As Christmas draws near, thousands of children in the United States wrote to the US government last week to stop separating families by deporting and detaining undocumented immigrants.
According to the Asian Journal, the pro-immigrant-family organization "We Belong Together" collected more than
4,800 letters from children who participated in their month-long holiday letter-writing campaign, some of them members of families torn apart by deportation.
“The voices of children and youth are rarely heard in debates about immigration enforcement. They, more than anyone, bear the brunt of these harsh policies,” Miriam Yeung of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum told the Asian Journal.
Some of these children-participants trooped to Washington, D.C. last December 8 to deliver their message to the US Congress and President Barack Obama personally, the report said.
One of them was Gabriel Santos, an 11-year-old Filipino-American from Portland, Oregon. In his letter to Obama, Santos wrote:
Dear Mr. Obama,
I think deportations [are] horrible and every parent should have the right to be with their kids without fear of being deported. I think it would be horrible to wake up seeing that my parents weren’t there and I would have to go to a foster home. My own family is partly made up of immigrants and we’re lucky enough to have citizenship papers so we’re trying to help others who don’t.
PS. The holidays is a great time to fix [this] problem and make it right.