In September, director Victor Kossakovsky confirmed at the 2020 Zurich Film Festival that Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix had welcomed their first child. They are proud parents to a baby boy named River, after the actor's late brother.
The very private couple have kept to themselves since the news came out. Now they are speaking out about their baby boy in the context of something greater. The couple penned an op-ed for People magazine. In it, they reflected on the 545 migrant children who were separated from their parents and have yet to be reunited because the parents haven't been found.
What these families are going through is truly unconscionable. From infants to teens, these children's lives have been irreparably changed. With luck and dedication to change, the family reunions will happen one day. These kids will never forget that feeling, however, and all parties involved have to live with it.
Rooney and Joaquin write about this, acknowledging their privilege while sharing how becoming parents themselves has made this already dire situation even more inexcusable for them. They call on their fellow Americans to speak out for these children and their families.
On Monday, People magazine shared a powerful op-ed penned by Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix. The new parents spoke about their own son but in the context of the crisis at the border. The couple, like so many Americans, is heartbroken by the news that 545 migrant children separated from their families at the border have yet to be reunited.
The couple examined the issue with the unique perspective of being new parents.
"Like many, we were pained to realize that despite falling out of the headlines, the policy of family separation continues to damage children and parents across the world, more than two years after it was ruled illegal by a federal judge," they wrote.
"As new parents, it's unbearable to imagine what it would feel like to have our child taken away from us for a day, let alone years."
"But that's the very situation those 545 children and their parents have been living through," they continued. The couple urged their fellow Americans not to let this issue fade away.
"As Americans, it's our responsibility to continue paying attention to the plight of these families and get answers for why they still have not been located."
"The practice of taking children away from their parents at the border was intended to be a deterrent. Many of the families subjected to it were asylum-seekers — meaning they came to the U.S. looking for our help after fleeing violence and danger at home," they continued.
"Instead, in order to send a message to other families who were on the run, we took their children away from them hoping that word might filter back home that new peril awaited anybody looking to make a similar journey.
"In some cases, this meant quite literally ripping children younger than 5 out of the arms of their parents, even babies under a year old. We all remember the audio that was leaked of some of those children in government custody wailing for their parents."
Rooney and Joaquin went on to explain how it came to be that the government was ordered to reunite the kids and their families, and what that process revealed:
"As part of the case, the government was told it had to hand over a list of separated parents to the ACLU and its partners so they could track them down and help them find their kids. The government grudgingly handed over that list, which showed that more than 2,700 children had been taken away from their parents under the policy."
"But more than six months later, a whistleblower report from the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General revealed that the true number was far higher. In fact, thousands more had been separated during an informal test run for the policy during 2017 and early 2018," they continued.
"Attorneys for the government fought to keep the public from learning about the existence of these children. And it's not hard to grasp why. In many cases, their parents were deported to their home countries after the separations while the children remained in the US."
As they dissected the events that led up to this point, Rooney and Joaquin imagined the toll this would take on the children whose parents could not be found.
"For the children who remain separated from their parents, the damage will be lifelong. Child psychologists say that even short periods of forced removal from the care of a parent can cause irreparable emotional harm," they wrote.
"Some of these children are no more than toddlers or have yet to reach their 10th birthday. Our hearts break to think about the suffering they've endured at our country's hands."
"As cruel as these separations are, they aren't the only immigration policy implemented in recent years that harms children," they noted.
"Against the advice of the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], the government has used the COVID-19 pandemic to justify a rule blocking almost everyone from claiming asylum at the Southern border. This includes unaccompanied kids running away from danger. An investigation by ProPublica recently showed that many of those kids are being secretly held in hotels at the border, away from the sight of immigration attorneys, before being quickly sent home without ever seeing a judge."
"We have to ask ourselves: Is this the country that we want? Are these our values?
"How will it feel to explain to our son, when he asks us about this time and how we treated scared, defenseless children, some of whom may never see their parents again? For the sake of our nation's character, I hope we will be able to tell him that America unequivocally rejected this cruelty and demanded that our representatives did everything in their power to find those missing parents."
The couple are not the only ones who have spoken out about this atrocity recently. Shakira recently penned an essay for Time magazine slamming the practice of breaking up families at the border as a violation of human rights:
"Who answers the cries of the children left without their parents? I cannot imagine the pain I would feel not knowing where my son was and whether he was safe, or the fear that these children must endure and the emotional scarring that is inflicted upon them."
