Khaled Hosseini, Ocean Vuong and Neil Gaiman among leading authors to sign a letter to the US Congress, urging action to remedy ‘atrocious conditions’
Neil Gaiman, Khaled Hosseini, Ariel Dorfman and Viet Thanh Nguyen are among more than three dozen migrant and refugee writers calling on the US Congress to take “immediate steps to rectify the atrocious conditions for asylum seekers being detained today”.
Forty authors, all of whom have migrated to the US or are the children of migrants, signed an open letter pleading with Washington politicians to take action over inhumane conditions in detention centres on the US-Mexico border.
“The reports of death, abuse, overcrowding, untreated illness, malnutrition and lack of basic hygiene are abhorrent, especially since many of those affected are children,” say the writers, including The Kite Runner author Hosseini, the Chilean-American novelist and playwright Dorfman and the Pulitzer-winning Vietnamese-American novelist Nguyen.
In the letter, published in the Nation, they call on Congress to “meet our moral obligations by ensuring those held by our own government receive elementary necessities like sanitation supplies and access to medical and legal personnel”. Continue reading