Haili Bruckner

AP Lang Pd. 3
Column Response 2

In her column, “Trump’s War on Migrant Children” (20 Dec. 2018), Amy Goodman

implicates Donald Trump in the suffering of families at the Southern border, maintaining that

vocality and protest by U.S. citizens is key to protect the country’s immigrants. Goodman

qualifies this claim through her use of allusion and a cumulative sentence structure, which

conveys the urgency of the scene. She recounts stories of three individuals afflicted by U.S.

immigration policy in order to humanize the issue and evoke indignation among her audience.

Goodman’s declarative tone communicates the factual basis of her argument, mobilizing an

audience of bystanders to act on immigration injustices.

Goodman begins by alluding to three distressing stories: that of Maria Meza, Jakelin Caal

Maquin, and Abdullah Hassan. She begins each paragraph with their names, rather than first

identifying them as ‘immigrants.’ The embodiment of an often generalized, impersonal issue

illuminates the hardships of immigrants to Americans uninformed on recent political issues. For

example, Goodman uses Jakelin’s tragedy to compare border custody with prison. Jakelin, a

seven-year-old girl seeking asylum with her father, died after over eight hours of detention.

Goodman cites researcher Clara Long, who expresses, “treating [immigrants] like criminals [in a

jail-like system] will lead, unfortunately, to these kinds of outcomes.” The allusion to real-world

examples compellingly introduces Goodman’s claim while inflicting remorse among readers.

In describing the three adversities, Goodman also uses cumulative sentences to create

suspense and feelings of desperation. For example, she explains that Shaima, the mother of

two-year-old Abdullah, cannot enter the U.S. to see her dying son due to Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban.’

Goodman details, “[Abdullah] suffers from epilepsy and hypomyelination, and, at the time of
this writing, is on life support, near death, at a hospital in Oakland, California.” Goodman

gradually adds details to a long-winded sentence, building apprehension and causing the reader

to develop emotional attachment to the characters. This instills guilt within an inactive audience,

increasing the persuasiveness of Goodman’s argument. Because Goodman published the article

in the midst of Shaima’s conflict, the reader is left wondering the situation’s outcome, further

intensifying the call to action at the end of the piece.

Goodman paints an emotional picture of immigrant hardships as a result of Trump’s

harsh policies, while a declarative tone seemingly removes bias from her argument. She

effectively uses allusion and strategic sentence structure to inspire answerability among her

readers, and remains transparent with the facts on which she based her argument. She concludes

the column by stating, “The courts can offer relief. But nationwide grassroots organizing and

massive media exposure are [also] needed.” Goodman advocates that Americans must be

proactive as they cannot rely solely on judicial action to solve issues of injustice.