A slightly different version of the below letter appears in todays (Sunday, August 17th) edition of The Plain Dealer, the sole daily newspaper serving metropolitan Cleveland. Please feel free to circulate. Thank you. (Those of you on my e-mail list may have already seen this.) Lou headline: Children come to U.S. for safer lives Regarding Kathleen ODonnells letter Focus on what border kids are fleeing, (Aug. 10th) she claims people who dont love the children are taking them to the border. I contend people transporting the children, and the childrens parents, do in fact love them and simply want a safer life for them. To illustrate, in the most recent quarterly issue of Connection, a publication of Network, a national Catholic social justice lobby, it is revealed that extreme violence against children in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras is exacerbating the latest immigration crisis. A15-year-old girl from El Salvador said gang members rape young girls and toss them into plastic bags. A grandmother encouraged her 17-year-old grandson, who was pressured to join a gang, to leave the country, saying, If you dont join, the gang will shoot you. If you do join, the rival gang will shoot you---or the cops will shoot you. But if you leave, no one will shoot you. The least we can do is keep these at-risk children out of harms way. Returning them to their native lands fails miserably to accomplish this humanitarian objective. Louis H. Pumphrey, Shaker Heights
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 16:39:25 +0000
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