Letter: End ‘zero-tolerance’

Friday June 22, 2018

Current policy would have stopped my family from coming to the U.S. from Cuba.

Editor:

In 1960, my grandparents fled a communist revolution in Cuba to seek freedom and shelter in the United States. Together with many of their brothers and sisters, they came carrying their children and were welcomed in Florida, New York, South Carolina, Illinois and many other states. They settled into productive lives, became active members in their churches, and participated in the civic institutions of this country, joining the Republican Party and the Democratic Party alike. Their children and grandchildren became professors, artists, engineers and soldiers.

If the "zero tolerance" policy of the current administration had been in place in 1960, they would have been detained and likely sent back to face repression and reprisals in Fidel Castro's Cuba, while their children would have been held in an internment camp.

We Americans should denounce this policy such that nothing of its kind may be enacted again. We should work with compassion to ensure that the children held in internment camps be reunited with their parents and welcomed into our country after suffering such inhumane treatment. The words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty promise them as much.

Robert A. Portada III
Kutztown
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End 'zero-tolerance'