Flowers for Ruya: Will the Murder of a 3 Year Old Refugee Bring Us Back to Our Senses?
Fourth of July celebrations in Boise will be a somber affair this year, overshadowed by the tragic stabbing of nine people at a child’s birthday party. The birthday girl, Ruya Kadir, a three year old refugee from Ethiopia, died from her wounds. Eight other people, five children and three adults, refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Ethiopia, were also stabbed, multiple times, by a man who had been kicked out of the apartment complex where the birthday party was taking place. At this time there is no evidence of a hate crime. Like so many victims of crime, these children and their families were at the wrong place at the wrong time.
My heart breaks for those parents and children, victims of random violence in a country plagued by mass shootings, drug addiction, and a growing hatred and fear of the other. The community of Boise has rallied around the victims , as most any city would, when something so random and tragic occurs. But Boise, long a stalwart supporter of refugees, is particularly sensitive to the fact that the victims were people who had already fled tragedy and violence, coming to a country where they believed their children would be safe. Community members have sought to reassure them that this is not who we (Americans) are.
While America remains a welcoming country, capable of rallying in the face of senseless tragedy, we are also becoming a country numbed to the daily attempts to divide us. In the days preceding and following the Boise tragedy, the U.S. government continued its efforts to justify the detention of families. The White House accused Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris of supporting criminals and “animals,”, simply because they disagree with the administration’s immigration enforcement policies. We learned that the Attorney General intends to release a regulation making it virtually impossible for many Central Americans to receive asylum in the United States. The Supreme Court ruled that the President had the authority to bar groups of individuals on national security grounds, willfully discounting the President’s consistent statements that the ban was motivated by a desire to exclude Muslims from the United States.
We are living in a country where the Trump administration is doing everything it can to create a Fortress America mentality, one in which we must build walls and keep people out. Immigrants, yet again, have become convenient scapegoats for everything wrong in the country. While this has happened many times in our history, this time around refugees have become the particular targets of hate-mongers. Our president has conflated Islam and terrorism time and again, banned Syrian refugees for a time, temporarily suspended the refugee program, and insisted on time-consuming and seemingly duplicative security checks in his pursuit of “extreme vetting.” The Trump administration has bet on achieving policy through fear-mongering, knowing that a promise of safety is something people latch on to in a chaotic world.
But all the refugee vetting in the world won’t protect our children from random violence. There are parents grieving for their child today who believed in a promise of safety that America couldn’t deliver. Her murder had nothing to do with immigration policy. Her murder was a senseless act, perhaps a result of mental illness or drug addiction, but a senseless act that could not have been predicted.
As a country, we have made the mistake of conflating safety and national security. We have blurred the line between our immigration laws and our criminal laws. We have failed to acknowledge that America’s problems with crime and violence aren’t imported from other countries.
We must start over, by acknowledging that we don’t prevent crime by keeping immigrants out. We prevent crime by enacting sensible laws that recognize the web of root causes — poverty, discrimination, mental health, drug addiction, lack of opportunities — that create the circumstances for crime.
If the circumstances had been reversed; if a foreign-born person had been the killer, I am sure the President’s Twitter account would have exploded when that young girl died. Instead, there has been silence.
Boise puts a lie to everything the President has claimed about the perils of immigration. Those refugee families want the same things for their children that all Americans do — the chance to grow up in safety, with opportunity and peace.
The people of Boise are right — America is that place, or we can be, but only if we push back everyday on the hate and the lies that divide us.
