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No justification for funding Trump immigration policy

Last year, I wrote a letter to the Daily Herald protesting the Trump administration's unconscionable separation of children from their families at our border. I insisted Trump's white nationalist policies, which include the kidnapping of children and the caging of people seeking asylum, were both amoral and monstrous. One year later, I write to express my anger not just with the Republican politicians and the voters that continue to sanction and support such barbarity, but with the Democrats who recently gave the agencies responsible billions of dollars in federal funding.

Trump's administration deliberately broke an already dysfunctional asylum process. His administration prevents refugees from accessing designated points of entry, thus denying people the legal opportunity to claim asylum. His administration denies due process. His administration steals children from their families, then either uses them to force parents and guardians to waive their rights, or funnels them to foster families with no intention of ever reuniting them with their families.

He deliberately creates immense backlogs of desperate people fleeing desperate circumstances, then built a network of detention centers where agents cram them into overcrowded kennels and tell them to drink from the toilets while denying them food and basic necessities. It's reprehensible.

In the midst of this atrocity, Democrats voted for a Senate bill that continues to fund this inhumanity, rather than even attempt to use congressional leverage to improve the conditions of the facilities, force the termination of the child separation policy or extract any concessions from Republicans. I am especially disappointed in Senators Durbin and Duckworth, who voted for McConnell's bill, despite there being no cynical political calculus to explain it.

The camps at the border are white nationalist barbarity. Supporting them is inexcusable. Funding them is unforgivable.

There is no justification for putting babies in cages.

Kim Cavill

Palatine

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