This administration’s family separation policy is both immoral and inept and will not resolve the issues we face at the border. Instead, it will further erode the basic values that unite us and that undergird our claim to world leadership. We have been here before.
In 1981, I found myself in a courtroom in Houston, Texas providing testimony to an immigration judge in support of an asylum petition by a 15-year old refugee from El Salvador. I had just established the Latin American history program at a local university and was one of the few available to support the boy’s petition. His story was horrific. His parents had sent him out of the country to escape forcible recruitment by the military or the guerrillas in the civil war then tearing the country apart. I recounted the dark history of US intervention in Central America from the late 19th century to the then current US support of the military dictatorship in El Salvador in its war against left-wing guerrillas. The war included deliberate targeting of civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers and other violations of human rights, 85 percent of which were done by the military. It also included military persecution and murder of the Archbishop of San Salvador and hundreds of clergy throughout the country. Within minutes of my testimony, the Administrative Law Judge, a political appointee, denied the boy’s petition for asylum, accused him of illegal entry into the US for economic reasons and sentenced him to deportation back to El Salvador. So here we are again. The killing is still going on: the intentional homicide rate in El Salvador is the highest in the world; 16 times that of the US in a country 50 times smaller. Our policies then –and now—have directly supported small authoritarian elites –often military dictatorships—hostile to true democracy and resistant to any kind of reform. We did so then under the banner of anti-communism. We do so now under the banner of anti-terrorism. Why? Are any of our elected representatives asking why? Are any of them connecting the dots between what the US has done there and what the US is facing now at the border? How many more refugee families will be separated and turned away until they do? Richard Hyland Grand Junction Email Letters to the Daily Sentinel, June 19, 2018 https://www.gjsentinel.com/opinion/email-letters-june/article_042078b2-74a2-11e8-95e4-27454f529e7b.html
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