Tag: Kinship

WASHINGTON — As Virginia Democratic Gov. Justin Fairfax remains in the wings as the man who would replace him if Northam were to step down. While Northam apologized and asked for forgiveness on Saturday, he also noted that he maintained a good relationship with Fairfax, who would be America's fifth-ever black governor were he to take Northam's place. "Justin and I have a very, very close relationship," Northam said at the press conference Saturday. On Saturday, Fairfax released a statement saying he was "shocked and saddened" by the images that appeared in Northam's yearbook. "He also reached out to me personally to express his sincere regrets and to apologize." Fairfax said despite Northam's career of service to American children, soldiers and constituents, he could not condone the governor's actions from his past. Still, Northam’s admission that he darkened his face with shoe polish for a costume in the past is not the only reminder that that process is incomplete. I will be stepping off the dais today in protest of the Virginia Senate honoring Robert E. Lee. Virginia only allows elected governors to serve a single, four-year term.

In March, John Kelly, then the homeland security secretary, expressed his belief that separating migrant families – forcibly taking children away from their parents in this country and at the US-Mexican border – would serve as an effective deterrent to undocumented immigration. Ivanka Trump embodies her father's family values | Richard Wolffe Read more The press has featured wrenching stories and photographs of children, some of them very young, being taken from their families. A Congolese asylum seeker and her daughter were kept in separate detention facilities for four months. In April, the ACLU reported that a Honduran mother had been separated from her 18-month-old toddler for two months. The fact that these things are occurring should be preventing us from conducting business as usual According to a recent story in the Houston Chronicle, children as young as 18 months have been deported without their parents. Do we believe that these children are less valuable, less precious, less human than Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s three-year-old son, whose photograph Ivanka tweeted as she held him in her arms in an image of radiant mother-child happiness? Surely there would be a groundswell of outrage and shock, of grief and mourning, a nationwide demand for an inquiry. We can text and write our congressional representatives and work to regain Democratic control of Congress during the midterm elections, though – since mass deportations were implemented during the Obama administration – it’s not entirely clear that a Democratic-controlled Congress will stand up for these refugee families. The US is ripping immigrants' families apart. Because if we know what is happening and do nothing, we will be no different from the “innocent bystanders” and witnesses to the mass arrests, the egregious violations of human rights and genocidal crimes – witnesses who, throughout history and after the fact, have claimed: we didn’t know.