In the wake of Trump’s workplace deportation raid in Sandusky, Ohio, nationally syndicated columnist Connie Schultz details the widespread community panic and the ripple effects of the raids: innocent children left without parents or caregivers.
Schultz concludes, “This is what we do now in America. Our government singles out brown and black children and traumatizes them, as policy. We rip their parents away from them and claim we’re protecting jobs that Americans don’t even want. We don’t even pretend this isn’t what’s happening. We just say this is how it’s going to be.”
According to Pili Tobar, Managing Director of America’s Voice:
From the midwest down to the border, the administration is systematically and shamelessly ripping loving, providing, and caring parents from their children, and leaving abandoned kids in its wake. Children and families are the victims in Trump’s America. Elected officials and everyday Americans need to step up, defend our neighbors, and hold this administration to account.
The entire column is worth the read, excerpted below and available in full here.
This latest ICE carnival was brought to you by the Donald Trump road show. It’s not really about stolen American jobs or evil immigrants, neither of which is a threat here. It’s about a reality show president’s desperate attempt to keep his base worked into the frenzy of fear and rage he needs to feel special.
The people you haven’t seen in this latest farce are the children who were left behind, in day care or with baby sitters, separated from their parents.
Here we go again.
The day after the raid, I called Veronica Isabel Dahlberg, who is the founder and executive director of HOLA Ohio, an advocacy group for the large Latino community in northeast Ohio. She is always one of my first calls when another crisis seizes her community.
We sure talk a lot these days.
“We have no idea how many children are currently in hiding,” she told me when I reached her Wednesday. “We’re still trying to find that out.”
Earlier, in a Facebook post, she described her trip to Norwalk, Ohio, where most of the detainees live. She visited the trailer park “where hundreds of Mexican families who work in agriculture have lived peacefully for many years. It was a ghost town. … Their top priority was to protect their families.”
“People left their cars,” she told me. “There were boxes spilled open. People just disappeared. Most of the children were born here, but many of their caregivers fled because they’re undocumented, too, and they’re afraid of being arrested.”
