“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
The above words written by Emma Lazarus is an inscription on the Statue of Liberty standing with raised torch in middle of the New York harbor. I read this, hear again the gnashing of teeth about immigration, and wonder: What is becoming of us?
The United States Attorney insists that people migrating to our country is a terrible crisis that can only be addressed by closing the borders. Making the path to entry more and more narrow or completely blocked seems to be this Administration’s goal.
AG Jeff Sessions announced that the asylum program is broken. No longer will being a victim of domestic abuse qualify as a reason for granting asylum. He is apparently just as oblivious to the reality of such women as he is on most other things that affect people in need.
In an incredibly poignant interview, Michael Barbaro of the NYT podcast “The Daily” talks with just such a woman. Her domestic abuse was terrible, added to that were the mores and legal practices of her home country which offered no relief made her more than qualified for asylum.
Please listen to her testimony and ask yourself are we now an inhumane, isolated “nation-state” as Sessions calls us? Or do we insist with raised voices and excellent voter turnout in November that we are America and we welcome all.
Words from Warren 