This TED Talk features immigrant advocate Melanie Nezzar recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic 2019.

Last summer, I got a call from a woman named Ellie, and she had heard about the family separations at the southern border and wanted to know what she could do to help.

She told me the story of her grandfather and his father.

When they were kids in Poland, their father,

fearing for his son's safety,

gave them a little bit of money and told them to walk west,

to just keep walking west across Europe.

And they did.

They walked all the way west across Europe,

and they got on a boat,

and they got to America. Ellie said that when she heard the stories of the teens walking up across

Mexico, all she could think about was her grandfather and his brother. She said that for her,

the stories were exactly the same.

Those brothers were the Hassanfeld brothers, the Hasbro's, the Hasbro's, the Hasbro Toy Company,

which of course brought us Mr. Potato Head. But that is not actually why I'm telling you this story.

I'm telling you this story because it made me think about whether I would have the faith

or the courage to send my teens, and I have three of them, on a journey like that,

knowing that they wouldn't be safe where we were, would I be able to watch them go? I started my career decades ago at the

southern U.S. border working with Central American asylum seekers.

And in the last 16 years, I've been at highest, the Jewish organization that fights for refugee rights around the world as a lawyer and an advocate. And one thing I've learned is that sometimes

the things that we're told make us safer and stronger actually don't.

And in fact, some of these policies have the opposite of the intended results,

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