This TED Talk features social worker, psychologist, and researcher Luis H. Zias, recorded live at TED Salon, Border Stories, 2019.

For over 40 years, I've been a clinical social worker and a developmental psychologist.

And it seemed almost natural for me to go into the helping professions.

My parents had taught me to do good for others. And so I've devoted my career to working with

families in some of the toughest circumstances, poverty, mental illness, immigration, refugees.

And for all those years, I've worked with hope and with optimism.

In the past five years, though, my hope and my optimism have been put to the test.

I've been so deeply disappointed in the way the United States government is treating families

who are coming to our southern border asking for asylum. Desperate parents with children from El Salvador,

Guatemala, and Honduras who only want to bring their kids to safety and security.

They are fleeing some of the worst violence in the world.

They've been attacked by gangs, assaulted, raped, extorted, threatened.

They have faced death.

And they can't turn to their police because the police are complicit, corrupt, ineffective.

Then they get to our border, and we put them in detention centers.

Prisons, as if they were common criminals.

Back in 2014, I met some of the first children in detention centers.

And I wept.

I sat in my car afterwards, and I cried.

I was seeing some of the worst suffering I'd ever known.

And it went against everything I believed in my country, the rule of law,

and everything my parents taught me.

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