Adoptive Mother Who Hates Trump: I'm Sorry I Brought My Daughters To America

Writing in Marie Claire on Election Day, a woman who adopted her two daughters from China spewed her hatred of President Trump and his administration in a venomous essay in which she stated she regretted adopting and bringing her daughters to America.

In the essay, titled, “Why Trump's America Makes Me Regret Adopting My Daughters,” Lisa Milbrand, begins her descent into vitriol with a happy memory:

The first time their tiny feet touched American soil, we made a big deal of it. We were so happy about everything they’d inherit as newly minted Americans—our already head-over-heels love for them, every opportunity we could afford, and freedom from China's oppressive government and its controversial (and now somewhat lifted) one-child policy.

But then, the horror: “I pulled those two beautiful babies away from a rising power and into a damaged democracy. I brought two girls of color into a society where it’s clear that their word and their bodies are worth less than a man’s—and where open, overt racism has become even more likely now than it was a decade ago.”

Milbrand segues to an attack on Trump. “Two years ago, I brought my daughters to the voting booth with me, expecting that they’d witness the election of the very first woman president. Instead, we got a guy with multiple sexual allegations made against him, who backs candidates for the highest posts in the land who also have assault and molestation claims against them.”

What political issue first comes to her radical feminist mind? Three guesses.

Trump promised during his campaign that he would roll back Roe v. Wade, and new Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh’s conservative judicial record makes it seem like he’d be just the man to help do it—no matter his protestations that he considers it ‘settled law.’ The idea that my daughters may lose the right to control what happens to their bodies—especially if they end up with a pregnancy that’s the result of a sexual assault, or one that could do serious damage to their health—keeps me up at night.

What’s a mother to do?

This: “We are thinking of stockpiling of Plan B pills, just in case my daughters’ right to choose what happens to their bodies disappears.”

Back to attacking Trump, this time insinuating that he has caused prejudice against Asian-Americans, as well as other people of color: “We are only two years into Trump’s administration, and even in our bright blue corner of the country, Asian people are accosted on the street by white people telling them to 'go back to your own country.' Trump's remarks against their birth country, China, grow ever angrier as the trade war continues. And as part of the Trump administration's war on brown and black people, every few weeks, there’s another news story about an international adoptee being deported back to a country they don’t remember, without a family or a safety net.”

Then, the paranoia: “Like many of my fellow adoptive parents, I ordered a passport card for my teen, so she could prove her citizenship wherever she went. I double and triple checked our paperwork, and started hunting for a lawyer to do pricey readoptions so we could add a security-blanket layer of paper proof for our girls. And then I worry that a sheaf of papers can be invalidated with a stroke of a pen—and the government’s brutal separation of child immigrants from their parents isn’t exactly inspiring confidence.”

The overheated rhetoric leads to this conclusion:

I skip my daughter’s soccer games to march and spend my nights volunteering to get out the vote. I divert money from their college funds toward campaigns that might help save our democracy. And on the very worst days, I start to look at what it would take to leave the country that I love, permanently. And my heart breaks just a little more. I’d sacrifice everything for the sake of my daughters. I just never thought it would come to this.