"Children as young as infants and toddlers have been taken from their families. The Trump administration is throttling the legal ports of entry where refugees are required under law to present themselves for asylum, pushing huge groups to remote and more dangerous stretches of the border. We have tragically seen this result in the deaths of several children in New Mexico near some of our remote ports of entry."

::::::::

This week, I led a hearing with my Democratic Senate colleagues to hear testimony from legal and medical experts who are on the frontlines of confronting the humanitarian crisis on the border.

VIDEO: U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich leads a Democratic Policy and Communications Committee hearing, "America Speaks Out: Stop Trump's Cruel Treatment of Children at the Border," July 23, 2019.

It's clear that the Trump administration has shown an appalling disregard for basic human dignity. Children as young as infants and toddlers have been taken from their families. Migrant families and children are being held in overcrowded, prison-like facilities. The Trump administration is also throttling the legal ports of entry where refugees are required under law to present themselves for asylum, pushing huge groups to remote and more dangerous stretches of the border. We have tragically seen this result in the deaths of several children in New Mexico near some of our remote ports of entry that lack even the most basic medical infrastructure.

I am sincerely appreciative that so many New Mexicans, rather than responding to the President's rhetoric and chaos on the border with fear, are instead responding to this humanitarian crisis with both kindness and compassion. I was proud to welcome one of those New Mexicans as a witness in the hearing. Imelda Maynard, a senior attorney for Catholic Charities of Southern New Mexico, has been providing legal services to migrant families and children in southern New Mexico, West Texas, and in our neighboring city in Mexico, Ciudad Juarez.

VIDEO: Imelda Maynard, a senior attorney at Catholic Charities of Southern New Mexico, discusses how the humanitarian crisis on the southern border has impacted communities in New Mexico, July 23, 2019.

I want you to know that I will continue fighting to hold this administration accountable for flouting our nation's laws and American values. This is not who we are as a country, and this is not how we should treat our fellow human beings.

Sincerely,

MARTIN HEINRICH
United States Senator

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev