Caught this little jewel of an article, entitled “Indefinite Detention? That’ll Set Those Damned Kids Straight” from a local Dallas paper called The Dallas Observer. Richardson is a suburb that sits not 10 minutes from downtown Dallas (that is if Central Expressway had zero traffic). Really, this makes me proud to be in North Texas. *sniff

Excerpt:

Last March, an immigration lawyer named Griselda Ponce testified before the U.S. District Court in Austin about conditions at Hutto, and told of an occasion when the five- or six-year-old daughter of a woman she was interviewing had to go to the rest room. The captain on duty told the girl that she could not do so during a head count. Ponce said that the girl made “six or seven requests,” and was rebuffed each time; after about fifteen minutes, the girl “smelled of urine.”

Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs …

Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines’s law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. “I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed,” he wrote. “When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, ‘If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.’ I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt If I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get step-parents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”

What did God say about immigrants in our country:

Leviticus 19:33-34 ‘And if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him. The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

If you think you have seen that before, you are not crazy.

Allow me to be harsh here. If you think that commandment was for the Israelites in the Promised Land, let me respond to that by asking one simple question: “Do you believe the Word of God is timeless?”

Can we pick and choose what applies to us and what doesn’t? Or does is the Torah is the absolute standard of God which is absolute perfection.

What about immigrants? What about capital punishment? What about divorce? What about tattoos? How can we possibly live up to that standard?

Short answer: we cannot live up to that standard. That is impossible.

Long answer: we cannot do it without God. God never intended to lay down His law for us to mindlessly follow him. God wanted us to love Him and fully depend on Him. By God, we are righteous and not by what have done or will do.

By what we know of God, how would His heart respond to our treatment of immigrants that we have labeled, ‘illegal’? By His heart, how we suppose to treat immigrants?