Empowerment Conference - "Together As One"

Speech

Together As One

13 stripes for the original 13 colonies

50 stars for our 50 states

White, purity and innocence

Red, our strength and bravery

Blue, perseverance, vigilance, and justice for all

A flag that represents our nation and our people

Virtues that we stand by together

This is what represents us as a people and as a country

In this piece I have depicted how these virtues, which hold our country together, are vanishing.

In recent and past months, ICE officials have taken away the people that make our country what it is: the land of the free, and with that, they are taking away the very structure of what we stand for - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, no matter your origin

As ICE walks deeper into the nation, we as a people are broken apart, rather than standing together to put back the pieces that we’ve lost

Families separated across borders

Parents taken away from kids on their first day of school

Wednesday, August 7, 2019. 680 detained in the ICE raids of food processing plants in Mississippi.

300 released the following day. Over half still detained.

Children stay at school because they have no home to go to anymore. No parent to take care of them, to ask them what their first day of school was like, to ask them if they made any friends. Neighbors and strangers try and comfort the crying children but they only desire one thing: their parents.

From Kindergarten to high school, children are escorted to gymnasiums while they wait for word on their mom and dad who have been stripped away from them.

Walmart. August 3, 2019. El Paso, Texas

22 killed. 24 injured. A massacre on US soil by an American and yet we point fingers at immigrants.

What are they doing here?

They need to go back to where they came from; to their home country.

They don’t belong here.

We’ve all heard these statements before, but tell me this: Why are Americans more terrifying than the ones we say we’re supposed to fear?

We decide to repeatedly attack some that are defenseless; the ones that are only trying to make a living, to feed their family, trying to establish a life in this country that we’re all so proud about.

Why has hate fueled this country to think about and commit these crimes against our own?

We are a land of immigrants but we want to push those very same people out.

Why?

Because they don’t look like us? Because we’re not all homogeneous?

Colonists didn’t look like Native Americans either but that didn’t stop them from coming here and kicking them out of the land they wanted to call theirs.

Illegal immigration is a problem, but so are hate-crimes and dehumanization.

Before you say that all immigrants need to leave, remember one thing: aren’t we all immigrants?

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