Before their meetings with lawmakers, Lozano gathered the children in a church to practice recounting their stories.
"OK, so why are you here?" Lozano asked Juan.
"Because I'm trying to get my Dad and my Mom papers," the boy answered confidently in English.
"And what are they trying to do to your Mom and Dad?" Lozana prompted.
"They're trying to take them to Mexico," he said, his voice suddenly becoming smaller.
"And what's going to happen to you if that happens?"
"I'm going to be left all alone!" he said, bursting into sobs.
Of course, why is this taking place?
Immigrant advocates, however, are increasingly putting such children at the forefront of their lobbying efforts, convinced that they offer the most compelling argument for granting illegal immigrants opportunities to legalize.
"Once the average American citizen learns the facts, they are not going to want these families to be separated. This is about the family values our country holds most dear," said Emma Lozano, co-founder of Familia Latina Unida in Chicago, one of several groups that have coalesced around the issue across the country.
But the problem is that they don't HAVE to be separated. The children are perfectly free to travel back to their home countries with their parents.
It's just that the parents don't want to go -- so they're having and using children as a propaganda tool to prevent the enforcement of laws they knew they were breaking well before they even got here. Worse, they're telling us lies about how they'll be "separated from their children" when, in fact, it would be only by THEIR choice that their children would be kept here rather than by going back with them.
Why, exactly, should we even be giving this the time of day?
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