The Republican candidate for president is promising mass deportations. He vows to remove millions of people if he wins the election. When I hear this threat, I’m reminded of an episode several years ago.
A new psychologist in our school district came into our monthly meeting clearly shaken. She had just left the middle school where she worked and was upset about one of her young clients. The girl was a seventh grader at a school in an ethnically mixed community. The girl’s family was from Mexico.
The girl was being seen for counseling because she had been very anxious and tearful and was having trouble concentrating at school. Her English class at that time was reading standard literature for this age group. That week it was “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
As the story unfolded, an increase of ICE activity was being threatened that month in the school’s neighborhood. The news and worries filled the community. The atmosphere of threat could almost be felt when one walked through the streets.
The girl’s parents were undocumented and often had to be away for their multiple jobs. They had warned the girl emphatically to stay away from the windows and if there was a knock on the door to go hide in the bathroom and to be absolutely silent until she was sure there was no one still there.
During the counseling session the girl’s final words to my young colleague, “Now, I think I sort of know what Anne Frank felt like.” There are obvious differences in the circumstance in the story they were reading in class, but this girl, more than most, could relate.
I would guess that many of the people currently making and enforcing immigration laws remember reading the “The Diary of Anne Frank” in middle school. I’d like to believe that it had some impact. Moreover, I’d like to believe that, regardless of laws and politic, it might create some empathy for the fears of young girls and boys all over this country. Too many children feel deeply that the survival of their families depends on them -- hiding, without a sound, when there is a knock on the door. The young girl in our story is just one of the many children who live in this ever-present worry. The threat of mass deportation may serve a political purpose, but young children all over our country are the victims of this, and the harm to them should not be ignored.
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