They tried to ban green card holders! GREEN CARD HOLDERS! These are people with houses and jobs and children who have lived in the US for years and years and chosen it as their permanent home. People who have been probed by bureaucracy after bureaucracy and found to be an asset to the country. People who, even if they renounce all connection to the United States and move across the world, must still pay income tax to the federal government for another 5 years!

My wife is a green card holder. Through the Byzantine process of immigration, despite being the mother of two American citizens and the wife of a citizen with roots in the Mayflower, she will not be eligible for citizenship herself for another two years. It is only by accident of history that she is not from a majority Muslim country, that the British drew the lines of Partition in one place and not another.

And now that craven, vile man believes he has the right to separate my wife from my children without due process of law, or indeed any process at all beyond his own thoughtless whim. There is no principle, secular or sacred, legal or moral, that can countenance this. I attended a protest for the first time in my life on Saturday, and I brought my whole family, so my children could stand there with me, and fight for their right to keep their own mother by their side.

Nor is it any comfort that our family enjoys more legal protections than those on a work visa, or seeking asylum. That we are relatively safe now, when a few years ago we would have no recourse. The process of being recognized as an American is long and onerous, but the process of becoming an American is immediate. When a person steps off the shore, or off the tarmac, and leaves the land of their generations of ancestors in search of a better life, THAT is what makes an American. We are all refugees. Whether a puritan fleeing persecution, or an irishman fleeing the famine, or a slave fleeing the south, or a jew fleeing genocide, we are ALL refugees. And we have a higher obligation to refugees than any other country on earth. They are ours, for they are our ancestors, and the ties that bind them to us are ties of blood.