Families In Detention This Christmas

Karnes Civil Detention Center by San Antonio Press News

Many of our readers will spend today with their family and friends – sharing presents, food, and fellowship.

Many migrant families will be spending this day in detention facilities in Texas. Hundreds of children – with an average age of six and a half – will spend today behind barbed wire and under the watchful eyes of government contractors.

Immigration attorneys Mary Neal and Daniel Thomann have published a moving op-ed about family detention via Fox News Latino. They write:

President Obama has said to Americans that his deportation policies will focus on “felons not families,” but we have met hundreds of children in immigration jails who tell a different story. These children – nursing infants, toddlers, pre-schoolers and school aged – are fleeing unimaginable violence in their home countries, and are being re-traumatized by our government in a morally bankrupt effort to deter people seeking asylum. These children and their mothers are not felons, they are families with U.S. relatives willing to shelter and support them. However, they had the misfortune of seeking refuge in the U.S. at a time when our policy was not to help and protect, but to detain and deport.

These children, Neal and Thomann write, “deserve to live with their families while they await their day in court.” They are, after all, waiting to present claims of asylum based on their desperate flights from “death threats, torture, and sexual violence” in countries that offer no protection from such terror.

-KitJ