Crimes Against Humanity on the Southern border

I generally stay away from political issues in the Home & Away environment. I am compelled to discuss what I consider crimes against mostly indigenous populations seeking asylum in our country. Thank you for reading.

Returning from my
second time working with immigrant women at the family detention center in
Dilley Texas at the end of 2019, I have some thoughts to share about the
appalling state of immigration policy as it has evolved over the past year.

Did you miss out on investing in Apple
stock when they first went public? Imagine what the stock would be worth if you
bought it and held it until today. Did you miss out on investing in Amazon when
it went public? How much would your stock be worth today if you still held it?
When we look at the past through the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to regret
that we didn’t act boldly and didn’t make an investment that would have turned
out to be the best financial decision we ever made.

Now let’s step away from our own lives
for now and put aside thoughts of our personal wealth. Instead, let’s think
about how decisions we make and actions we take can affect other lives. Think
back to a different time and a different missed opportunity, an opportunity to
save hundreds of thousands of human lives. Before the U.S. went to war in 1941,
there was talk of concentration camps run by the Germans where Jews and other
groups were being worked to death and exterminated. President Roosevelt’s
administration was successful in saving some refugees, but imagine how many
more lives could have been saved if an all-out effort had been made to resettle
European Jews in the U.S. It is a complicated and nuanced issue, but most acknowledge
that the U.S. could have done more. Doing more would have meant saving many lives.

We as a nation now have the
opportunity to do more to save lives, many thousands of lives. Current
immigration policies, which have been continuously tightened through Executive
Orders and new regulations over the past twelve months or so, have effectively
cut off immigration from three of the most dangerous countries in the world: El
Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The new policies are inhumane and cruel. They
are crimes against humanity. We are turning people away from our country who
are fleeing brutal, ghoulish gang violence, domestic violence, and more because
their cases don’t tick all the boxes that our new policies have put in place as
requirements for granting asylum.

Border agents, immigration officers,
and immigration judges can rightfully say they are obeying the law when they
turn people away or rule against them. Nazi officers who perpetrated heinous
crimes claimed they were obeying the law because they were following orders
from their superiors. We can’t expect these agents, officers, and judges to
break the law, but we can demand that they treat people humanely and that they
extend the protection of international immigration standards to the fullest extent.

So if agents, officers, and judges
can’t change things, who can? We can. We can call our senators and congressional
representatives. Let them know that we want no part of the crimes against
humanity being committed by our government. We can march. We can speak out
publicly. We can vote for people who do not support cruel immigration policies.
We can volunteer for organizations that help immigrants. We can donate to nonprofit
organizations that fight to help immigrants every day: Immigration Justice Campaign
(www.immigrationjustice.us ,
RAICES (www.raicestexas.org), and Al
Otro Lado (www.alotrolado.org) are
three such organizations.

Before I finish, I want to make one
more point: the rhetoric of the Trump administration would lead us to believe
that all the persons seeking asylum in the U.S. are committing an illegal act
by crossing the border and turning themselves in to Customs and Border Protection.
Nothing is further from the truth. Persons who come to a U.S. port of entry and
ask for asylum have the right to do so under international law. They are
breaking no laws. They are not “illegals”. If they are illegal, all of us
except for Native Americans are illegal.

Please, do what you can, in as many
different ways as you can.

I thank all the staff of the Dilley Pro
Bono Project and all my fellow volunteers for doing what they do. Special
thanks to Hannah Cramer, who pointed out the historical perspective and the analogy
with World War II issues.