Insiders say the Queen has convened an emergency family summit with Prince Harry, Prince William, and Prince Charles on Monday at her estate in Sandringham, following Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s announcement that they planned to take some space from royal life. Apparently, the whole situation has been tough on Prince William who, according to a source, has been feeling “sad” about his brother’s decision and their supposed rift in general.
An unidentified friend speaking to The Sunday Times said that William had previously told them, “I’ve put my arm around my brother all our lives, and I can’t do that anymore. . . I’m sad about that.” He reportedly continued, “All we can do, and all I can do, is try and support them and hope that the time comes when we’re all singing from the same page. I want everyone to play on the team.”
Rumors of distance between the two brothers began circling after Prince Harry married Markle. Because there were two growing families, the palace split up their households to better accommodate staff, duties, and royal responsibilities. It was a logical step, but it didn’t help quell the gossip, which Prince Harry addressed directly during the documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey. While he confirmed that perhaps there had been issues, he stressed they’d always have a bond.
“Inevitably stuff happens. But we’re brothers; we’ll always be brothers,” Prince Harry said at the time. “We’re certainly on different paths at the moment. I’ll always be there for him and as I know, he’ll always be there for me. We don’t see each other as much as we used to because we’re so busy, but I love him dearly.” It’s unclear how the meeting among the royals is going to shake out, so there could still be a chance they find something that works for everyone in the new arrangement.
Last week, President Donald Trump reversed a practice that separated migrant children from their parents, a move that came after many American citizens expressed outrage over the humanitarian crisis.
Since May, more than 2,000 children have been separated from parents crossing the US border, with some kept in facilities like the enclosed tent camp in Tornillo, outside of El Paso, Texas. The children have no idea if or when they will ever see their families again. The issue has transcended partisanship: according to a Quinnipiac poll released last week, two-thirds of American voters oppose these separations, and the administration has scrambled to explain whether it will reunite thousands of families and house them at family detention centers.
“I don’t believe it,” says Ruth Pagirsky, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor. “There is too much going on that is reminiscent to me of how it all started in Europe. But I was a kid and I didn’t know, I didn’t understand the whole extent of it.”
Pagirsky and her family were forced to leave Berlin for Poland in 1936, after Germany passed a series of laws between 1933 and 1935 that pushed Jews out of professional life. The aim was to establish a pure Aryan utopia. At the time, Pagirsky was almost 10, and says her family’s effective expulsion introduced her to the capacity of human cruelty.
“I had a favorite ring my aunt had given to me, she always gave me something like jewelry and the S.S. man who came saw the ring on my ring holder and he just picked it up and took it. I just couldn’t believe this! I looked at my mother and she just put her finger to her mouth. It was the most frightening thing. Soon after, we left Germany and we went to Poland.”
The family moved to Katowice, where they had relatives. For three years, they survived in relative quiet. “Then we stayed in Poland, and the horror began.”
PHOTO: Photographer: John J. Nicastro and B.A. Van Sise
Ruth Pagirsky
In 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and in Katowice, S.S. officers came to round up Jews to take to concentration camps like Auschwitz. In 1942, two of Pagirsky’s cousins were playing in front of the house and thrown onto a truck. Her aunt rushed outside with her son (Pagirsky’s cousin), Joshua. He was almost two.
“They were crying, and screaming, everyone was screaming, and the little boy was screaming, and my aunt was trying to calm them down,” Pagirsky remembers. Her aunt offered to go to the camp with the children to help calm them, but the S.S. officer headed her off.
“The children are going to a very beautiful camp and they’ll be taught and they’ll be fine,” he insisted.
Pagirsky’s aunt continued to plead while Joshua sobbed in her arms.
“He was laughing and little Joshua was still crying. He walked over, and he took him out of her arms. Grabbed him and pulled him out of her arms. He walked over to the building and started banging his head on the stone. Can you imagine this?”
