In Martin Scorsese’s searing movie, “Gangs of New York,” Bill the Butcher, a “native-born” brute played by Daniel Day-Lewis lounges on the docks screaming and hurling stones at newly arrived immigrant “trespassers” as they step off the gangplank and onto America’s shore. Now, 170 years later, the slurs and epithets are just as hurtful when hurled by “natives” in California at refugee children, alone or with young mothers, as they attempt to find asylum here.
While the Irish immigrants of the 1850s were fleeing famine, today’s waves of refugees are sent by parents making a life-or-death decision to send their children thousands of dangerous miles across the desert, with little water, holding on to the tops of train cars, to escape a more immediate danger at home. Central American children have been making this perilous journey for decades, often alone. Lately, the situation has worsened; neither their parents, nor the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, are able to protect them from rampant gang violence, drugs, and sex trafficking afflicting those nations.
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