Booker: Instead of Detention Centers, We Should Give Migrant Kids ‘Pathways To Become Citizens’

EXCERPT:

BOOKER: “Well, again, a lot of folks seem to think that we have to have these somehow to protect ourselves. And instead, what we often see is nursing mothers, pregnant women, elderly, children being held in conditions that does, according to the government’s own reports, permanent harm to these children. And so by having a system that’s not of detention facilities, but finding placements for them, working on the kind of things that everybody from the American Pediatric Academy to the American Bar Association have spelled out, again, evidence-based programs that give them safe and secure housing and resources. And actually, even for parents, a system so that they can come back through the civil process and be evaluated for their asylum claims and if they have a legitimate pathways to become citizens in this country.”