Pagirsky, then 16, recalls that all she could think about was whether that S.S. soldier would go home that night to play with his own children.
Soon, Pagirsky was also separated from her family. Her brother was taken to Auschwitz. Her father was sent to another concentration camp. Holocaust scholars would later estimate that over one million people were murdered at Auschwitz, a number that includes Jews, Catholic Poles, Roma and Sinti people, members of the LGBTQ community, and anyone else who stood in the way of the Nazis. (Six million Jews were murdered between 1933 and 1945.)
“My father’s last words to me were, ‘You, my child will live. You will live to tell it all’,” says Pagirsky. He spoke those words and Pagirsky never saw her father again. “And that’s what pushed me to survive, the story. My father said I will live to tell it all, I had a purpose. There were years when I was separated from my mother and it was terrible. I was alone and scared. And I would think about what my father said—that I will live—and that helped me. It gave me that impetus to survive.”
Pagirsky and her mother hid in the forest. Eventually, Pagirsky obtained false identification papers that allowed her to work on a farm in Germany, where she remained until 1945 when the area was liberated by Americans.
In 1946, Pagirsky made it to New York. She met her husband, with whom she would spend 63 years. Despite the fact that she immigrated with just a fifth-grade education, because the Nazis had barred Jewish children from public schools, she earned her high school degree and later became a dental hygienist. She had three children, and now has several grandchildren and great grandchildren.
The rhetoric that the current administration has relied on—words like “infest,” “animals,” and “invade”—to defend its attitudes toward the undocumented reminds Pagirsky of tactics used in Nazi propaganda. And some supporters, like Fox News host Laura Ingraham, have tried to wave off horrific reports. On television, she referred to the tents and chain-link enclosures in which immigrant children have been held to as “essentially summer camps.” But the Texas Tribune and Reveal surfaced federal court documents which came to light as part of a class action lawsuit in which children and adolescents held at Shiloh Treatment Center outside of Houston, Texas, alleged that staff held them down and even injected them with psychotropic drugs without consent or proper medical evaluations. (In a legal response, Shiloh representatives said that Texas monitors the center for compliance with state laws and guidelines, according to CNN.)
The news has made Pagirsky wonder whether America has learned from Europe’s mistakes. “I watch it on television and I am so upset with that! I see it, I lived through this! It is so cruel, never forget that.” And efforts to dehumanize those in detention centers or who want to come to America from other countries are causes of particular concern: “I tell people not to fall into the trap where you think it is okay and that [these people must] deserve it. We are not the judge to say who deserves what.”
“We cannot be apathetic,” Pagirsky concludes. “We have to be aware and cannot be afraid to speak up. In Europe people were afraid to speak up. This is what we can do here, we can speak up. And we have to speak up. If we stand by and do nothing, we are guilty.”
For the past week, much of the public has been decrying the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which treats would-be adult migrants at the border as criminal offenders, resulting in the separation of the children accompanying them. Although the White House has stepped back from separating children from parents and, on Saturday, announced protocol for reuniting those separated, questions still remain on how the government plans to put families back together again.
“We came to Tornillo, Texas, to show our solidarity with the families who have been separated, the children who are alone, the parents who are grieving and the undocumented Americans who are losing more than I can fathom. Thank you, Tornillo, for showing us a warm border welcome and reminding us that together we rise.”
Jenni Konner
“#endfamilyseparation”
“This is the border. They have closed the pedestrian walkwaybecause of this peaceful rally to #endfamilyseparation. They do not want us to see detention tents. They do not want us to witness this tragedy up close.”
Sia
“Help @votolatino do imperative work to protect and serve our asylum seekers. I will match all donations up to $100k. please RT votolatino.org/donate“
Mira Sorvino“TY so much @lenadunham for inviting me on this moving journey of bearing witness at the border. Tho they would not let us pass through, knowing that those children were there on the other side of the barbed wires, in a desert where the heat was easily over 100, made me want to fight even harder to #EndFamilySeparation”
“Looking back on best messages on our way to the #border #tornillo @votolatino to #rally v. #familyseparation #KeepFamiliesTogether I took these at the #FamiliesBelongTogether @familiesbelongtogetherla march a week and a half ago. Now sitting across the bus aisle from @doloreshuerta !!”
