Former First Lady Laura Bush pleaded for politicians to find a better way of securing the US borders than the current “zero-tolerance” immigration crackdown…
Former First Lady Laura Bush pleaded for politicians to find a better way of securing the US borders than the current “zero-tolerance” immigration crackdown that so far has torn 2,000 children from their parents, calling the policy “cruel” and “immoral.”
“In 2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this current crisis?” Bush, 71, asked in a Washington Post Op-Ed on Sunday.
“This zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” the Texas native wrote.
The wife of 43rd President George W. Bush said the converted stores and tent cities children are housed in hearken back to the cruel Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, which she called “one of the most shameful episodes in U. S. history.”
“Americans pride ourselves on being a moral nation…” she wrote. “If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.”
Bush pointed to one especially cruel rule – that people working in US Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters are instructed not to pick up or hold children to comfort them, no matter how young.
She wrote that when her mother-in-law, former First Lady Barbara Bush, visited a home for children with HIV and AIDs in 1989 she held an afflicted little boy who had been deemed “untouchable.”
“My mother-in-law never viewed her embrace of that fragile child as courageous. She simply saw it as the right thing to do in a world that can be arbitrary, unkind and even cruel,” Bush wrote. “She, who after the death of her 3-year-old daughter knew what it was to lose a child, believed that every child is deserving of human kindness, compassion and love.”
“People on all sides agree that our immigration system isn’t working, but the injustice of zero tolerance is not the answer,” wrote Bush, who isn’t known to wade into political debates.
“I moved away from Washington almost a decade ago, but I know there are good people at all levels of government who can do better to fix this,” she added.
