I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: 8 year old guatemalan boy

  • another one bites the dust


    Alas, yet another member of the president’s cabinet bids us all a fond farewell – maybe not fond, but definitely farewell.

    Kirstjen Nielsen, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, evidently felt it was the right time for her to step aside according to an article in the Business Insider today. Nielsen became the pretty face for the president’s ugly “zero tolerance” immigration policy of 2018 and she continued to defend the detainment of refugee children taken from their families – assuring Congress (and I heard this with my own ears) none of the refugee children were living in cages. Alrighty then. Clearly none of us have seen those conditions with our own two television eyes.

    Ms. Nielsen attended Georgetown University’s school of foreign service and studied abroad in Japan. She worked for Senator Connie Mack of Florida before going to law school at the University of Virginia. During Dubya Bush’s first term who’s surprised  she worked for the White House Homeland Security Council during Hurricane Katrina and had a hand in the less than stellar response by the Bush team in that tragedy. And still she moved on up.

    In one of her Congressional appearances I heard her answer she had no idea how many asylum seekers had died during their internment in our camps. I could have helped her with that one. Two children died within one month of each other in December of 2018. Seven-year-old Jakelin Caal of Guatemala died on December 8th. Eight-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo died on Christmas Eve. We can start the death count with those two.

    Now the courts have determined we may have to wait another two years to identify thousands of children still separated from their families at the border because of a policy Secretary Nielsen administered for a man with no concern for the welfare of anyone other than himself. Shame on him, shame on her and shame on all of us for a lack of moral outrage as a nation.

    In Vision of Reality – a Study of Abnormal Perception and Behavior, author Alberto Rivas quotes Heinrich Himmler,  another Minister of the Interior in a country across the pond during the Nazi regime:

    “The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.”

    So farewell to you, Secretary Nielsen. Don’t let your twisted lack of conscience hit you on the way out the door.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

  • geography = destiny


    Finn and Dwight spent Christmas Eve with their families with visions of sugar plums or something equally delightful dancing through their heads – 8-year-old Finn at his home in South Carolina where the moon was a gigantic white ball suspended in space surrounded by bright stars promising magic in the sky; soon to be 8-year-old Dwight at his grandparents’ home in South Dakota waiting for a brilliant white snowfall that would provide a magical playground for him and his two brothers when they woke on Christmas morning. Both boys drifted off to sleep on Christmas Eve in warm beds surrounded by the love and protection of their families.

    Meanwhile, another 8-year-old boy named Felipe Gomez Alfonso who walked to the United States seeking asylum from a Central American country known as Guatemala fell asleep in a hospital in Alamogordo, New Mexico where he had been taken a second time on Christmas Eve because his condition had worsened from an earlier afternoon visit to the hospital which had released him with amoxicillin and Ibuprofen according to an article in the New York Times on December 25th by Miriam Jordan. This little boy never woke up.

    He is the second child to die in our custody in the past three weeks. The first was a 7-year-old girl.

    According to the Times article, the children are placed in overcrowded facilities where they sleep side by side on mats with one mylar blanket. The children refer to their sleeping areas as “hieleras” which is Spanish for ice boxes because they are so cold.

    The article went on to say that last week the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Neilsen, was unable to answer a question asked during a report to a congressional committee: how many people have died in our custody?

    My question is why couldn’t you answer that question, Madam Secretary?

    On the other end of the spectrum, TBS comedian Samantha Bee created her Full Frontal Christmas on I.C.E. special which brought attention to the deficiencies in our immigration and detention policies specifically as they apply to the children caught up in situations not of their own making. As a result of a visit she made to Lumpkin, Georgia which is the home of a small group known as El Refugio that ministers to immigrants, their families and friends held at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, Samantha and TBS donated a six-bedroom house that they renovated for the project. Check out the El Refugio website as well as another charity Samantha supported: Kids In Need of Defense (KIND).

    Finn and Dwight today are happily enjoying the holiday season with their families because they were born in the United States to parents who were able to provide for them. The nameless little boy from Guatemala will be returned to his home in a coffin.*

    Regardless of what we believe to be right or wrong about asylum seekers or the world in general at the end of 2018, geography often equals destiny.

    Stay tuned.