Ione Skye
“Rob Reiner speaking at detention center . We need to make sure these kids are not being mistreated. Vote in November. This treatment has zero Tolerance and dignity.”
“Detaining children doesn’t need to represent America. #familiesbelongtogether vote in November donate and pass the information on. It is not over and the policies have to change. They are not breaking laws-Seeking Asylum is not Illegal in America”
Angelique Cabral
“Scenes from today in Tornillo, TX at the Port of Entry. We held a peaceful rally, and yet they still closed the pedestrian walkway; they don’t want us to see the detention camps. Its unfathomable to me. As a human, I’m devastated. As a parent, I’m livid ?? We need to act now. To learn more & join the movement visit stopseparation.org/March ????????????????#FamiliesBelongTogether #EndFamilyDetention”
“So proud to be supporting @votolatino today rallying in Tornillo, TX to bring an end to family detention”
Anna Camp
“Speaking up for children and their families here at the port of entry. #keepfamiliestogetheract #stopseparatingfamilies morality > politics”
Katie Lowes
“They closed the pedestrian gate at the border. Must really not want us to see the detention tents. I wonder why. This is just awful… #keepfamiliestogether”
“Stepping off the bus in Tornillo, TX, the first site where hundreds of refugee children are detained in temporary shelters and separated from their families, to rally with people from all over the US to #keepfamiliestogether.”
Casey Wilson
“In Tornillo, Texas at the border where hundreds of refugee children are being detained in temporary shelters. We are here to bear witness. We are singing and chanting in hopes our voices will reach the tents. I hope they felt our love. #keepfamiliestogether This is not okay. This is not America. If you support Trump know that you are on the wrong side of history.”
In the weeks leading up to summer, it appears as though the entire country has turned its attention to America’s border cities. There, a crisis emerged when the Trump administration ordered a “zero tolerance policy” calling for the prosecution of migrants attempting to enter the country via asylum or otherwise.
The policy change mandated that border agents detain anyone attempting to cross—which is typically treated as a civil misdemeanor offense—and try it as a criminal case. In turn, parents traveling with children were separated at the border and sent to different detention facilities.
The pure, unadulterated outrage that followed from the American public, churches and advocacy groups reached a fever pitch before the president signed an executive order that ended the separation of families on Wednesday. However, while signing the order, President Donald Trump made it abundantly clear that his administration’s “zero tolerance policy” toward migrants will remain, which has left followers of this humanitarian and political catastrophe with more questions than answers.
Will families actually stay together?
According to the executive order, which was posted to the White House website, families will remain together “where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.” However, it additionally noted that children and parents may be separated if the government determines keeping them together “would pose a risk to the child’s welfare,” which gives the government room for interpretation of the law.
Is it actually legal to detain families, even if they are together?
This is where things get very murky. According to a 1997 court ruling known as the “Flores Settlement,” children who are detained at the border with parents must be placed with a family friend or immediate relative “without unnecessary delay,” Vox explained. But, as the ruling states, immigrant children who must remain in custody must be placed in the “least restrictive conditions” possible. Those conditions include food, running water, medical care and separate living quarters from unrelated adults.
The last part—separate living spaces—is what likely will cause major issues in the near future.
In 2014, the Obama administration attempted to keep families together in detention centers following a massive uptick in asylum-seekers from Central America. However, immigration advocates found the practice inhumane. So, a 2015 court set a general standard stating the government could only hold children in custody for up to 20 days, NPR reports. And though the court never specified how long parents could be held, the Obama administration made it practice to release the entire family together, with certain restrictions, such as placing ankle monitoring bracelets on parents to ensure they’d return to court.
