Political Quotes

“This Sunday I was out on the road amongst my constituents when at about midday, I started to get panicked emails from the doctors of Yale New Haven Hospital because one of their own, Tarek Alasil, an ophthalmologist of Syrian dissent, an ophthalmologist who has made his home here in the United States, who has U.S. citizen children, who has his family in New Haven, had been detained in the Caribbean in the Bahamas. He had been in the Caribbean doing cataract surgery for people who might otherwise not have access to the surgery that might allow them to see again; stepping forward, as all that we think is best about a country that was founded and strengthened by immigrants abroad, doing God's work as an ambassador--informal, though, he may have been--that America is a good and decent place. But he was detained and sat there in the Bahamas detained by the customs and border patrol, wondering if he would ever see his family again, wondering if he might ever become the United States citizen that he hoped to be, wondering if he was going to get sent back to his native city of Aleppo, which now is a smoking ruin. Of course, we hear story after story like that. The worst I heard was an elderly lady in her eighties, Hamidyah Al Saeedi. Hamidyah Al Saeedi has a son who is a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne.…”