A group of self-proclaimed “grannies” kicked off a 2,000-mile journey to Texas to raise awareness about children separated at the border.
They are part of “Grannies Respond,” a grassroots effort to protest the zero tolerance immigration policy. Participants say they are speaking out for the children still waiting to be reunited with their parents, after being separated at the border.
“This is a group of senior citizen grannies, both men and women, who just can’t stand this anymore, and who feel like we’re complicit if we don’t speak out in the separation of families and incarceration of innocent children and to what end, so we’re speaking out,” said organizer Ellen Freudenheim.
Indigenous Languages Pose Challenge for Immigration Officials at The Border
A spike in illegal crossings over the past several years of aliens from Central America has posed a new challenge for immigration officials: How to communicate with a growing number of asylum seekers who speak rare indigenous languages.
Hundreds of indigenous languages are spoken in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. That issue was compounded by the zero-tolerance immigration policy, later reversed, that separated families at the border. There were reports during the child separation controversy that released detainees were being forced to sign English-language paperwork they did not understand.
Activists say many young children did not even know the name of the language they spoke, which made critical communication with them almost impossible to carry out. The inability to communicate with anyone, activists said, had harmful effects on the children.
“There’s 26 different dialects spoken in Guatemala among the Mayan indigenous population. You’re hearing from social workers that they don’t even know for weeks what dialect it is that the child is speaking and they become really withdrawn,” said Taylor Levy, legal director of Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, a non-profit that offers services to migrants and refugees.