There is no word yet if Trump’s administration will do the same, however, he has time and time again ridiculed the practice of releasing the families, often referring to it as “catch and release.” Trump has also instructed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to ask the federal court to modify that agreement so there will be no limit on how long children (and thus their families) can remain in detention, NPR explained.
Where will the families be housed?
Again, this is another question in the air (are you sensing a pattern in this crisis?).
As part of Trump’s instruction to Sessions, the president also called on different branches of his administration to find facilities that could be available for detaining families with children, NPR reports. Trump also asked the Defense Department, to build new facilities “if necessary.”
What will happen to the families already separated?
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who provided a statement to NPR, it is indeed working side-by-side with the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to reunite families. “ICE and ORR will work together to locate separated children, verify the parent/child relationship, and set up regular communication and removal coordination, if necessary.”
“ICE will make every effort to reunite the child with the parent once the parent’s immigration case has been adjudicated,” the spokesperson added. However, according to multiple reports, this just isn’t happening.
According to PRI, the process of unification is difficult because the adults and children fall into different legal paths at the border, and are thus the responsibility of different government agencies. The parents and children are often given different case numbers, so it’s hard to track one another down.
“If they don’t reunite these kids and their parents right away, what can happen is the kids will be stuck in the US for years, guardians will be appointed, and their parents will be down in Honduras or Guatemala with no idea where their child is and no meaningful way to reunite,”John Sandweg, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Obama administration, told MSNBC.
Furthermore, several lawyers and advocates explained to the New Yorker, that the process of finding a child within the system after a parent has been released or deported is nearly impossible. The experts who spoke with the New Yorker explained, in great detail, how the parent is forced to track his or her own child down using a system of non-profits, a 1-800 number set up by ORR, and simply having a bit of luck with finding their loved one.
“I have a master’s degree, and I’m fluent in English,” Emily Kephart, a program coordinator at an immigrant-rights group known as Kids in Need of Defense, told the New Yorker. “And it takes me days to figure one of these cases out.”
There’s a certain irony to the fact that the land stretching along the California and Mexico border is a disarmingly beautiful place—the bright, flower-filled fields dotted with charming horse farms puts forth a stark contrast to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, one that’s ripped families apart and reportedly leaves migrant children vulnerable to physical and mental trauma.
On Monday, I made my way to the San Diego border alongside Enrique Morones, the founder of Border Angels, and Hugo Castro, a board member of the faith-based nonprofit that advocates for human rights. Admittedly, in my five years of living in Los Angeles, it was my first trip to see the imposing fence for myself. And it marked the first time I drove across the border in more than 20 years.
In San Diego, Morones invited me along for a talk and tour he was giving to a group students on a mission from California and Oregon. Another bit of irony: We met, in all places, at Friendship Park.
A national monument adjacent to Border Field State Park, Friendship Park was dedicated by then-first lady Pat Nixon in 1971. At the time, the only border was a small barbed wire fence, where people could meet on either side to see loved ones, shake hands or share a familial hug. Now, an 18-foot high metal fence blocks all access to people on the other side. Approaching within several yards of the fence during non-visitor hours, which have been restricted to just Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 .pm., is strictly prohibited.
After making the 40-minute walk from the Border Field State Park entrance to Friendship Park’s beach, we were once again struck by the border’s off-putting dichotomy, but not in the way you’d think. On the United States side sat a barren beach, save for one border patrol agent standing guard on a high perched cliff and a few people riding their horses down the stretch of sand. However, on the Mexico side, was a true Sunday party. Families gathered on the beach, frolicked in the chilly Pacific waters, and played music. The sound of laughter even flowed through the tightly-knit fence that stretched past the crashing waves and into a borderless ocean beyond.
I walked down to where a border patrol agent sat, to get a glimpse of his view. He bellowed out a command to a man approaching the fence just before I stepped down next to his truck. A few students from my group followed behind and asked him why he chose to become a border agent.
