An open letter to Congress, including our Congressional Representative, Col. Paul Cook:

Congressman Cook:

Separating parents and children is abhorrent and a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  We are ashamed of our country and of everyone who supports this policy of cruelty.

We have experienced something similar twice, something a parent never forgets, like a rape of one’s soul.

Fifty-plus years ago we had to leave one of our children in a hospital far from home for major surgery.  Staying with her was not an option.  As we left her room, we heard one wail, nothing more.  It was the cry of an abandoned child, not old enough to understand what had to happen, but knowing her parents had walked out and not knowing what would happen next.  The nurses were wonderful, the medical care the best, and she had not been snatched from equally terrified parents.

During the first Gulf War, when our daughter was stationed in Turkey, her husband and two children were evacuated back to the States.  The little girls had their father’s affection and excellent care all the time.  They lived with loving relatives or in military-paid housing for the duration, but the hastily-weaned-from-breast baby developed an infection and stopped gaining weight.  The doctor’s diagnosis: “She’s grieving for her mother.”  It was a full year after they were reunited that this child’s physical development reached normal.  This was separation from only one parent, and other than the stress of travel, in a physically optimal environment.

Furthermore, neither of those situations followed a traumatic journey with probably already-traumatized parents.

The only solution is to immediately cease (with repentance and amendment of life) this kidnapping-and-concentration-camp treatment of children.  They must be reunited with their parents.  If their parents have been deported, the only moral thing to do is to offer parents the alternative of having the child(ren) taken back to them, or asylum here while the damage is mitigated.

Legislatively, child abuse by immigration officials needs to be as illegal as child abuse by any other person(s).

Did you learn nothing from the internment of the Japanese, the forced boarding-school treatment of Native American children, or the several Trails of Tears? Do you not know about Nazi abductions or Russian exile to Siberia?  Or even the slave trade?  The fact that these things are going on in other countries does not excuse our evils.

We can only conclude that everyone responsible for this atrocity has lost the ability to distinguish between good and evil.  We grieve for the children, their parents, and for our country which has lost its moral bearings.

For the love of God, stop!