“The kids showed up in our driveway on a Tuesday afternoon. The boy wore a backpack full of diapers for his sister; she wore neon-pink tennis shoes and wouldn’t let go of his hand. Their case worker gave me some paperwork and was gone before I had time to process the thought: Now I’m a foster mom… I’ve tried not to read the headlines about migrant children being separated from their parents. Their panic was palpable. Mine probably was, too.” J. Cummins, The New York Times

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Excerpt: If It Can Happen to Them, Why Can’t It Happen To Us? By Jeanine Cummins, The NYT

“The little one didn’t sleep so much as lose consciousness in moments when her small body demanded a break from her otherwise ceaseless crying. This happened with no discernible pattern. My two biological daughters, then 7 and 3, watched with concern as her cries turned to whimpers and then sloped into the ragged breath of sleep. She could nod off anywhere except in her crib: at swimming lessons, at the dinner table, sprawled on the kitchen floor…We may have been experienced parents, but we were inexperienced at parenting a traumatized child. I didn’t know how to change the diaper of a baby who was afraid of me. I didn’t know how to comfort a child who became frantic when I tried to touch her.

During the months that followed, the crying diminished and the children began to trust us. We tried to provide a safe, stable home for them. We gave them clothes, toys, grandparents. We laughed at their jokes and cried with them when visiting their parents was difficult. We loved them.

And yet we were, inherently, part of their trauma. Their parents were, for the moment, unable to provide a safe home for them. But even when it’s necessary, removing children from their parents causes acute distress. I witnessed that suffering. It lived in my home.

My older daughter began having nightmares that ‘the people’ would take her away from us and give her to another family. She was inconsolable. ‘If it could happen to them,’ she asked with the clear-eyed logic of a 7-year-old, “why can’t it happen to us?’

I told my kids this kind of separation happens only to children whose parents don’t do the right thing. But now it’s happening to people who are behaving exactly as good parents should. To parents who endure inconceivable hardship to get their children to this country, precisely in order to protect them. They come from places of violence and poverty and they travel, in some cases, thousands of miles carrying their children on their backs, all in the hopes of providing those children with a chance at safety. Their perseverance is the very model of parental sacrifice… Republicans are ostensibly the party of Christian family values.

Their leader is making a mockery of those values at our borders, separating even asylum-seekers from their children, and then using those children to force migrants into voluntary departure…Now I understand that it’s not always merit-based, who gets to keep their kids and who doesn’t. It can be arbitrary — a matter of unlucky geography — even in 2018, even in the United States of America. My daughter was right to be afraid.”