Laurie Sweet Photo
Laurie Sweet finally got a glimpse through the fence. She and the people with her started singing.
Then the sheriff arrived.
Sweet was down in the border community of Tornillo, Texas. With a group of fellow immigration-reform activists, she was visiting a barbed-wire tent city where the federal government is holding thousands of teen asylum seekers separated from their parents.
Sweet made the “pilgrimage” earlier this month as part of a group called Immigrant Families Together. The onset of the Trump administration had turned the local mom of two into an activist, beginning with the “Nasty Women” movement and blossoming from there.
“I needed to look at the children” in the tent city “with my own eyes,” Sweet said during an appearance Wednesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
She found most of the camp’s fence covered with tarp. Eventually her group came across a clear stretch on the grounds of a private farm.
The group made eye contact with kids and launched into a rally. The farmer, who asked them why they cared about the kids on the other side of the fence, called the sheriff. That ended the rally.
But not the work. Sweet returned home as committed as ever to opposing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. She’s working daily helping a family of Honduran asylum-seekers as part of a “rapid response team,” while attending rallies (including this one Monday evening in New Haven) and speaking up.
“We made this a crisis,” she said, and citizens can help fix it.
Click on the video to watch Sweet recount her Tornillo experience and discuss her ongoing efforts during the “Dateline New Haven” episode, which also covered the debate within the movement over whether to embrace fully open borders or push for an expanded and more humane system with some limits