PHOTO: Stacey Leasca
A border patrol agent looks over the Pacific Ocean.
“To protect the laws of the United States. Immigration or otherwise,” he said, in such a rapid response that it was clear he’s answered this question before. “Immigration is a very touchy subject, but you gotta remember one thing—it’s the law.”
He went on to share with the teenagers, some as young as 13 years old, that if their own mother or father committed a crime, say like robbing a bank, they too would be separated from them, which is indeed a fact.
However, he did not mention that people attempting to cross at the legal point of entry just miles from his feet aren’t committing a crime. Instead, they’re seeking asylum—which essentially means they’re asking for protection from another country because of persecution or dangerous circumstances—or going by the letter of the law to cross with proper paperwork. Even those attempting to cross illegally for the first time are simply committing a civil offense, not a criminal one.
But, even with the current “zero tolerance policy” put forth by the Trump administration, families are still attempting to cross. Because going home again would be doing so at their family’s own peril.
“We cannot work in Mexico because we are scared of our children being kidnapped,” 34-year-old mother Alejandra* told me as she sat inside the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter in Tijuana’s Zona Norte neighborhood, a community in one of the nation’s deadliest cities (which hit a record 1,744 homicides in 2017). But, the Movimiento Juventud 2000 is also one of the closest shelters to the port of entry, which sits just miles from the U.S. border, making it the most desirable location for those seeking entry.
Each day, they go to the port to check where their names are on the asylum list. And each day they are told to come back tomorrow.
In the shelter, Alejandra and her family share two brightly-colored camping tents provided by donation. When they arrived, they were given a home, along with blankets and hygienic products in a small pack. There, the family is also provided a few meals a day. When I visited, dinner was a small bowl of soup and bagels donated from a local shop. They sat at the communal tables filled with children and teenagers. Alejandra watched as her children enjoyed the welcomed meal with their new friends before she herself ate the leftover parts of the bagel her youngest daughter left behind.
Through Castro, Alejandra explained that she and her husband, along with their five children — four girls and one boy — fled their home in Guerrero, Mexico, a state encompassing the idyllic resort community of Acapulco, which was once frequented by American tourists. However, because of gang violence, people native to the community are fleeing, and the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for all Americans in the region. And though the government doesn’t believe it’s safe enough for Americans to visit, they also don’t believe it’s dangerous enough for Mexicans to warrant asylum.
PHOTO: Stacey Leasca
Children at the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter in Mexico eat bagels and soup for dinner.
As Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared last week, “Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum.”
But there, in the community where Alejandra grew up, and where she left her mother and father behind, she explained that they would not be able to afford a ransom if their children were kidnapped.
And this isn’t the unfounded fear of a hysterical mother. As Al Jazeera reported, 834 Mexicans were killed in Guerrero alone in 2017.
So, the family of seven simply sit and wait inside the shelter, which is a glorified parking lot filled with wall-to-wall tents like theirs. It’s a place they’re more than happy to call home as they all take their chances at the port of entry each day. So far, Alejandra explained as she stroked her youngest daughter’s hair, they have been waiting for two weeks. Each day, they go to the port to check where their names are on the asylum list. And each day they are told to come back tomorrow.
According to the shelter’s director, José María García Lara, who has run the shelter for about seven years, that asylum list has become increasingly long, and the port only processes about 20 to 30 applications a day.
PHOTO: Stacey Leasca
Tents line the parking lot at the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter in Mexico.
“Every day around 10 people arrive, and around 10 leave, so we cannot take more people because we have a maximum capacity of 107,” García Lara explained via Castro, as we spoke outside the shelter as the sun went down. While speaking, a few people began to meander down the street, hoping to gain entry to his shelter for the night.
When asked if he knows if people are being separated from their children once they pass through, he said it’s simply something he does not know.
“We have not been able to know,” he said. “We do not have any information.”
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