Four members of the Homeland Security Advisory Committee resigned their posts last week in protest of President Donald Trump's policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border.
The group of four, all of whom were appointed by former President Barack Obama, claimed they were not consulted over what they called the "morally repugnant" practice of immigrant family separation in a powerful letter of dissent written to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
“Were we consulted, we would have observed that routinely taking children from migrant parents was morally repugnant, counter-productive and ill-considered,” the group wrote. “We cannot tolerate association with the immigration policies of this administration, nor the illusion that we are consulted on these matters.”
Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman (D-NY), one of the four resignees, followed up with a letter of her own to Nielsen, in which she called for the secretary to resign.
Although it is I resigning in protest against these policies, it is you who should be tendering your resignation instead.
Holtzman coauthored the Refugee Act of 1980, which she said was violated by Trump's decision to rip families apart, and that the law was put in place to avoid a repeat of the United States' refusal to accept refugees fleeing the Nazis during World War II. Holtzman worked to track down and prosecute escaped Nazis in the United States in the 1970s.
Holtzman was a literal Nazi hunter. Her words are damning.
"There was a time that the US welcomed refugees,” she wrote. "We readily accepted and absorbed more than 600,000 refugees from Cuba, 750,000 refugees from Vietnam, and more than 100,000 Jews from the Soviet Union. … The thought that the US government is afraid today of 2,000 children and their parents is both laughable and appalling."
Holtzman blasted the Trump administration's "war on refugees and immigrants," which the former New York City Comptroller said are "ethnically and religiously motivated" and "malign and self-destructive policies."
"This is child kidnapping, plain and simple," Holtzman said.
Seizing children from their parents in violation of the constitutional rights of both is bad enough (mentally harmful to the children and infinitely painful to both the parents and children), but doing so without creating proper records to enable family reunification shows utter depravity on the part of the government officials involved.
Twitter lauded Holtzman's demand for Nielsen to step down.
Some think Holtzman's note to Nielsen should be "copied and pasted on the resignation letter of every Trump administration official."
Users also voiced their distaste for the Trump administration's attitude toward immigrants and human decency, with one person calling people who work for Trump "the lowest form of human."
"They possess no compassion, caring or understanding. They remain self-absorbed, self-centered with Trump-like cruelty."
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@sadcommunistdog; @froglok/Bluesky