I am one of many in this country who were born here. I didn’t earn my place here; I was born into the safety and liberty this country affords me. If I wasn’t born into it, I would seek safety and liberty wherever I could find it, and I would try to do so as quickly as possible, rather than waste years trying to earn my right to the same benefits others are born into. I empathize with immigrants who try to cross the border, and I find their treatment by the U.S. government there abhorrent.
Even if you cannot empathize with asylum seekers, you should be able to recognize that their children should not be harmed in their parents’ attempts to give them better lives. Yet, as families flee from violence and poverty elsewhere, they find their children harmed here. Children detained at the border have been torn from their families, left unclean and unsupervised (to the point where infant care is left up to other children), and suffered trauma without the resources to help them cope with it. Children have even been killed in our country’s custody, when they have needed immediate health care and their captors haven’t treated them on time.
I urge Congresswoman Annie Kuster to stand up for children and to work with Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, and the full U.S. Congress and the Trump administration, to ensure the well-being of these children. I ask her to please co-sponsor the Help Separated Families Act (H.R. 3452).
MELISSA PROULX
Concord