Schools should not be battlegrounds for Trump’s fake war
Schools bear the brunt of the immigration crisis
We’ve all seen images of migrant caravans comprised of thousands of asylum seekers from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador making their way to the U.S. to find refuge from the poverty and violence in their home countries. “This,” according to President Trump via tweet, “is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”
Trump’s words have cast our neighbors as enemies.
And his inflammatory use of language is infecting others. An October 2018 Associated Press headline dubbed the caravan an “army of migrants.” While the AP changed the headline after the backlash they received, a commenter on Fox News Network’s Fox and Friends doubled down on the sentiment, saying, “They [terrorists] are a threat to our national security because today, war — it’s not only countries that go to war, it is groups such as ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and they have declared war openly against the United States.” The Fox News commenters intimated that terrorists were among those in the migrant caravan.
To be clear, there isn’t an emergency at the border. Immigrants seeking asylum aren’t aiming to hurt us. Inward migration has slowed significantly, declining to its lowest levels in the past decade, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center report. Security seems to be working; there have been more arrests along the border than ever before. However, Trump’s manufactured war does have casualties: children. Thousands of immigrant youth have been traumatized from being separated from their families because of the administration’s policy to detain and prosecute illegal border crossers — even those with children in tow.
The maker of the policies may flit from one subject to the next on a whim, but schools will bear the brunt of the immigration crisis for CONTINUE READING: Schools should not be battlegrounds for Trump’s fake war
