Twelve Reasons to Abolish CBP and ICE.
00:05
1…
00:08
When my father arrived in this country,
00:12
the first words he learned in English were
00:15
“Thank you” to the Latina who sat beside him
00:19
and summarized the teacher’s rapid-fire speech.
00:23
“Thank you”
00:24
to the snickered whispers he chose to ignore
00:27
and the broad-jawed bruiser
00:28
who pretended his Colombian immigrant classmate did not exist.
00:31
“Thank you” to the mentors
00:33
who combed through line after line of a language
00:36
that felt to his tongue like braille to my hands.
00:39
“Thank you.”
00:40
2. A father of two delivers a pizza to a military base in Brooklyn.
00:46
The military police officer who ordered it
00:49
demands the father’s naturalization papers.
00:52
When the deliveryman refuses, the police officer calls ICE.
00:58
Some soldiers at Fort Hamilton ordered a pizza.
01:02
It had pepperoni, green peppers, onions,
01:05
I’m lying, who cares?
01:07
It was a pizza that might cost a father his family.
01:10
The only tip the soldier gave was a phone call
01:12
that risked making two little girls fatherless.
01:14
3. The first journalist allowed to enter Casa Padre
01:17
calls the detention center an internment camp–
01:20
nearly 1,500 undocumented children locked up in an abandoned Walmart,
01:24
having committed no crime but crossing a border to survive.
01:26
3. The five-year-old boy who shares my name, Carlos,
01:31
taken from his mother in Missouri
01:34
and put up for adoption against her wishes,
01:36
now renamed Jamison by the couple who stole him.
01:40
3. The pregnant women detained by ICE,
01:42
shackled around the stomach and denied medical care while they miscarry.
01:46
4. The honors chemistry textbook at my public high school
01:49
was missing one-third of the elements of the periodic table.
01:52
My English teacher would return papers
01:54
with red wine stains and reeking of weed smoke.
01:57
60,000 bridges in our country are architecturally deficient–
02:00
is there nothing else we can do with this money?
02:02
5. The former chief counsel of ICE
02:07
who stole the identities of immigrants seeking asylum,
02:10
a man who forged documents with the photograph of a murdered woman.
02:15
6. List of present-day U.S. states that were part of Mexico before 1848:
02:21
California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, close to half of New Mexico,
02:25
a quarter of Colorado, and part of Wyoming.
02:27
7. Piles of confiscated rosaries
02:33
in Brownsville, Texas,
02:36
like piles of wedding rings and gold dental fillings at Buchenwald.
02:43
I imagine them hovered over someday by trauma tourists muttering,
02:47
“Never Again”– again and again and again and again.
02:53
8. The son of a Syrian refugee invented your iPhone.
03:00
A Soviet-born computer scientist invented Google.
03:03
Even a Canadian invented basketball.
03:06
9. Most terrorist attacks in the United States
03:10
over the past two decades
03:12
have been carried out by white American men.
03:18
Most terrorist attacks in the United States
03:20
over the past 200 years
03:22
have been carried out by white American men.
03:26
I have never seen a news headline calling a white American man a terrorist.
03:30
10. Border Patrol agents encounter a father, mother,
03:34
and their three-year-old son from Honduras
03:35
entering the U.S. across the border with Texas.
03:39
The family asks to apply for asylum.
03:42
The CBP officers say the family must be separated,
03:46
physically restrain the father,
03:48
tearing his three-year-old son from his arms.
03:50
They place the father in a chain-link detention cell,
03:53
then move him 40 miles away to solitary confinement
03:56
at Starr County Jail.
03:58
At 9:50 a.m. the next morning,
04:01
a guard finds the father lying in his own blood,
04:04
having strangled himself with a piece of his clothing.
04:08
The father’s name was Marco Antonio Muñoz.
04:12
The father was the same age I will be when my son, Gabriel, is three.
04:17
His name was Marco Antonio Muñoz.
04:20
His death was not publicly disclosed.
04:21
It did not appear in any local news accounts.
04:24
11. José, the five-year-old carrying a trash bag of dirty clothes
04:28
and a stick figure drawing of his parents,
04:30
taken from his family.
04:31
11a. The seven-year-old girl in a pink bow and dress,
04:34
left behind after her parents were deported.
04:36
11b. Johan, the one-year-old,
04:38
playing with a purple ball and drinking from a bottle,
04:41
appearing in court without his father.
04:42
11c. The three-year-old, separated from her family,
04:46
climbing on top of the desk during her deportation trial.
04:49
11d. The infant from Honduras
04:51
pulled from his mother’s breast mid-feeding,
04:53
separated from his mother.
04:55
11e. The special needs’ child, separated from her mother.
04:58
11f. The deaf child who is not able to speak,
05:01
separated from his mother.
05:02
11g… 11h… 11i…
05:05
12…
05:07
Upon whose bones
05:10
do we stand?
05:18
What
05:22
will it take?
05:32
(applause)
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