Yes, I said it. Separating children from their parents with no plans to reunite them for the crime of crossing a border illegally is the very beginning of genocide. Genocide is intentional action to destroy a person in whole or in part. Some people believe that you need to physically kill others before this word applies but I don’t. You can destroy an entire nation by victimizing their youth, ensuring that they are criminalized from the crib, and taking actions that will mentally scar them for life.  We do not have to wait 10 years after the fact to acknowledge it, commemorate it. We have witnessed and learnt about enough tragedies to learn the early signs and this is one of them. The sooner we call it out, I think, the more this can be prevented.

What you are about to read is not a news article about the current US administration zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration south of the border. If you live under rock, let me contextualize this piece. Whether you are a democrat or a republican this is the fact that happened that no one disputes: Days after Sessions announced the zero-tolerance policy, the U.S. government issued a call for proposals from shelter and foster care providers to provide services for the new influx of children taken from their families after journeying from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. As children are separated from their families, law enforcement agents reclassify them from members of family units to “unaccompanied alien children.” Federal officials said that since May, they have separated 2,342 children from their families, rendering them unaccompanied minors in the government’s care. If you want more background from various sources click here, here, and here. If you need more, do your Googles.

In this piece I present my opinion about these children taken from their families at the border, not as an immigrant, not as a mother, not as someone who somehow is more deeply impacted by the situation but as a human being. I am horrified at what is happening south of the US border. I am a first row witness to the rise of nationalism in the US as most of us are and every day the future of this nation looks bleaker. I am not American. I am Togolese Canadian. I am an immigrant here. I am an observer here.

Most of Trump’s concern has lied in this since he ran for office: criminalizing people who risk their lives to enter the US. Are there criminals who take advantage of the immigration system (legally, or illegally)? Absolutely. But they do not have one nationality, color, and as I just mentioned, a lot of the ones I think he is worried about do not actually come to the US illegally and may actually work with white US citizens to get their drugs across…but who cares? Also a reminder that the average American is much more likely to be killed or raped and robbed by the fellow US citizen who looks like him or who, fun fact, actually knows him personally or even, submitted the same homework assignment.

We all know this is not about border security. This is just one more expression of the current climate of hyper-nationalism and bigotry which emboldens any genocidal government.  Just last week Trump said this:  “We’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” he said. “These aren’t people. These are animals.””  You can say Trump is referring to MS-13 gang members, but once again I think you probably know this is a dog whistle for immigrants by now since Trump has used the term interchangeably several times.

Taking children away from their families as an act of reprimand is cruel and inhumane. Infants as young as a few months old (held in “tender age” shelters) are being separated and detained for unspecified amounts of times away from their family by total strangers. It is an empirical fact and multiple regression models revealed that, controlling for baseline family and maternal characteristics and indicators of family instability, the occurrence of a mother-child separation of a week or longer within the first two years of life was related to higher levels of child negativity (at age 3) and aggression (at ages 3 and 5). The effect of separation on child aggression at age 5 was mediated by aggression at age 3, suggesting that the effects of separation on children’s aggressive behavior are early and persistent.

Who are these children’s caregivers? Does anyone wonder who these kids are left with and completely at the mercy of in these “camps”? How many stories of mental and physical abuse will we hear about in a few years? How can this society possibly justify that this is in any way fair punishment to these desperate families seeking a better life? Can you imagine crossing thousands of miles and so many dangers with one sole goal:  giving your children hope and a better life, and seeing them taken away and incarcerated at the hands of people whose government warns their people everyday that your kind of people is an infestation to this country?

Some people will endorse this policy and actually claim that there is no better deterrent to future illegals than knowing that crossing the border illegally will mean losing some family is one of the worst way imaginable by seeing your children, no matter how young they are incarcerated.

I believe that while upholding the legitimacy of borders, a country should not sacrifice its values or humanity, that is, if it had any of these to begin with.  Alicia Lieberman, who runs the Early Trauma Treatment Network at University of California, San Francisco said “Children are biologically programmed to grow best in the care of a parent figure. When that bond is broken through long and unexpected separations with no set timeline for reunion, children respond at the deepest physiological and emotional levels.”

I believe children are the most valuable and precious part of our society whether they look like us or not. Defiling them, as I am seen done countless of times in the past few weeks is beneath what a free society should ever be able to do to protect itself or in this case, the egos of grown, uneducated, bigoted, mostly white men and women in America who are afraid that these kids will take away more of what white supremacy has afforded them all these years.You have already lost that battle. The future is now. The future is immigrant.

Here’s who to follow for on-the-ground updates

A number of publications have people working the immigration beat and/or reporting from the border. To follow along with their reporting, their Twitter handles are attached below.

• Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times
• Jacob Soboroff, MSNBC
• Elise Foley, HuffPost
• Roque Planas, HuffPost
• Nick Miroff, Washington Post
• Miram Jordan, New York Times
• Tal Kopan, CNN
• Julia E. Ainsley, NBC
• Lomi Kriel, Houston Chronicle
• Madlin Mekelburg, El Paso Times
• Bob Moore, Texas Monthly

Lastly and most importantly, Here’s a list of organizations that are mobilizing to help immigrant children separated from their families if you feel so inclined to do something.

Update:  the Trump administration has announced that the United States is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council as at June 19, 2018.

Update: Trump signs executive order on family separation but says "zero tolerance" to stay as at June 20, 2018.

What is your opinion on this entire situation? Do you think exceptions should be made for the prosecution of families? Should the families be prosecuted but kept together? Is family separation the fair price to pay for breaking the law?