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On Wednesday, July 10, 2019, in Philadelphia, we had a rally for Immigration Justice in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. I was one of six speakers. There were perhaps 50 attendees in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. My remarks were posted to the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia Listserve, and they elicited an unexpectedly enthusiastic and appreciative response, so I think that we tapped into something that many psychoanalysts feel very, very strongly. I would like to express my gratitude to Gil Kliman, whose work and activism have been so inspiring. Other speakers covered much of the same ground that I did and were very eloquent.
Fellow Therapists and Fellow Citizens,
I'm honored to come before you today to speak about and to protest the immoral treatment of Central American refugee children and adults being carried out in the name of the citizens of the United States.
Women being held in rooms without running water and told to drink from the toilet, sleeping bags set up on concrete floors, and children who have been torn from their families. That was what Democratic lawmakers learned about and described after they toured two Texas border facilities on July 1, 2019. Their emotional and graphic descriptions were reported in the New York Times, as was the existence of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents. Posts on the group's Facebook page included jokes about migrants' deaths and doctored and obscene images of Hispanic lawmakers. Some of the most offensive posts were directed at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York.
The Department of Homeland Security's independent watchdog, its Office of Inspector General, on Tuesday, July 2, 2019, backed up the lawmakers' account. Its report, upon visiting five facilities in the Rio Grande Valley, described standing-room-only cells, children without showers or hot meals, and detainees clamoring desperately for release. They found that the children had fe