Children along Mexico’s border are being torn from their parents’ arms and housed in detention centers, some with cages or cells.

I have two children, whose well-being I care for deeply, as many other parents do, as well.

How many people, if living in a dangerous country where their sons were constantly being approached by gangs to join or suffer the consequences, while in the distance was a shining land that promised freedom from such violence, would not attempt to go there and seek a better outcome for their sons’ lives, or freedom from harm for their daughters, whatever dangers that course entailed?

Yet once arrived at that country’s border, their children were taken from them because they hadn’t kept to a new rule — and were jailed because of it — which took their progeny away, not by any law in that country, but by a presidential directive sanctioning a more aggressive immigration policy?

Then the president of that shining land said that the new policy, enunciated by his attorney general on April 6 — a policy that was never the rule of law or procedure in any previous administration — was the fault of the weak opposition party.

Is this cruel heartlessness what President Trump meant by “Making America great again” — now reflective of the altered invitation on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free … and let them meet my Wall”?

Our new Statue of Liberty.

Paul Baribault, Lewiston

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