Today is World Refugee Day.

If you've been fortunate enough to have been born in America, imagine for a moment if circumstance had placed you somewhere else. Imagine if you'd been born in a country where you grew up fearing for your life, and eventually the lives of your children. A place where you finally found yourself so desperate to flee persecution, violence, and suffering that you'd be willing to travel thousands of miles under cover of darkness, enduring dangerous conditions, propelled forward by that very human impulse to create for our kids a better life.

That's the reality for so many of the families whose plights we see and heart-rending cries we hear. And to watch those families broken apart in real time puts to us a very simple question: are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together? Do we look away, or do we choose to see something of ourselves and our children?

Our ability to imagine ourselves in the shoes of others, to say “there but for the grace of God go I,” is part of what makes us human. And to find a way to welcome the refugee and the immigrant – to be big enough and wise enough to uphold our laws and honor our values at the same time – is part of what makes us American. After all, almost all of us were strangers once, too. Whether our families crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we’re only here because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, how our last names sound, or the way we worship. To be an American is to have a shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us deserve the chance to become something better.

That’s the legacy our parents and grandparents and generations before created for us, and it’s something we have to protect for the generations to come. But we have to do more than say “this isn’t who we are.” We have to prove it – through our policies, our laws, our actions, and our votes.

His FB Page in case you are interested in reading the replies.

When You Say You Miss President Obama . . .

Do you mean changing U.S. policy to detain women and children seeking asylum and giving Corrections corporations of America a $1 billion no-bid contract to do so?

For the first time in modern American history, the government decides to detain all Central American women and children seeking asylum in the U.S., instead of allowing them to live freely until their days in court. The policy change is intended to send a message to anyone else seeking refuge from a plague of gang violence below our southern border: Don’t believe everything you read on the Statue of Liberty.

And to implement this draconian proposal, the government awards a well-connected private prison company with a $1 billion no-bid contract — one that promises to pay the firm $20 million a month, no matter how few migrants its facility is responsible for housing at a given time. Then federal courts rule that this policy of mass detention isn’t actually legal. But the contract is already signed, and so the Corrections Corporation of America collects millions in taxpayer money to maintain a nearly empty detention center.

This may sound like the kind of cruel, incompetent policy-making you’d expect from Donald Trump’s administration. But it’s actually the work of Barack Obama’s. Per the Washington Post:

(do read the whole article)

h/t ggersh who first posted this here