Former President Obama is calling out President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that separates families at the border, asking “are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms” or one that strives to keep them together?
“If you’ve been fortunate enough to have been born in America, imagine for a moment if circumstance had placed you somewhere else,” Obama said in a statement on Facebook to commemorate World Refugee Day. “Imagine if you’d been born in a country where you grew up fearing for your life, and eventually the lives of your children. A place where you finally found yourself so desperate to flee persecution, violence, and suffering that you’d be willing to travel thousands of miles under cover of darkness, enduring dangerous conditions, propelled forward by that very human impulse to create for our kids a better life.”
Obama later criticized the policy that has resulted in thousands of families being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that watching these families broken apart in real time poses a very simple question to Americans.
{mosads}”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?”
Obama’s statement comes two days after he and former first lady Michelle Obama expressed support of former first lady Laura Bush’s criticism of the policy. Bush said the policy was “cruel” and “immoral” in an op-ed published by the Washington Post.
“Sometimes truth transcends party,” Michelle Obama said in a tweet responding to Bush, one that Barack Obama retweeted.
Obama’s statement comes as many Democratic and Republican lawmakers push forward with legislation that would end the policy.
Despite repeatedly defending the separation policy, Trump said on Wednesday that he may sign something that would keep families together.
“We want to keep families together. It’s very important. I’ll be signing something in a little while that’s going to do that,” Trump told reporters during a meeting with Republican lawmakers at the White House.