Rev. Dr. Charles N. Davidson: A Summons to a Nationwide Citizens’ Mobilization to Free and Unite Migrant and Refugee Children and Families

The crucial moment has arrived amid the immigration crisis inflaming the nation—the time for citizens from cities, townships, and hamlets across the land to answer the clarion call to take swift action.

With unrelenting resolve, we the people must unite in an urgent mobilization to free immigrant refugee children and families from the egregious and compulsory separations forced upon them at border crossings and in federal, regional, and local detention centers, jails and prisons.

What we are witnessing before our collective American eyes is a cunningly calculated human catastrophe. The harsh hand of President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and ICE, has tightened the screws and fastened the bolts of an authoritarian assault upon tens of thousands of defenseless persons, including children who are totally powerless before the might of the state.

Fleeing the perils of political carnage, drug wars, persecutions, domestic violence, poverty, and hunger in their native countries, asylum seekers come knocking upon the doors of freedom only to find unconscionable perils awaiting them in “the sweet land of liberty” — barbed wire fences, automatic weapons, arrest warrants, and handcuffs with which to seize and bind their wrists and arms.

In spite of the laws, ideals, and values enshrined in the constitution of our democratic republic, Emma Lazarus’s immortal words emblazoned upon the Statue of Liberty have suffered a thief’s heist from the conscience of the Trump administration.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Due to the president’s and attorney general’s policy of “zero tolerance” criminalizing refugee migrants as “illegals” the very second they step across the border, the forces of a command bureaucracy are arrayed against them like tigers teeth ready to pounce.

Worst of all, thus far—by an edict in and of itself inherently criminal—immigration officials in the Trump regime are obeying the presidential order to wrench innocent children from the sheltering arms of their parents.

The nation’s highest ranking legal official, who once argued for “separate and unequal” in the schools of Alabama, has promulgated the dire warning that if you, dear migrant (who happen to be a person of color), disobey the “zero tolerance” directive, then the doctrine of “separate and divide” will be the fate to befall you and your children. Thus does the U.S. Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Third, unremorsefully turn defenseless refugee children into political pawns of the state.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States in a stunt of crass stupidity and blundering irony flirts with Kim Kardashian during a photo shoot in the Oval Office over the need for universal “prison reform.”

So, let it be said on behalf of the blunt and unequivocal truth. The practice of purposely dividing families by ripping children from their parents, and parents from their children, whether at the Mexican border or on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, or Asheville, is outrageously and brutally inhumane. It also, in fact, perpetrates a premeditated and pernicious systemic evil upon an entire class of people.

In diametrical contrast to the Terror Politic of “zero tolerance”—a dystopian phrase that too easily could be applied to more than one Machiavellian practice—the biblical Law of Moses makes abundantly clear what a God-given universal morality requires.

“When an alien resides within your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:33-34).

Likewise, Jesus of Nazareth, in thoroughgoing solidarity with the alien, the outcast, the destitute and poor of his day, reiterated the divine commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31).

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SO, FELLOW CITIZEN, let us pause to look anew at our neighbors.

Look, with your compassionate heart, squarely into the faces of these boys and girls being snatched from their parents and siblings. Give your undistracted concentration to their terrified, disbelieving gazes.

Bear witness to their utter humiliation as they are being handcuffed by strangers in armed uniforms and secreted off in unmarked vehicles to undisclosed locations.

Pause yet again, giving your rapt attention to the emotional torture they suffer while watching their parents being booked as criminals and hauled away to prison.

Observe with deepest empathy their tender youth—some barely of age beyond toddlers and infants—incarcerated behind locked doors, barricaded within overcrowded warehouse walls sealed shut with blackened windows, crammed into wire cages, off-limits to public and parental inspection.

Approach them not from the president’s, the attorney general’s, or ICE’s totalitarian point of view, which is demonstrably antithetical to their personal wellbeing. Rather, let your benevolent mind’s eye see them from their own simple, delicate, fragile perspectives. Let your earnest glances grace them as kindly as you would the faces of your very own child.

Imagine yourself as though you were the one to be confined to their palpable predicament. If by good fortune you are a parent, grandparent, or guardian, then for heaven’s sake, for a single clear-eyed minute’s sake, for the children’s sake, please! paint the faces of these latch-cage kids into your own children’s and grandchildren’s faces.

Do you grasp the foreboding and fear in the torrents of tears streaming down their cheeks?

Do you catch their feverish eyes searching frantically for familiar faces, just one familiar face, within their cold, concrete, unfamiliar spaces?

Do you notice their arms, hands, fingers—entire bodies—desperately longing to be held within their mothers’ and fathers’ warm, comforting embraces?

Are you seeing them now?

Are you hearing what their ears are straining to hear? Will you reach out to let them cup your ears with their hands?

Will you do so, lest any remaining deafness to their plight fail to reach beyond the clamor of the clanking steel encasements to which their universe is abruptly crashing in?

Are you listening to them now?

Oh? you say—

Isn’t it better to be temporarily boxed in a converted Walmart Super Store than facing the mortal dangers of those pitiless desert trails their feet have trod, only to reach the end from which they began and to which they’re deathly afraid they’ll be forced to return again?

Are you seeing them now? Are you moving yet?

Are you seized by their frenzied screams, their panicked sobs, their sunless morning groans, their midnight whimpers? Do you feel the knots gnawing at their stomachs, the tremors wracking their bones?

Are you listening to them now? Are you moving yet?

From where they lie flat, bivouacked upon cement-hardened floors where once stood shelves of teddy bears and little girls’ fancy dolls and little boys’ play plastic pistols, is there anyone from afar who can be trusted to know exactly where they are?

Speaking no English, with no one around to translate what’s impossible to understand without taking hold of Mommy’s or Daddy’s consoling hand, they have no earthly idea either where they are, or possibly or likely what shall become of them.

Are you seeing them now? Are you moving yet?

Caught like fish flailing in the Orwellian night-troller’s dragnet, how shall they escape the captor’s merciless grip?

Is there an interlocutor of sure and certain voice, of undeterred demeanor, refusing to take no for an answer, standing erect before the oppressor, demanding release, demanding justice where there is no mercy, and mercy where there is no justice?