Two boys selling lemonade in Overland Park want to help migrant kids. Why don’t our leaders?
Thank God, two young brothers in Overland Park, Carter and Ben Wilson, don’t know all the details of what’s happening to migrant children at our border with Mexico.
They’re 8 and 10, so their parents have naturally tried to shield them from the worst of it.
Still, they know that there are kids just like them in terrible trouble there. “They happened to see parts of the story on the news,’’ says their dad, John Wilson.
And they know, too, that there is something we can do to help them. That is why they have been standing out in the heat this past week, selling lemonade for $1 a cup and donating all of the proceeds to Kids in Need of Defense, or KIND, which provides legal representation to migrant children.
“I would want them to legally be able to come to America or be able to live in America without being forced into these places away from their parents,” said 10-year-old Ben.
The hellish places Ben is referring to are, for no reason other than President Donald Trump’s belief that his supporters will reward his steadfast attempts to treat immigrants as poorly as possible, holding babies in conditions that betray us all.
According to multiple reports summarized in a recent court filing, hundreds of children being held at the border are spending weeks “without access to soap, clean water, showers, clean clothing, toilets, toothbrushes, adequate nutrition or adequate sleep. The children, including infants and expectant mothers, are dirty, cold, hungry and sleep-deprived. Because the facilities deny basic hygiene to the children, the flu is spreading among detained class members, who also are not receiving essential medical assessments or prompt medical treatment. Very young children are charged with responsibility for toddlers, with no adult or family supervision. With each passing day, more hospitalizations are occurring and more lives are at risk.”
A pediatrician who examined children at the Ursula detention facility in McAllen, Texas, said conditions there “could be compared to torture facilities. That is, extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.”
And why? Most of these children have loved ones in the U.S. who want to take them in; this is not a problem caused by lack of funds, but by lack of compassion.
No child should even have to see, much less live, the reality of that Associated Press photo of the young Salvadoran father and his toddler daughter who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande.
Naturally, some said that the father, 25-year-old Oscar Alberto Martinez, was at fault for bringing his daughter, Angie Valeria, on a journey that ended with the two of them lying face down in the mud, her arm still wrapped around him.
But that’s not what Martinez’ mother, Rosa Ramirez, saw in the photo of her son and granddaughter: “He never let her go,’’ she told a reporter for Reuters. “You can see how he protected her.”
The U.N. refugee agency said the image points to “a failure to address the violence and desperation pushing people to take journeys of danger.”
It is the inevitable result of Trump’s immigration policies, all of which point in the same cruel direction. Cutting aid to U.S.-run programs in Central America, as he has, can only worsen the violence and poverty that make so many feel they have no choice but to flee.
Recently, the president threatened to arrest “millions” of immigrants in a mass roundup. NPR reported last week that the administration also wants to scale back long-standing protections for the undocumented spouses of active-duty U.S. troops.
As former San Antonio mayor and housing secretary Julián Castro put it in one of the most memorable exchanges in the first Democratic presidential debates, “that image of Oscar and his daughter, Valeria, is heartbreaking. It should also piss us all off.”
It’s true, as he said, that Trump’s “metering” policy that’s caused backlogs at ports of entry “is basically what prompted Oscar and Valeria to make that risky swim across the river. They had been playing games with people who are coming and trying to seek asylum at our ports of entry. Oscar and Valeria went to a port of entry, and then they were denied the ability to make an asylum claim, so they got frustrated and they tried to cross the river, and they died because of that.”
Castro wants to “get to the root cause of the issue” with a Marshall Plan for Central America, “so that people can find safety and opportunity at home instead of coming to the United States to seek it.”
Meanwhile, Congress has approved some emergency funding for migrants in these prisons for babies. Republicans voted down protections for children being held there, while Democrats did stave off a Republican proposal that would have expanded the border detention facilities.
There is not enough lemonade in the world to resolve the crisis. But the humanity shown by these boys in Overland Park is the antidote to a problem made exponentially worse by its absence.
This story was originally published June 30, 2019 at 6:16 AM with the headline "Two boys selling lemonade in Overland Park want to help migrant kids. Why don’t our leaders?."