Thread by @Monaheart1229

1/ An excerpt from the article that I've written about my experience in Southern Texas this week.
Even edited and excerpted, it's long. There is so much to say...yet still, I cannot find language befitting this atrocity.

2/I just spent three days in El Paso, Texas, on assignment, looking into what is happening on the ground at the Mexican border. It is 110* there during the day, and as the temperature falls in the evening, it begins to pour. The dust turns to mud, and the air becomes no less

3/laden with humidity.
The most devastating thing that I saw in the midst of this are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people huddled on a bridge. Desperate, shielded from the rain by only sheets of cardboard. They say nothing, through the cacophony of the pounding rain only

4/sounds of mothers and fathers soothing their children can be heard. The silence is astounding. These are men, women and children primarily from Central America, people, families, who have left everything they know, some walking 1,000 miles fleeing drug cartels who have

5/decimated their villages, killed their relatives and burned their homes. People, human beings like you and I whose lives have been torn to shreds by palpable terror. People who without question meet the requirement for seeking asylum in the US, what is known at the border as

6/‘Credible Fear’. In the morning, these families are taken into administration buildings where they are to be cleared for entry. At this point, the parents are searched and arrested, the children are removed from their custody, they aren’t given much in the way of explanation,

7/their questions aren’t answered, their cries ignored. Once they’ve been separated, the parents are moved to holding areas, places with chain link fencing designed to separate the genders. The minor children are then moved to detention facilities of another sort, facilities that

8/are being called Internment Camps, Children’s Prisons, and as Charlie Strass has now coined, the newest kind of Trump Hotels. Places with cages (we are told...NO press gets in). These children’s facilities are said to be enormous rooms, lined with mattresses.. They are cold,

9/they are windowless and there is nothing that comes close to affection for these thousands of screaming, terrified children. I do not have the words to explain to you the wrenching, heart rending, knee buckling terror and sickness that witnessing this new hell evoked in this

10/mother...nothing even close. And I’m certain that I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know, haven’t already seen reported.There are reporters from all over the world in Southern Texas right now, and soon, they’ll also be in Houston where, it is said a new

11/ (the fourth) center will be opened for what Trump et al are now calling ‘tender-age children’ Children under the age of five. I was told by more than one of my colleagues that there are infants as young as a few weeks old. Separated from their mothers, placed in cold rooms,

12/and at extremely serious risk of failure to thrive, something that happens to babies when they aren’t held, loved by their primary person, or by anyone at all. Failure to thrive often leads to death. “The practice of separating families amounts to arbitrary and unlawful

13/interference in family life, and is a serious violation of the rights of the child”, said a spokesperson for the UN Human-Rights Office. And Astrid Dominguez, Director of the Regional Center for Border Rights said, “This administration [is] just creating more people with

14/records.They are trying to deter them from coming, and they’re legitimate asylum-seekers. They’re sending them to federal court, they’re prosecuting them, the judge sentences them to time served, then they go back [to] the station or marshal custody but [aren’t] reunited with

15/their child.” At this time, many people with detained children have been deported back to Mexico, but because there is no working policy in place for the reunification of families, they’ve been deported without their children. None of them have ANY idea where their kids are,

16/and their questions aren’t being answered. There are lawyers all over the place trying to help these people. Trying to locate their children, trying without success to figure out how to reunify these kids with their parents. There are several organizations also present like

17/The Texas Civil Rights Project, The Refugee & Immigrant Center for Education & Legal Services, Las Americans Immigrant Advocacy Center, The Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee, the ACLU and many, many people of The Cloth, Priests from Churches all over the area...good,

18/decent people, all trying to help, most getting few, if any answers. These wonderful organizations need our money, they need every single penny that we can spare so that they can begin to find a solution. Each of these can be donated to separately or you can donate directly to

19/ACTBLUE, who give money to a total of 8 agencies who are involved in the desperate search for reunification of these families.And there are protestors. More good, decent people. Mothers, Fathers and older children standing in the 110* heat, at times quietly, holding their

20/signs, but whenever any official emerges from one of these facilities, these good people erupt into loud, outraged cries of ‘Keep Families Together’, ‘Where are the babies?’ ‘Trump Must Go’, and much more. As a country we are incensed, aggrieved at the desecration of all that

21/is moral and good. All that we stand for. And well we should be. I’m not going to pontificate, we all know how we feel. But we are at an overwhelming and legitimate loss about what TO DO about this. So, we protest. Governors withhold National Guard Troops, all forms of

22/cooperation. In Congress Trump is waylaid with groups of Senators and Congressman in the hallways on Congressional Hill. All normal business is now interrupted by loud, long admonishment in the chambers.Trump said today that he’s going to ‘sign something soon’ to reunify

23/these families. But this, as we well know, is about his wall. So I don’t hold much hope for him to successfully put an end to his new policy. This has to be dealt with in the courts. Just as we dealt with his travel ban in January, 2017. On March 9, 2018, the ACLU filed a

24/National Class Action lawsuit, challenging the Trump Administration’s policy decision to separate asylum-seeking parents from their children, demanding the immediate release of these parents & their children. They’re not flight risks or dangers to the well being of our

25/citizenry. They’re terrified, loving human beings in search of a better life. A life without the certain fear of death.Again, Donald Trump announced today that he will be signing an Executive Order to detain families together. However, the detention facilities already in

26/place are so chaotic, so inhumane, so mired in pandemonium, that I have little faith that it will be a true solution. Please give your money to the organizations that we can trust, the people whose hearts are overflowing, those who work with tears streaming down their faces

27/all day long. And PLEASE call, or GO and SEE your Republican representatives and tell them that a Trump EO is not enough-TELL them to seek judicial solutions. And please, support the ACLU, support their efforts to bring Trump to World Court for his human rights violations.

28/It will be a very long time before I am able to process the atrocity that I witnessed, before any of us forget what is happening. And that is good, because it is when our basic values system is called into question that real change begins to happen. And, it is time.

29/So on November 6, we don’t stay home. On November 6 we let them all know that even contemplating these actions is going too far. We let them know that we will not be overtaken. That is is WE, The People who run this show.
~MBBH 6/20/18