Last weekend, widely-circulated reports of thousands of “missing” illegal immigrant children riled up social justice activists, who promptly took to social media to create the #WhereAreTheChildren hashtag, a handy vehicle to spread the disinformation.
After the facts were clear, activists simply transferred their campaign to a new hash tag – #FamiliesBelongTogether. But let there be no confusion (or conflation), the new rallying cry is for an old demand – ending any detention or enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.
Social justice organizations, unions and illegal immigrant rights’ advocates are using it to rally supporters for protests this weekend and “vigils” in support of detained illegal aliens.
Lawmakers jumped on the caravan too. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is publicly embracing issues like unchecked immigration in an effort to convince the far left base of her party she is worthy of representing the nation’s largest sanctuary state, made her presence known.
“It’s hard to conceive of a policy more horrific than separating children from their parents,” proclaimed Feinstein in a statement released Thursday announcing a soon-to-be-introduced bill to “prevent the intentional separation of immigrant families.”
“Congress has a moral obligation to take a stand here,” Feinstein tweeted.
The movement even went international with a group of activist groups filing a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights demanding the commission require the U.S. “to immediately stop the practice of separating families and reunite the petitioners with their children.”
The groups argue the commission, which studies human rights abuses in North and South America, has the authority to “take action in cases of serious, urgent, and life-threatening human rights abuses.”
Shouldn’t the commissioners be focused on the human rights abuses occurring in the homelands from which the immigrants are allegedly fleeing?
A week of hashtag campaigning and protests has stoked the fire of righteousness among the loudest voices. But, as a real open border activist notes, they have failed to consider the logical consequences of their own demands.
“End family separation, the hashtag, is really odd to me because, without family separation, one of the defaults would be family detention and that’s been the hashtag since 2015,” Andrew Free, an immigrant rights lawyer, told The Daily Beast.