Yearning to Breathe Free

Artist Statement

While this image of the child with tear filled eyes is a product of my imagination, she represents the reality of what thousands of migrant children confront at the United States and Mexican borders. There is a humanitarian and moral disconnect between the worlds that embodies the national spirit and conscience: give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free (excerpt from the 1903 inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty); and the continued dysfunction of our immigration and asylum system. As an increasingly polarized Congress continues to avoid approving humane legislative immigration reform, a child with pleading outstretched hands reaches through a barbed wire fence as to ask "what about the children yearning to breathe free?"