Family separations bring Tallahassee’s faith community together

Tallahassee faith leaders — in oratory ranging from subdued to fiery — and others on Wednesday prayed for a permanent end to the separation of migrant families crossing the Mexico-U. S. border.

Some, including pediatric cardiologist Louis St. Petery, long outspoken on children’s issues, called it “child abuse.”

But many of the roughly 200 who attended an interfaith prayer vigil at First Presbyterian Church in the city’s downtown were cautiously optimistic about President Donald Trump‘s executive order that for now ends the policy of removing children from their parents.

That order, however, doesn’t change his ‘zero-tolerance’ policy of prosecuting adults caught illegally crossing the border.

“I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” Trump said Wednesday, according to POLITICO. “I think anybody with a heart would feel strongly about it. We don’t like to see families separated.”

First Presbyterian Pastor Brant Copeland applauded the move but said “a great harm has already been done to thousands of families,” calling the separations “heartless cruelty” and “callous mistreatment.”

Added Judith Lyons, a member of Temple Israel: “I don’t trust a momentary executive order. Time will tell … In the meantime, we must do whatever we can to stop this.”

Still others commented on the practice of keeping detained families in chain-link fence cages inside facilities.

Earlier Wednesday, state Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who is Jewish, drew an analogy after he tried to visit the federal Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead.

“I came here today to remind myself that children being separated from their parents and being thrown into cages is a practice my people have experienced before,” the Broward County Democrat told reporters there.

Imam Rashid Mujahid of Masjid Al-Nahl also picked up on that theme at the vigil: “We, as Muslims, feel a great pain with this … As my Jewish brothers and sisters say, ‘never again.’ Well, it’s happening again.”

And Lee Johnson, pastor of Loved by Jesus Family Church, lit up the pulpit, telling vigil-goers, “All of us have been asleep at the wheel. We need to wake up.”

The same immigration system that works for everybody else, he said, “ought to work for them. We are our brother’s keeper.”

In an interview before the vigil, St. Petery — who publicly opposed the now-overturned 2011 “docs vs. Glocks” state law that aimed to stop doctors from asking patients about guns in their homes — said “what is happening will have a permanent effect on these kids.

“There’s already been trauma; it should have never happened in the first place,” he said. “It needs to not happen ever again. It constitutes child abuse.

“If a parent puts a kid in a cage, that’s child abuse. Our government is doing the same thing. That’s crazy.”

Former Florida Democratic Party Chair Allison Tant, who also attended the vigil, later said she had asked Copeland to organize the event. She too said she was cheered by Trump’s about-face on the separations but was concerned about those families already torn apart getting back together.

“I, for one, don’t have a lot of confidence in the people running the show up there”— referring to Washington — “to actually care enough to get it right,” she said. “That’s one of the things to pray the most for.”