A brief interlude of rage

Ok, so let me state at the outset that I'm good friends with an immigration attorney, and I'm one of those people who has been criticizing US immigration policy for some time now.  Many of our deportations were cruel and shitty under Bush, and later Obama (seeing those cage pictures on the news attributed to his administration was not a surprise) and now...

I can't.  I just can't.  I stare into my 5 month old's big blue eyes and imagine her crying.  This isn't hard to do, she's a baby she cries ALL. THE. TIME.  But I think about how she cries when I don't pick her up immediately because, I don't know, I'm driving the car or sitting on a toilet or standing over a pan with flaming hot sesame oil sizzing towards my eyeballs.  And I imagine her cries when I am eventually going to be self-separated from her when I return to work.  But I have the minimal solace that she will be at a daycare where I know that she will be held and she will be soothed and I will rush out of work like the fucking flash to have her in my arms again.  And I will gladly nurse her as many times at night as she wants just to be near her.  I say this not as some awful sanctimommy, but with some degree of matter-of-factness, because this is how we rolled with Niblet when I had to return to work nine years ago.  Yes it sucked, and yes I was tired, but when you have to leave your baby for the day, you will do what you gotta do.

The news is wrenching and awful and frightening and TRIGGERING AS FUCK.

And look, mass incarceration, it's sort of the American way.  I live in a city where families are torn apart every day, and children are hurled into a foster system that can eat them alive.

But this, this is all too much.  I attempted to explain some of it to Niblet this morning on our drive to camp, and she was just.... appalled.

That's all I've got.  Oh, and if you think that children who don't speak English, and in many cases, don't speak Spanish, should have access to legal representation as well as an advocate who can help them reunite with their family, well, RAICES is a good organization to donate money to:

https://actionnetwork.org/campaigns/endfamilyseparation