EVANSTON, Ill. --- President Trump signed an executive order to keep families together at the border but says the zero-tolerance policy will continue. Northwestern University professors from medicine, political science and religious studies are available for comment.
Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a practicing pediatrician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, is available to speak about the potential impact that this immigration policy could have on the children involved. She can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] or (mobile) 202-213-2437.
Quote from Dr. Heard-Garris
“As a pediatrician, I am horrified that the U.S. Government has been directly contributing to forcible separation of children from their families,” Dr. Heard-Garris said. “Our government has been inflicting undue trauma on these children and caregivers. Immediate action needs to be taken to stop this harmful policy and practice.
“Pediatricians have publicly condemned the Trump Administration's separation of children from their families. This is an unacceptable practice that would not be tolerated in any other groups. This is a racist policy that hurts children and must end now.”
Jaime Dominguez is an assistant professor of instruction in the department of political science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His teaching and research focuses on race and ethnicity, immigration, urban politics, Latino politics and Chicago politics. He can be reached at (mobile) 312-375-4868 or
[email protected].
Quote from Professor Dominguez
“The incarceration of young children represents a self-inflicted wound by the Trump administration immigration policy. Taking a hardline stance and choosing to separate families at the border is not going to deter immigrants from coming to the U.S. The decision to do this is clearly being done to appease to his base and the GOP leadership.” (from 6/15/18)
Robert Orsi is professor of religious studies, Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. He studies American religious history and contemporary practice; American Catholicism in both historical and ethnographic perspective; and he is widely recognized also for his work on theory and method for the study of religion. He is available this evening at
[email protected].
Quote from Professor Orsi
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions is heir to an intellectual tradition once prominent in the American South, and in particular in the state of Virginia, that used selective readings of Christian scripture to provide sacral justification for the institution of slavery and later for Jim Crow apartheid.
“Under the cover of alleged Biblical warrant, slave marriages before the Civil War were broken up and children separated from their families; after the war, African-American men were taken from their homes and pressed into enforced labor in southern industry.
“This is not a matter of what the Bible says or does not say. It has to do with the particular variant of American Protestant Christianity Attorney General Sessions comes from, which justifies violence against people whose skin is not as white as theirs with the claim that the United States is a white nation by divine will.
“It is worth remembering in this context that Hitler’s lawyers looked to the American Protestant Christian South for guidance in shaping the National Socialist legislation that paved the way for the Shoah.” (from 6/15/18)
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