And the rest of us will be thrust into a national emergency of conscience. For we have allowed children to be snatched from the arms of their parents and sent to inadequate holding cells, cages, transported hundreds, even thousands of miles from their loved ones to caretakers in the employ of nonprofits, men and women who don’t know the names of the villages of these children, their aunts and uncles, their neighbors, or what they love to eat for dinner.
Recently, our attention has been split by the plight of the Thai boys trapped in the cave, and the bizarre behavior of President Trump in Brussels, the United Kingdom and Helsinki. And yet there are thousands of parents and children trapped in a kind of hell, waiting to find each other.
This time, thankfully, the free press that our president mocks day after day as fake gave us the chance to hear firsthand from these mothers and fathers and their children, to see for ourselves the cages the children were sent to and to hear their cries.
Trump’s comments came in the run-up to the birthday of iconic African American civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King and the seventh anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed nearly 250,000 people.