Moms In Prison, Kids In Concentration Camps For Profit #HappyMothersDay

I started out Mothers Day donating to National Bailout to help free black women from jail so the can spend the day with their kids. I know, it seems late, but they assured me that they will be working all day to free moms incarcerated for the color of their skin rather than the severity of their crimes. Black woman are disproportionately jailed for minor offenses that someone who looks like me would probably not even be prosecuted for, or charged with in the first place. Because I have donated to their project in the past, they sent a nice ecard that I could print out for my own mom.

My mom with her mom, her dad and her brother.

But my mom isn't on the planet anymore. She was surely with me yesterday though, because my youngest child graduated from college and my mom was big on education. My mom raised her kids not to kill another mother's kids, and I've tried to do the same. Her parents traveled from Oklahoma to California to escape dire poverty by picking cotton and grapes in the San Joaquin Valley. 

I'm out of town to celebrate my son earning his degree, so I won't be able to attend the rally my retired colleague in a nearby town has organized for Mothers Day. I'm there in spirit as the rally she organized calls attention to the cruel U.S. policy of separating asylum seeking children from their parents. Migration due to poverty is nothing new, but infants and toddlers are now routinely terrorized to discourage their parents from trying.

From Meg Robbins reporting in the Morning Sentinel:

Central Mainers for Change will hold a “Mother’s Day Rally to End Family Separation and Child Detention” from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday at Head of Falls in Waterville. 

The rally is part of a national movement that 20 other communities across the country will participate in this weekend with the goal of bringing attention to aspects of the United States’ immigration policy.

My friend Mary Dunn's focus has been on a particular shelter i.e. concentration camp for children in Florida, Homestead, which is expanding. It is highly profitable for its owners who are awarded no bid contracts to run the facility.

Remember when we were horrified to learn how the Nazi government of Germany had separated families and herded children into detention centers? Yeah, me too.