OK, so, I have been thinking about what can be done, and here are a few things.
1) Contact your Congressional representatives and let them know that this is an important issue for you. Tell them how you feel about this human rights violation in which our entire federal government is now complicit. Ask them to support legislation that will make the separation of families at the border illegal.
2) While you are on the phone, ask them whether any of these immigrants, adults or children, are being processed through holding facilities in your state/district. Not all of this is going on at the border. Some of the media attention to this is coming from Seattle, where hundreds of detainees are being sent from the border to SeaTac Federal Detention Center. Totally foreseeably, Buttercup’s enthusiasm for the mass detention and punishment of immigrants and asylum seekers has overloaded the existing system, and these people are not only being separated from their children but shipped to detention facilities all over the country.
3) If they say they don’t know, ask them to find out and to send you an email with the information.
4) If you find out that your state/district has one of these facilities in your backyard, contact your local Indivisible chapter or whatever organization you normally work with and start organizing. Ask your representative to visit it. Hold a demonstration outside it. Inform people in your region of its existence. Whatever. Be one of the people who makes this a headache.
5) Are you a person of faith? Have you contacted your faith community about this? What are they organizing? If they are not doing organizing, why not?
6) While you’re at it, you may want to write in to the Washington Post and tell them that their story on Casa Padre should have read a little less like a puff piece in a travel industry magazine. Totally driven by the owners, who are allowed to control the narrative and provide most of the information; features a photo of a large game room where “Children can play pool and foosball.” Yes…I note that in your photo, exactly NO children are actually playing with this equipment. Is that because you have 1400 kids in that facility and 10 foosball tables? ASK THEM ABOUt WHAT THEY ARE NOT SHOWING YOU.
If you need help and/or want to help others, head to Informed Immigrant to find organizations near you working to support undocumented immigrants.
Check out Celeste Pewter’s twitter for up-to-date call scripts and resources for contacting your reps and fighting for human rights:
- Tips for calling your electeds
- Supporting Feinstein’s Keep Families Together Act
- Call scripts for Texas residents near detention centers
- Call script pushing for House/Senators’ investigation of DHS’s Zero Tolerance Policy
More resources:
- Join a local protest at FamiliesBelong.org
- Indivisible’s Immigration Resources
- Find My Reps
- Resistbot (emails and faxes reps for you)
Captions for the call scripts under the cut!
Separating Families at the Border: What Can We Do?
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