Neil Gaiman, Khaled Hosseini, Ariel Dorfman and Viet Thanh Nguyen are among more than three dozen migrant and refugee writers calling on the US Congress to take “immediate steps to rectify the atrocious conditions for asylum seekers being detained today”.
Forty authors, all of whom have migrated to the US or are the children of migrants, signed an open letter pleading with Washington politicians to take action over inhumane conditions in detention centres on the US-Mexico border.
“The reports of death, abuse, overcrowding, untreated illness, malnutrition and lack of basic hygiene are abhorrent, especially since many of those affected are children,” say the writers, including The Kite Runner author Hosseini, the Chilean-American novelist and playwright Dorfman and the Pulitzer-winning Vietnamese-American novelist Nguyen.
In the letter, published in the Nation, they call on Congress to “meet our moral obligations by ensuring those held by our own government receive elementary necessities like sanitation supplies and access to medical and legal personnel”.
The writers, who also include Paul Muldoon, Ocean Vuong, Gary Shteyngart and Reza Aslan, urge Congress to provide migrants with access to medical care, nutrition and hygiene; to allocate resources for judges to hear cases more efficiently and with due process; to forbid tax dollars being spent on holding asylum seekers in countries where they face danger; and to reverse the White House’s evisceration of the refugee resettlement programme.
Earlier this month, a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General warned that facilities in the Rio Grande valley in southern Texas faced dangerous overcrowding and required immediate attention.
“We remember well the experience of utter paralysis that’s part of nearly every immigrant’s journey: of standing before the US immigration system, praying to not be found wanting,” say the writers. “Today, those enduring unspeakable conditions at our border are praying, just as we once prayed, when it was our turn. They may be praying to a different god, or different gods or different entities, but it doesn’t matter; what matters is that the power to address their prayers lies with you, the United States Congress. Please, do not let them go unheeded.”
