Green Sunday: Child Internment Camps in the American Refugee Crisis

Our presentation looks at the practice of separating children from their parents – a United States policy designed to be a deterrrent to refugees, many of them from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, who have been forced to immigrate and seek asylum at the southern border. Ten thousand children ripped away from their parents are currently in internment camps – a situation far more than cruel and unusual, but indispuutably evil because this brutal traumatization of children is unnecessary.  To help us look into the abyss and understand what we are seeing, we have four activists this evening to inform us.

Karma Bennet is a Marketing Content Strategist who runs an Oakland company to help creative people publicize their books and build websites. She was arrested for her participation in the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation campaign and she protested at George Bush’s stolen election, the G8, the World Bank and the School of the Americas.

Liz DeCou is a nurse and grandmother affiliated with Solidaridad Con los Niños.  She was arrested for trespassing at a detention center in Fairfield when trying to deliver a doll to immigrant kids separated by ICE from their parents. Her arrest got over a million views on Twitter.

Jesse Smith is an Oakland community organizer and an activist focused on police corruption.  As a practitioner of civil disobedience, he recently joined with a California human rights group to engage an internment camp at the southern border.

Nohelya Zambrano is an Ecuador-born, New York City-raised Latina student from Mount Holyoke College who is interning this summer in the Bay Area. She is a proud immigrant who fights for immigrant and reproductive justice.