Angelus News | May 17, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 10
On the cover: Emma D. and Roberto M. read during a class session at San Miguel School in Watts, one of 24 schools in lower-income areas across the Archdiocese of Los Angeles participating in the new Solidarity Schools initiative. On Page 10, Theresa Cisneros examines the program’s ambitious goals and talks to participants who describe its early success in creating a ‘culture of literacy’ among disadvantaged students.
On the cover: Emma D. and Roberto M. read during a class session at San Miguel School in Watts, one of 24 schools in lower-income areas across the Archdiocese of Los Angeles participating in the new Solidarity Schools initiative. On Page 10, Theresa Cisneros examines the program’s ambitious goals and talks to participants who describe its early success in creating a ‘culture of literacy’ among disadvantaged students.
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Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie is a mother of five<br />
who practices radiology in the Miami area.<br />
est. And the assaults often involve cases<br />
in which dozens of women are violated<br />
in a single event.”<br />
Approximately one-fifth of the migrants<br />
are children, and half of those<br />
are under 5. Hundreds of children<br />
have been orphaned or separated<br />
from parents while going through the<br />
jungle, eventually becoming an “unaccompanied<br />
minor” with all the danger<br />
that entails (for instance, the U.S.<br />
reports losing track of 85,000 of them).<br />
Adults and children who survive the<br />
journey through the jungle are housed<br />
in detention centers in Panama,<br />
waiting to board a bus to the Texas<br />
border, with free passage granted by<br />
the intervening countries. This means,<br />
effectively, that our own southern border<br />
has been outsourced to Panama, as<br />
one Panamanian government official<br />
recently put it.<br />
Arriving in the U.S. traumatized,<br />
robbed, sometimes orphaned or raped,<br />
migrants’ troubles continue. They have<br />
to pay their traffickers and the cartels<br />
they work for, often through labor and<br />
sex slavery. Children are not exempt,<br />
as the Labor Department reports that<br />
child labor cases have risen steeply,<br />
with some jobs being dangerous or brutal.<br />
The children in inadequate foster<br />
care, left with sex traffickers, or simply<br />
“lost” to the system, present nightmarish<br />
possibilities to the imagination.<br />
I cannot blame a single man, woman,<br />
or child living in one of the many<br />
hellscapes of our hemisphere, be it<br />
Haiti, Venezuela, or Cuba, for accepting<br />
the invitation of a disordered U.S.<br />
immigration policy. But if we have sent<br />
a signal that all are welcome — even<br />
as we have no plan to successfully<br />
assimilate them, are not blessed with<br />
infinite resources for them, and have<br />
not talked about how fair this is to vulnerable<br />
Americans — we have made<br />
ourselves responsible for the migrants’<br />
suffering.<br />
Thinking of ourselves as a kindhearted<br />
and openhanded nation may be, at<br />
this point, a huge mistake. The depravity,<br />
violence, and heartbreak that our<br />
policies are driving in the already-miserable<br />
lives of our neighbors make us<br />
downright cruel, no matter how good<br />
our intentions.
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