We must be the better country

 At the core of the US constitution are basic rights and freedoms. One of these is that we are innocent until proven guilty, and a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.

Our government rightfully condemns human rights abuses in Afghanistan and North Korea. We should. Those countries routinely abuse the rights of their citizens. North Korea imprisons children because of things their grandparents said. Afghanistan is prohibiting the ability of women and girls to go to school.  These countries governments are abhorrent and the worst in the world.

We are right to condemn them.

But since George Bush was president there has been an increasing trend of the United States to abuse the rights of prisoners in this country who have not been proven to be US citizens. Afghan refugees are stuck in camps, unable to get refugee status to the United States, despite that they have that right under laws we have signed. The Biden Administration has failed them. https://theintercept.com/2023/09/13/afghan-refugee-resettlement-camps/

Many Afghan refugees have been resettled. But many more are left in resettlement camps today. This is abhorrent and we need to give them their legal rights.

We must be better than this. Russian propaganda deliberately looks for any reason to criticize the United States for violating the human rights we claim to uphold. We need to end these abuses.

We need to reform our immigration laws and end the crisis at the border which was started by George W. Bush. This will require action from congress ultimately, but there are things President Biden can do now to reduce the suffering at the border.

It's about human rights and basic decency.

I hope someday we will have more politicians who are more in line with these values and will do the hard work to overturn laws which violate the rights of people in this country.

As we need to continue to rightfully claim we want the North Korean and Afghan governments to fall, which will solve human rights violations in this country we need to also do everything we can to be as good as possible. The most important reason is because giving refugees their rights under international law. The second most important reason is we must give absolutely no ammunition to the Russian propaganda machine to claim we are hypocrites. Afghan refugees being stuck in limbo and the lack of visas for farm workers leading to thousands of people in immigration detention camps just feeds the narrative that we are hypocrites.

We need to reform the laws we have for domestic laws as well. Mandatory minimum sentencing, the drug war, and other factors. We need to make sure that someone when they leave prison is done serving their time.

We must do better.