Oprah slams Trump’s immigration policy separating families seeking asylum
Oprah Winfrey is the latest celebrity to lash out against President Trump’s controversial and cruel immigration policy that is holding children captive in jail-like cages at the nation’s border.
Winfrey took to Twitter to air out her dismay over seeing migrant children imprisoned and hearing the gut-wrenching stories of how they have been ripped from their parents’ arms.
“Babies torn from their parents. Can’t stand it! Will be watching Gayle King and her colleagues LIVE from Texas,” Winfrey tweeted.
CBS News’ King, who is Winfrey’s best friend, has been reporting from a detention center in McAllen, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border, reports the Daily Mail. Hundreds of people are awaiting federal prosecution because they crossed the border illegally, CBS News reports. But many of them were fleeing persecution and were entering the US for help. What they didn’t expect is that they would be separated from their families, or go to jail and end up in an internment-type camp.
“When you came to border, did you think that you could be separated from your children?” King asked Cristina Melgar traveled from El Salvador with her 16-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son.
“No,” Melgar said, crying. “I never imagined it would happen,” she added through a translator.
Melgar said her daughter refused to join a gang so they fled out of fear of being killed. They were trying to get to Boston where her sister lives.
“I just came to this country to protect my children—and to do something good. Not to do anything bad,” Melgar said.
—Sen. Kamala Harris calls on DHS Sec. Nielsen to resign over ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy—
Oprah is not the only one disturbed by Trump’s policy, his own wife, Melania Trump said through a spokesperson, that she believes “we need to be a country that follows all laws”, but also one “that governs with heart.”
“Mrs Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said.
And now all five living first ladies have now publicly come out against the controversial policy, which separates children from their parents as families try to cross the border into the U.S.
Laura Bush published an op-ed in the Washington Post on Father’s Day calling family separations “immoral” and “cruel”. Bush also compared the current administration’s warehousing of immigrants in detention facilities to the internment camps in the U.S. during World War II.
Our Forever First Lady Michelle Obama retweeted the link to her op-ed and wrote: “Sometimes truth transcends party.”
