead, we saw the proliferation of kids’ jails pop up in 2018 and 2019, like Tornillo and Homestead, which grew in mere months into some of the largest mass-incarceration facilities in the USA. And that’s because Trump & Co had taken another page from Ezell’s playbook: use the kids as bait to hunt down the undocumented.
From 2018, they required ORR to undertake background checks not just each migrant child’s sponsor, but on everyone in the sponsor’s household. Then, they compelled ORR to share that information with ICE.
ICE used it to locate, arrest, detain, and deport untold numbers of US residents, many who’d lived and contributed to the US culture and economy for decades. They instilled terror in immigrant neighborhoods —it was targeted persecution on US soil.
And the migrant children these deported adults agreed to sponsor? Many still languish in ORR custody — if they haven’t been secretly deported — as do those whose relatives in the US, upon figuring out what ICE was up to, feared stepping forward, like Jenny’s mom.
Now seen as betraying the children for whom it was meant to provide care, Family Separation 3.0 has forever compromised the moral integrity of ORR.
Family Separation 4.0: Dividing Parents
With “zero tolerance,” Trump & Co exploited another long-standing practice: to remove children from a parent considered a danger. By criminalizing all border crossings, as they did in April 2018, even lawful requests for asylum now result in a criminal record.
This has particularly impacted fathers who are separated from wives and children and made to suffer indefinite detention in ICE prisons while their kids grow up without them. Jailed at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas, Erick arrived at the border with his heavily pregnant wife in October 2019. She gained entry into the US on a “vulnerability exemption,” landing with her sponsor just in time to give birth to a beautiful baby girl.
“Andrea” is now crawling, and starting to talk without having ever met her Papi. Locked up for the “crime” of wanting to live in peace in the “land of the free,” Erick is now sick with COVID-19.
ICE has given him the option: remain sick in prison or agree to self-deport, while sick. Many fathers just like Erick have been forced to choose freedom over seeing their families ever again.
Which brings us back to Family Separation 5.0: A Sophie’s Choice (see above). But the story unwittingly kicked off by Ed Asner in 1984 doesn’t end there…
Family Separation 6.0: Indefinite Detention
Most mothers and children weren’t as “lucky” as Erick’s wife. Many were placed in the MPP program and kicked back to Mexico to fight off, all on their own, the same dangers that defeated Pedro, Esmeralda, and their mother.
Others were detained, with their children, at Berks as well as Dilley and Karnes, the processing centers built in response to the 2013/14 surge that were meant to be temporary. Family detention, but with a new, cruel twist.
Determined to bury the FSA in el dompe of history, Trump & Co tried, in mid-2018, to have it rescinded. When that proved unsuccessful, Stephen Miller — architect of Trump & Co’s immigration agenda, and acolyte of Jenny Flores’ nemesis, Harold Ezell — pushed a new idea…
By exploiting the lack of stated parental rights in the FSA, he suggested giving asylum-seeking parents another Sophie’s choice: Agree to self-deport without your children, leaving them in the care of another relative or sponsor in the US; or waive the humanitarian protections baked into the FSA to keep your family together. But in detention. Indefinitely.
Peter Schey calls it a “binary choice.” Carlos Holguín calls it “extremely cruel.” RAICES calls it “cruel beyond imagination.” I call it torture.
With indefinite family detention, Trump & Co sent a new message to others fleeing persecution, crushing poverty, and gang violence: Neither you nor your family are welcome here. Come, and we will lock you up. And throw away the key.
Family Separation 6.0: Detention w/COVID
Then Trump & Co found a way to twist the knife they’d already plunged into the hearts of these parents. In May 2020, ICE brought them another, even more inhumane, Sophie’s Choice: Release your kids from jail to save them from potentially contracting, and dying, from COVID-19; or keep them with you, locked up, in the midst of a global pandemic.
With the first option, parents may never see their children again, for “consent to separate means losing all control over your relationship with your child, quite possibly forever,” states immigration attorney Amy Maldonado. “The only alternative to stay together as a family is to remain in a facility” even with an active, spreading COVID-19 outbreak. And ICE has made it very clear: If your children die, their blood will be on your hands, not ours, because we gave you the choice of sending them to freedom.
