‘CHILDREN ARE HUMAN’
Crowd at Delgado’s office calls for shutdown of migrant holding centers
KINGSTON, N.Y. >> Steve Greenfield wore his yarmulke Tuesday as he called on demonstrators outside U.S. Rep. Antonio Delgado’s Kingston office to step out of their comfort zone and engage in civil disobedience to force the closure of U.S. detention centers that house thousands of migrant children.
The New Paltz resident said he intends to wear the skullcap that is a symbol of his Jewish faith, as well as a yellow star like the ones Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, until the imprisonment of children ends. And he urged the roughly 100 people who gathered outside Delgado’s office on Clinton Avenue to “commit yourself to an actual, physical street movement” to force the closure of the detention centers, which he called concentration camps.
“There are people being held in concentration camps in this country,” Greenfield said, rejecting the controversy over the use of the phrase to describe where thousands of children are being held. He said using the phrase honors the memory of those who died in Nazi concentration camps and “the commitment we made to ‘never again.’”
“I am a Jew, and I was raised by my culture to believe that I bear a special burden in life, for
as long as I’m on this Earth, to make sure that there are no concentration camps anywhere in this world,” Greenfield said.
“If we don’t start committing ourselves to inconveniencing the people who are doing this ... then we are going to be doing nothing but exercising the First Amendment and not doing a single thing to get these camps closed,” he said.
The event outside Delgado’s office, organized by Sharon Roth, was one of many “Close the Camps” protests held Tuesday at congressional members’ offices across the United States.
“I am a grandmother, I have two grandchildren,” Roth said. “I could not bear the thought of this happening to my grandchildren.
“I cannot just sit at home and wish it was not so.”
Brooklyn residents Justin Krebs and Casey Selzer took time out of their upstate vacation to bring their three young daughters to the Kingston event. “When something this horrific is happening, we all have to do something,”
Krebs said.
Leslie Peone, her two young children and her grandmother, Karen Cuthers, traveled from New Paltz to participate. Peone said she brought her children to show that “babies are human, children are human.”
The demands of the demonstrators on Delgado, D-Rhinebeck, were fourfold: They want him to visit a detention center this week, work to close the centers, reject any additional federal funding for family detention and deportation, and bear witness and reunite families.
The protesters were critical of Delgado’s vote in favor of a $4.5 billion border funding bill that aims to improve conditions for detained migrants. Greenfield, who ran against Delgado in 2018 on the Green Party line, said the vote for funding was a vote “for Donald Trump to build $4.5 billion worth of camps for the profits of private investors.”
“What’s going to happen? Are the camps going to have more diapers? Is that what’s going to happen? Our goal here is to shut these camps down,” Greenfield said.
Delgado was not in his Kingston office Tuesday. In a prepared statement read by a staff member, the firstterm congressman said he applauded “the impassioned civic engagement in response to what’s happening to migrant families within our borders.”
But Delgado didn’t join the protesters in their call to shut down the detention centers. Rather, he said in his statement that he was “horrified by the conditions at Customs and Border Patrol facilities,” and he vowed to “continue to stand up for the reunification of children with their families.”
He also said any facility that “fails to allow migrants to seek asylum with dignity by maintaining the safe and sanitary conditions required by our laws has no place in America.”