In 2018, when I helped screen separated parents, I talked to a man locked in an ICE jail who literally wept as he described being unable to put a shirt on his son's back and only eating once a day. He *begged* for a chance just to live here for a few years. I'll never forget him.
https://twitter.com/EJDionne/status/1374910073504473089
There's nothing like watching a grown man on the other side of a plexiglass wall in a remote ICE jail break down and sob and plead with you as if you alone can save him, to really drive home the point of how desperate many people migrating to our borders are.
He told me that he felt like an utter failure as a father because in Guatemala he had no land, no money, no work, and no hope. So when he heard in 2018 that families were being allowed in, he sold everything he had and came to the border. And then his son was taken from him.
We must always, always, remember that migrants are fathers, they are sons, they are mothers, they are daughters, they are above all people. Not floods, not waves. People who believe in the promise of this country in a way that so many of us who are born here no longer do.
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