Asked about separating parents and children of illegal immigrants, Nielsen says "don't break the law." "If you break the law, you go to jail and you're separated from your family. It shouldn't be any different for illegal immigrants," she tells driveway gaggle at WH. pic.twitter.com/vBDDdZLB8G
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) May 18, 2018
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
My removal from my parents was a benevolent act that led me to being housed for several months by a generous American family. And yet being separated from my parents hurt enough for me to remember it vividly more than 40 years later. I can easily imagine the kind of damage a prolonged removal, under much more adverse circumstances, would do to a child. Or to a parent, since I am now the father of a 4-year-old myself. I say I can imagine it, but the pain of losing my son is actually unimaginable.
I wonder whether whoever decided to take me from my mother considered her pain. Maybe they only saw her alienness and her lack of education, which happened because she was born poor and a girl. Perhaps they never saw that in Vietnam she had been a successful businesswoman. But even if she hadn’t, what difference should that have made? Are people who are less successful not human or deserving of the right to hold on to their children? Our answer to that question says everything about us.