Former President Barack Obama weighed in on the family separation crisis Wednesday, calling on Americans to “find a way to welcome the refugee and the immigrant.”
In a lengthy Facebook post, he took a thinly-veiled shot at President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that has left bereft and panicked children in facilities away from their parents at the border.
“And to watch those families broken apart in real time puts to us a very simple question: are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together? Do we look away, or do we choose to see something of ourselves and our children?” he wrote.
He reminded Americans that nearly everyone in this country comes from somewhere else, and that those who were born into citizenship here should recognize how fortunate they are.
“Whether our families crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we’re only here because this country welcomed them in…” he said.
He ends his message with a call to action, pushing Congress to take legislative action and all Americans to vote.
“But we have to do more than say ‘this isn’t who we are.’ We have to prove it – through our policies, our laws, our actions, and our votes,” he concluded.
Former first lady Michelle Obama weighed in Monday, retweeting her Republican counterpart Laura Bush’s opinion piece in the Washington Post calling for an end to the border separations. She captioned the tweet: “Sometimes truth transcends party.”
Read Obama’s full post here:
