Family separations focused on discrimination - Echo opinion
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| Keep families together! |
El Paso Texas - This Saturday marks one year since the passage of the first 30-day deadline to reunite families separated at the southern border.
Issued by a Federal Judge, the order decreed that the Trump administration had 30 days to reunite approximately 2,000 children who crossed the border with their families (an as-yet-incomplete project).
What I think we must remember though, is that these horrific acts of violence have been embedded in our country’s policies for decades, and that kids in our very neighborhoods have been suffering from them for much longer.
In my role as founder and Executive Director at Youth Rise Texas, and a person who herself lost my mother to incarceration and then deportation as a young woman, my professional and personal life is intricately woven with these issues. I knew that what we were seeing was the rotten fruit harvested from decades of punitive policy that has conflated migration and criminality. The reason why we listened to kids crying from their cages last summer was the same reason why I put myself through high school without my mother; why youth I work with are sleeping on a family friend's couch and working two jobs before they hit 12th grade.
For anyone, the experience of losing access to your parent is incredibly difficult — those who have lost parents to death, divorce, and relocation can attest. For those of us who lost ours to carceral institutions, the implications are similar and lifelong. The destabilization of waking up with their hugs and going to sleep with a gaping uncertainty where their presence ought to be is enormous. For children at the border, being thrown into a chaotic cage of other confused crying children and woefully underprepared caregivers intensifies the harm.
We mustn’t lose sight of the rate at which this is happening — not just on the border, but across our very neighborhoods; not just at flashpoints but in everyday quietude. Your children’s friends may very likely go home to this instability and not share a word of it out of fear, shame, and sheer overwhelm. In a forthcoming report that my organization will release this fall in partnership with the University of Texas, we found that since 2018, a minimum of 10,000 children — over 10% of children in Austin ISD — have suffered parental removal. This number grows daily.
Our nation has a long history of separating families of color; it is the soil from which the rotten fruit of family separation has grown. During the antebellum, White landowners violently tore Black families apart for profit; post-colonization, Native families were forced to send their children to boarding schools far away from their homes. From the 60s through 90s, our nation’s criminal justice system germinated the seeds of this crisis through increasing the funding for, and subsequently the size of, carceral industries. In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act further criminalized migration, punishing families like mine in search of the elusive “better life.”
These rotten seeds were fertilized by a harshly divisive national discourse around getting tough on crime, and so grew the second and third generations of sour fruits that have evolved into today’s numbers, including the 10,000 kids in Austin, the over 250,000 kids in Texas, and the 2,000-plus children at the border.
In my role as founder and Executive Director at Youth Rise Texas, and a person who herself lost my mother to incarceration and then deportation as a young woman, my professional and personal life is intricately woven with these issues. I knew that what we were seeing was the rotten fruit harvested from decades of punitive policy that has conflated migration and criminality. The reason why we listened to kids crying from their cages last summer was the same reason why I put myself through high school without my mother; why youth I work with are sleeping on a family friend's couch and working two jobs before they hit 12th grade.
For anyone, the experience of losing access to your parent is incredibly difficult — those who have lost parents to death, divorce, and relocation can attest. For those of us who lost ours to carceral institutions, the implications are similar and lifelong. The destabilization of waking up with their hugs and going to sleep with a gaping uncertainty where their presence ought to be is enormous. For children at the border, being thrown into a chaotic cage of other confused crying children and woefully underprepared caregivers intensifies the harm.
We mustn’t lose sight of the rate at which this is happening — not just on the border, but across our very neighborhoods; not just at flashpoints but in everyday quietude. Your children’s friends may very likely go home to this instability and not share a word of it out of fear, shame, and sheer overwhelm. In a forthcoming report that my organization will release this fall in partnership with the University of Texas, we found that since 2018, a minimum of 10,000 children — over 10% of children in Austin ISD — have suffered parental removal. This number grows daily.
Our nation has a long history of separating families of color; it is the soil from which the rotten fruit of family separation has grown. During the antebellum, White landowners violently tore Black families apart for profit; post-colonization, Native families were forced to send their children to boarding schools far away from their homes. From the 60s through 90s, our nation’s criminal justice system germinated the seeds of this crisis through increasing the funding for, and subsequently the size of, carceral industries. In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act further criminalized migration, punishing families like mine in search of the elusive “better life.”
These rotten seeds were fertilized by a harshly divisive national discourse around getting tough on crime, and so grew the second and third generations of sour fruits that have evolved into today’s numbers, including the 10,000 kids in Austin, the over 250,000 kids in Texas, and the 2,000-plus children at the border.
So while we remember this sordid anniversary this weekend, let’s also remember where it came from. I hope that in doing so, we can help ourselves see that we also have the solutions.
Kandace Vallejo, founder and executive director at Youth Rise Texas.
Kandace Vallejo, founder and executive director at Youth Rise Texas.
Labels: El Paso Times, immigration, Kandace Vallejo, Youth Rise Texas
posted by Juliana L'Heureux | 7:34 AM
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