Archives for February 2019

Eve Meltzer-Krief MD, FAAP

(Dr. Eve Meltzer-Krief MD, FAAP is a pediatrician in Huntington and member of the NYS AAP Chapter 2 Immigration and Legislative Advocacy Committees.)

My alarm went off at 4:45am.  I got dressed and neatly folded my white coat into my bag, got into my car, and drove to the train station where I waited in the cold on the dark, deserted platform in Huntington, Long Island.  I was catching a train from NYC to Albany where dozens of other advocates were gathering from across the state, advocates including other physicians and moms and including individuals who had lost loved ones to gun violence.  We were all coming together to support the historic passage of gun safety legislation in New York State.

For some, like myself, it was our first time at the Capital watching Senate and Assembly proceedings.  For all of us, it represented the culmination of phone calls, letters, rallies and visits to legislative offices advocating for common sense gun legislation for our children.

As pediatricians, we know the impact that gun violence has on children in our country.  Nearly 1,300 children under 18 years old die from gunshot wounds every year and 5,790 are injured yearly.  Firearm related injury is the third leading cause of death among American youth.  A recent study showed that half as many children die from gun injuries in states with stricter gun laws compared to states with more lax gun laws.  Pediatricians know that gun violence is a healthcare epidemic for children in our country.

The pediatricians who were in Albany to witness the passage of the important gun safety bills stood up in applause along with Linda Beigel Schulman who lost her son to gun violence at Parkland and who burst into tears as one by one the gun safety measures were declared state law.  We watched as the Senate passed the Extreme Risk Protection Order bill and passed a law that will give up to 30 days to complete background checks.  They banned bump stocks and passed a bill preventing teachers from carrying guns.  They created regulations for gun buyback programs and passed a bill that allowed out of state mental health records to be reviewed before obtaining gun permits.  Common sense gun safety legislation.

Pediatricians also look forward to the passage of safe gun storage legislation that would require guns to be stored unloaded in a locked box separate from ammunition.  Studies show that 70% of childhood gun injuries, deaths and suicides would be prevented if the family weapon was locked up and unloaded.  Pediatricians from the NYS AAP also advocate for the establishment of a Gun Safety Research Institute in NY that would allocate funding for evidence based gun safety research and lead to recommendations for future gun safety measures.

It was inspiring and fulfilling to see our work lead to positive change .  I urge pediatricians to speak to their legislators about the issues they care about and to join your chapter’s legislative advocacy committee.  See you in Albany !

Eve Meltzer-Krief MD, FAAP

(Dr. Eve Meltzer-Krief MD, FAAP is a pediatrician in Huntington and member of the NYS AAP Chapter 2 Immigration and Legislative Advocacy Committees.)

The news cycle is dizzying, exhausting and at times overwhelming.  And it is powerful.  It has the power to distort time, making days feel like weeks, weeks like months and months like years.  It has the power to shape what we know and what we care about.  And it has the power to allow tragedies of the utmost urgency and consequence to get buried and forgotten, lost in its chaotic pace.

We were all enraged last summer when we learned of the nearly 2,800 children that had been separated from their parents under this administration’s zero tolerance policy.  Their parents had brought them to this country legally seeking asylum only to have their children ripped from their arms and placed in detention centers across the country.  We learned of the cruel and immoral lengths this administration was willing to go to as a deterrent to those who would seek safety in our borders.  Public pressure and a court order have reunited most but not all of these children with their parents.

Tragically, there is a different news story that has gone mostly unnoticed about an entirely different and potentially much larger group of children.  What makes these children different is that we have no sound bite of one of them crying for the nation to hear.  We have no image of a little girl surrounded by ICE.  We have no video of children in cages.  They are invisible.

Last month DHS released a report which revealed that perhaps thousands of children had been separated from their parents during the year prior to the official announcement of their separation policy.  Furthermore, they revealed that they had no record of these children’s identities and they had failed to track them saying, “We don’t have any information on the children released prior to the court order.”  On February 1^st the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) released a statement saying it was not “feasible” to identify the children with the Deputy Director of the ORR, Jallyn Sualog, explaining that it would take “100 analysts, working eight hours per day for 471 consecutive days” to identify the separated children.  I wonder if Ms. Sualog would think that any amount of time and resources was too much to dedicate to finding her own children if they had been ripped from her arms.

ORR claims that the vast majority of minors are released to relatives.  But considering that the administration was taking children away from their parents – dozens of them under 5 years old and as young as 6 months, and placing them not with relatives, but in detention centers.  Can we trust that the thousands they chose not to tell us about were somehow treated more humanely?  How many children exactly did they separate from their parents before they revealed their abhorrent policy?  How old were these children?  Are they among the nearly 15,000 children this country is still holding in detention centers?  Were the separated children even old enough to know their names?

Buried in the news cycle we find child abuse, destruction of thousands of families and lifelong trauma inflicted upon children in a gross violation of their human rights.  We have dehumanized these children and we have now lost them.  We must demand that our government do everything in its power to identify and track the children they have separated.  We must demand accountability from a government responsible for these heinous crimes against children and humanity.  History will surely remember this as one of the darkest hours in our country’s history and it will judge us harshly if we remain silent.