Last summer I got a call from a woman named Ellie,
and she had heard about the family separations
at the southern border, and wanted to know what she could do to help.
She told me this story
of her grandfather and his father.
When they were kids in Poland,
their father,
fearing for his son's safety,
gave them a little bit of money and told them to walk west,
to just keep walking west across Europe,
and they did.
They walked all the way west across Europe,
and they got on a boat and they got to America.
Ellie said that when she heard the stories of the teens
walking up across Mexico,
all she could think about was her grandfather and his brother.
She said that for her, the stories were exactly the same.
Those brothers were the Hassenfeld Brothers,
the Hasbros.
The Hasbro toy company, which of course brought us
Mr. Potato Head.
But that is not actually why I'm telling you this story.
I'm telling you this story because it made me think
about whether I would have the faith,
the courage, to send my teens,
and I have three of them,
on a journey like that.
Knowing that they wouldn't be safe where we were,
would I be able to watch them go?
I started my career decades ago
at the southern US border working with Central American asylum seekers,
and in the last 16 years,
I've been at HIAS,
the Jewish organization that fights for refugee rights around the world,
as a lawyer and an advocate,
and one thing I've learned is that sometimes
the things that we're told make us safer and stronger actually don't.
And, in fact, some of these policies have the opposite of the intended results,
and in the meantime cause tremendous and unnecessary suffering.
So why are people showing up at our southern border?
Most of the immigrants and refugees that are coming to our southern border
are fleeing three countries: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
These countries are consistently ranked
among the most violent countries in the world.
It's very difficult to be safe in these countries,
let alone build a future for yourself and your family.
And violence against women and girls is pervasive.
People have been fleeing Central America
for generations.
Generations of refugees have been coming to our shores,
fleeing the civil wars of the 1980s
in which the United States was deeply involved.
This is nothing new.
What's new is that recently, there's been a spike in families,
children of families,
showing up at checkpoints and presenting themselves to seek asylum.
Now, this has been in the news lately,
so I want you to remember a few things as you see those images.
One, this is not a historically high level of interceptions at the southern border,
and, in fact, people are presenting themselves at checkpoints.
Two, people are showing up with the clothes on their backs;
some of them are literally in flip-flops.
And three, we're the most powerful country in the world.
It's not a time to panic.
It's easy from the safety of the destination country
to think in terms of absolutes.
Is it legal or is it illegal?
But the people who are wrestling with these questions
and making these decisions about their families
are thinking about very different questions.
How do I keep my daughter safe?
How do I protect my son?
And if you want absolutes,
it's absolutely legal to seek asylum.
It is a fundamental right in our own laws and in international law.
And in fact
(Applause)
it stems from the 1951 Refugee Convention,
which was the world's response to the Holocaust,
and a way for countries to say never again would we return people to countries
where they would harmed or killed.
There are several ways refugees come to this country.
One is through the US Refugee Admissions Program,
and through that program the US identifies and selects refugees abroad
and brings them to the United States.
Last year, the US resettled fewer refugees
than at any time since the program began in 1980,
and this year it'll probably be less.
And this is at a time when we have more refugees in the world
than at any other time in recorded history,
even since World War II.
Another way that refugees come to this country is by seeking asylum.
Asylum seekers are people who present themselves at a border
and say that they'll be persecuted if they're sent back home.
An asylum seeker is simply somebody who is going through the process
in the United States to prove that they meet the refugee definition.
And it's never been more difficult to seek asylum.
Border guards are telling people When they show up at our borders
that our country's full, that they simply can't apply.
This is unprecedented and illegal.
Under a new program
with the kind of Orwellian title "Migrant Protection Protocols,"
refugees are told they have to wait in Mexico
while their cases make their way through the courts in the United States,
and this can take months or years.
Meanwhile, they're not safe
and they have no access to lawyers.
Our country, our government, has detained over 3,000 children,
separating them from their parents' arms as a deterrent from seeking asylum.
Many were toddlers,
and at least one was a six-year old blind girl,
and this is still going on.
We spend billions to detain people in what are virtually prisons
who have committed no crime.
And family separation has become the hallmark of our immigration system.
That's a far cry from a shining city on a hill or a beacon of hope
or all of the other ways we like to talk about ourselves and our values.