Letter to the Editor: Today’s unaccompanied minors come for different reasons than the Pedro Pan children of the 1960s



Celia C. Suarez,

Tue, February 15, 2022, 11:25 AM


Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski and businessman Miguel “Mike” Fernandez have been pictured in recent articles as “holier than thou” crusaders of the illegal, unaccompanied children arriving by the thousands, continuously and for years, at our borders.

The Pedro Pan Group has been described as selfish and arrogant in their position that there is no comparison between their group and recent arrivals of unaccompanied minors.

The Pedro Pan children and all other waves of unaccompanied minors are linked to historical moments such as famine, two world wars, the Russian, Chinese and Cuban Communist revolutions; and, increasingly in our times, climatic or cataclysmic events, including those caused by leaders who bring misery, lack of freedom and want to their people.

Pedro Pan children were not illegal; they had papers. They did not come to stay; the expectation was they would return to Cuba within two years.

Their trauma was the separation from their parents and their uncertainty in a new country. The parents entrusted their care to the Catholic Church because it ran the private schools, often the best in Cuba.

I feel the plight of the newly unaccompanied migrant children and recognize my own humanity in wanting to help them, but this is wrong.

These children are coming here not as the result of a specific event.

If the Church and some altruistic millionaires are so welcoming of this illegal immigration, they should foot the bill or provide assistance to those children by creating shelters or work opportunities in their home countries.

Our government should support those efforts, not continue funding shelters, courts, social workers, psychiatrists, and special education programs for them.

Celia C. Suarez,

Coral Gables






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