545 reasons to vote for Biden/Harris and Stop Trump’s Abuse
By: Teresa Albano
Tags: Joe Biden, Immigration, Politics, Election 2020, Society

A Minnesotans for Biden-Harris campaign sign in support of Joe Biden for President and Kamala Harris for Vice President ahead of the 2020 general election in a front yard in Hibbing, Minnesota. Photo by Tony Webster/CC

In the last debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, one of the most significant moments for me came when Biden, visibly angry and upset, talked about the 545 migrant children “ripped from their [parents’] arms and separated” at the border as per Trump administration policy.

Trump jerkily danced around moderator Kristen Welker’s question on whether he had a plan to reunite the 500+ children with their parents, claiming so-called “coyotes”and “lots of bad people” brought the children. During his disgraceful answer, you could see the frustration building in Biden. At one point he closes his eyes and bows his head, as if in prayer. The former vice president did not let Trump get away with his lies.

“These 500-plus kids came with parents,” he said, his voice raising with righteous anger. “They separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with. ‘Be real tough. We’re really strong,’” he said with disgust.

“Coyotes didn’t bring them over. Their parents were with them. They got separated from their parents,” Biden said with emphasis. “And it makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”

(By the way, if these children were brought to the border by illegal means, did the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) arrest them? What did the U.S. government do if they thought there was human trafficking? Let the criminals go? The president throws out “coyotes” to distract from his policy and to play on anti-Mexican, anti-Latino biases and stereotypes.)

Later, as Trump tried to bait him about who built the cages his administration used to throw children into, Biden got even more emphatic.

“Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. What happened? Parents were ripped… Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 of the sets of those parents, and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal. It’s criminal,” he said with sincere emotion.

I get emotional rewatching that moment because it encapsulates what’s at stake in this election and the vast differences between the two candidates and their parties.

The choice is between a president who has no plan to reunite children, 60 of whom were under 5 years of age when his administration separated them from their families.

Or vote for a former vice president who has pledged to immediately institute a task force to reunite these 545 children with their parents.

Just to put a bow on how stark the differences are, Trump said during the debate, “They are so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that were so clean.” His definition of “so well taken care of” is destroying families.

Trump wanted extremist policies at the border. With malice aforethought, the administration spawned the diabolical “zero tolerance” policy. Department of Justice officials, starting with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, pushed to enact the Trump’s most sadistic measures.

Sessions insisted, “We need to take away children,” and Rosenstein chastised prosecutors who declined two cases because the migrant families’ children included infants and toddlers. “Per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child,” Rosenstein said.

Lest anyone forgets, as the Trump administration implemented its inhumane policies, Holocaust survivors wrote of their experiences of being separated from their families by the Nazis. That was the comparison.

Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama was labeled the “deporter-in-chief” by immigrant rights groups for the administration’s mass removals of immigrants who crossed the border without authorization and for prioritizing deportations of immigrants with criminal records. When asked about it at the debate, Biden did something Trump has never done. He admitted the administration was wrong.

“[W]e made a mistake made. It took too long to get it right,” he said. He promised to send a bill to Congress within his first 100 days that would provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million hard-working immigrants, most of whom are here on expired visas.

Read the debate transcript. Biden makes many other moving and substantial points about immigrants, which you can tell by the resolve in his voice and his manner come from a passionate belief in human dignity. It’s clear Biden is fighting for the country’s promise embodied in Emma Lazarus’ poem, The New Colossus, which is mounted on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

Biden’s concern for families and children was also on display when he talked about guaranteeing affordable health care for all, raising the minimum wage and addressing in substantive ways institutional racism.

There are 545 children forcibly separated by the U.S. government from their families. Trump created a policy based on the worst of U.S. government actions — from the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II to the forced removal of Native children from their families to attend Indian residential schools to the generations of enslaved Black children ripped from their mothers’ arms and sold. Biden promises to address these great wrongs and inequities.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as the famous quote goes.

I started writing this with my many leftwing friends in mind. When talking about Biden, they use terms like “nose holding” or “lesser of two evils.” I disagree greatly. Joe Biden is not evil. I have no qualms about voting FOR him and not just AGAINST Trump. There are 545 children without their families, and if you care one iota about them, you can proudly vote for a man who cares about them and will work to reunite them with their families. That’s 545 reasons to vote for Biden and Kamala Harris.