A five-year-old girl broke through the security barrier along pope Francis’s motorcade to try and reach him. Fortunately for her in this day and age, she was not immediately shot and while she was being escorted away by security, the pope noticed her and asked her to be brought to him and she managed to give him a hand-drawn picture and a letter.
The daughter of two undocumented immigrants, Sophie gave the pope a hand-colored drawing that read, “My friends and I love each other no matter our skin color.” The gift was meant as a way to gain attention to the plight of people like her parents, whom she fears will be deported.
When a reporter asked what she was hoping would come of her audience with the Pope, Sophie said that she hoped it would put a spotlight on the need for immigration policy reform in the U.S.
“Pope Francis, I want to tell you that my heart is sad and I would like to ask you to speak with the president and the Congress and legalizing my parents because every day I am scared that one day they will take them away from me.”
It is a touching moment but I am waiting for the right-wing anti-immigrant outrage machine to get cranked up and pour vitriol on the parents of exploiting their daughter to get attention to their cause and insist that they be hounded down and deported immediately for their action.
Because that’s how these people roll.
Also using foreign heads of state to influence US policy.
Mano Singham: …but I am waiting for the right-wing anti-immigrant outrage machine to get cranked up and pour vitriol on the parents of exploiting their daughter to get attention to their cause and insist that they be hounded down and deported immediately for their action.
And the right wing outrage machine using Ms. Cruz as an example why we need to stop “natural born” birthright citizenship.
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anat, #1: Also using foreign heads of state to influence US policy.
Lol. Recent history shows just how much conservatives hate it — absolutely hate it! — when foreign heads of state try to influence US policy.
Listening to a radio account my ears perked up when the reporter said that the Pope “asked for children to be brought to him”. I immediately imagined a priest drunk of communion wine screaming for children to use to indulge his every twisted and perverse desire. As a rule, all people in positions of authority within the Catholic church should avoid, like the plague, any public display of desire to have children near them.
It’s not as though he took her away in private for a couple hours so people could imagine nefarious goings-on, he talked to her for like thirty seconds with a thousand people watching. And since there’s at least two famous passages in the Bible about listening to kids, and since Francis has been branding himself as the Nice Pope, he’d have taken a much bigger PR hit by not talking to her. Once she got through the security line, it was going to make the news anyway, so he might as well be nice about it.
The bit I like is where this five-year-old apparently “broke through” the security barrier. That phrase makes me think of the Swiss Guard and/or the Secret Service getting overpowered by a kindergardener. Either that security line was much more porous than it should have been, or someone deliberately let the kid through (possibly because stopping her would have caused a messy incident.)
Right wing vitriol or not, the fact is this incident was staged by a pro-immigration group named La Hermantad (The Brotherhood), and yes it is manipulative to make this out to be the spontaneous outpourings of a child. That the words of the letter were not those of a 5-year-old should be obvious.
Exploiting children is probably not the best way to get your message across, particularly not when she’s running a gauntlet of trigger-happy cops.
Even if it wasn’t spontaneous, I doubt the little girl is keen on the prospect of her parents being hunted down by the US government. She was not harmed in any way, and probably enjoyed meeting Pope Francis, who seems to have a nice rapport with children.
Not everyone who likes the company of children and communicates well with them is a pedophile, even if he is a priest. Where would good schoolteachers come from if this were the case?
This Pope is one of the few examples of someone with great power at least trying to use it for good. America needs to be reminded to be humane in its treatment of immigrants.
A nation has the right to limit immigration and citizenship, but immigration policies must be lawful and just. The US Constitution defines a citizen as anyone born or naturalized in the country. Any future exceptions to this is a travesty unless established by an amendment.
Even if that happens, which I hope it doesn’t, changes should only apply to the time period after the amendment takes place. For example, if you were born in the US in 2000 and the Constitution is amended in 2025 to say that only children of legal immigrants are citizens, you should be grandfathered in. No retroactive attacks on anyone’s established citizenship, please!
And before any big crackdown on illegal immigration, the nation whose businesses and privileged classes have benefited for so long from their labor should come to terms with how they have profited from the people some of them demonize to score political points.