Meantime, ICE has total discretion to release both parents and children from these facilities. It just won’t.
Human rights organizations, like Amnesty International, call it Family Separation 2.0. But by my estimation, it’s Family Separation 6.0 w/Cruelty in the era of COVID.
Hotels as Detention Centers: Redux
Thirty-five years after Ed Asner sounded the alarm that Jenny Flores, et al., were trapped in a Pasadena motel-turned-detention center, it appears little has changed. On July 22, 2020, the Associated Press broke the news that Trump & Co have been hiding new arrivals to the Southern border in hotels, including in Lizee’s hometown, until they can be deported. Called “expedited removal,” this is a blatant violation of both constitutional due process as well as the FSA.
Under Trump & Co, cruelty toward immigrants remains the point. Even before the border closed, processing centers, like la hielera in McAllen, held migrant children in deplorable and unsanitary conditions for far longer than the time allowed by the FSA. Trump & Co are on the record, in 2019, defending their lack of responsibility to provide detained migrant children with toothbrushes. Children, who are made to share lice combs, also share the flu, mumps, measles, skin diseases, and chicken pox. At least seven migrant children have died in ICE custody under Trump & Co, all for treatable illnesses. Many have gone blind from conjunctivitis.
In her capacity as monitor for the Flores Settlement Agreement, Hope Frye, Founder of Project Lifeline, is one of few people afforded access to child detention facilities in the era of Trump & Co. On her last scouting trip to the border, she observed a teenage mom, clearly in postpartum pain, cradling her ashen, listless, pre-mature baby in nothing but a dirty sweatshirt she’d begged off another detainee. That small act of kindness left the other woman with nothing to keep herself warm in the notorious “ice box.”
Hope took a tissue out of her pocket to wipe the blackened dirt from the newborn’s skinny neck. The next day, Hope didn’t feel well. Three days later she was in the local ICU, stricken with Influenza A, contracted while visiting the detained children.
It was not then flu season. The hospital staff were shocked to see Hope so sick. Hope was shocked to encounter border agents, many of them father of small children, so inured to the dreadful conditions, they‘d lost their own humanity.
Families Belong Together
That’s why, when Lizee learned that Pedro and Esmeralda had been allowed to cross into the US alone, she wanted to scream at their mother and shake her and yell, “Why did you let them go!”
But the Angry Tías’ mission is to bring dignity to the people Trump & Co have trapped, without any protection at all, in some of the most dangerous places on Earth. In 2019, they disappeared 60,000+ people as they systematically assassinated the right to asylum in the US. How could Lizee tell this grieving mother they would likely split up her children, too, and send them to different kids’ jails? How could she tell her that they might be used as bait to hunt down and deport their loved ones already living in the US? How could she tell her that while she languishes, all alone, in a tent in Matamoros, the children might be sent back to Honduras without her?
Recognizing the devastation and regret on this mother’s face, hearing her wanting to believe she’d done the right thing, Lizee forced up her lovely, toothsome grin and she did what she could to give another mother hope.
With me, however, she could crack, even a little bit. “If I hadn’t taken a day at home, I could have stopped them,” she said, forcing back tears.
Lizee wasn’t always an activist. But when she heard the infamous recording of Trump & Cos’ tiniest victims, crying and calling for their missing parents, while detained in her hometown of McAllen, Texas, it woke her up.
“I realized then, if I don’t act to stop these crimes against humanity, I’m complicit.”
Thank you for reading Episode 15 in my travelogue of a road trip gone awry: THE FIRST SOLUTION: Tales of Humanity and Heroism from Trump’s Manufactured Border Crisis, rolling out on Medium as fast as I can write it because it’s Just. That. Urgent. For earlier episodes, click here.
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.” — Toni Morrison, 1995
In addition to being grateful for Lizee’s passionate activism, I’d like to offer special thanks to Hope Frye of Project Lifeline for her help preparing and fact-checking this post, as well as to Philip Schrag, author of the highly recommended book Baby Jails, and everyone involved in the must-see Netflix production, Immigration Nation.
