http://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-refugees-idUSKBN15W2GN
Nine asylum-seekers, including four children, barely made it across the Canadian border on Friday as a U.S. border patrol officer tried to stop them and a Reuters photographer captured the scene.
As a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer seized their passports and questioned a man in the front passenger seat of a taxi that had pulled up to the border in Champlain, New York, four adults and four young children fled the cab and ran to Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the other side.
One by one they scrambled across the snowy gully separating the two countries. RCMP officers watching from the other side helped them up, lifting the younger children and asking a woman, who leaned on her fellow passenger as she walked, if she needed medical care.
The children looked back from where they had come as the U.S. officer held the first man, saying his papers needed to be verified.
The man turned to a pile of belongings and heaved pieces of luggage two at a time into the gully – enormous wheeled suitcases, plastic shopping bags, a black backpack.
“Nobody cares about us,” he told journalists. He said they were all from Sudan and had been living and working in Delaware for two years.
How this is a headline in America in 2017 is so far beyond my comprehension. The state of our nation today is absolutely pathetic and embarrassing.
The idea that people are fleeing our nation because they feel like we don’t care about them is so antithesis to what this nation should and used to stand for that it makes me livid and sick to my stomach. We are not some war-torn third-world failed state, we are the United States of America, the supposed bastion of peace and freedom and the embodiment of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These people left their home country to come to the home of the brave and the land of the free to pursue our vaunted American Dream, and the fact that they literally fled the country two years later saying “nobody cares about us” means that we, as their fellow Americans, failed them. And for that we should feel great shame.
I only hope that we can one day be a great nation worthy of adulation and the aspirations of the rest of the world again. Until then, I hang my head.