A Continuous Tragedy

Last Saturday, I decided to take the day (sort of) off. I packed Bitty Baby up in her car seat and went out to shop for a pair of jeans in relative peace. 

Sometime after lunch, I looked down at my phone and saw that I had a text from Chris. "The kids are fine..." And then something about two men entering our house and getting apprehended by the police. 

And he included this picture...

I pulled over to a city park and called him. Turns out two men here illegally, who snuck into the country via the train, ran into our house, with my babies inside, in an attempt to escape the police. They were stopped by my husband screaming at them, which gave the cops a chance to catch up, tackle and lay them out on the floor, and cuff them. 

While my two older kids were still in the room. 

So my kids have now witnessed someone getting forcibly subdued and arrested. Chris got them into their room as soon as there were multiple police in our house and he knew he wasn't needed (apparently there was just one guy initially against two men). Luckily the kids think they were playing dog pile; we're going to let them keep thinking that for the time being. 

The border crisis has now officially moved from my front yard to inside my house. It seems like things have been getting worse as the weather cools off: two weeks in a row, I left the house to bring the kids to storytime and saw Border Patrol loading people into vans or trucks. It seems every other time I leave the house I'm seeing people getting apprehended, and we heard through the grapevine about two dead bodies found at the cotton gin down the road. Apparently they tried to jump from a moving train and  didn't make it. 

The border crisis is real. It's affecting real people on both sides of the border. Good people, which I have no doubt most of these people are, in desperate situations make very bad decisions. 

As we come up on an election next year, please make people who want to 

a.) Find a way to make it easier to enter the country legally (versus just turning a blind eye to a surge of people putting themselves in dangerous situations to get here illegally, while doing NOTHING to make it easier to be here legally, which is what the current administration is doing)

 and 

b.) Make securing the border a priority 

something you look for while you're voting. 

I know I'm probably ruffling some feathers with that last one, but the truth of it is, we're not going to be able to stop the human trafficking, people putting themselves in stupid dangerous situations, or fix it so people are motivated (and able!) to come in legally until we get the border secure. It's just what it is.