'How to Get Away with Murder' Season 6 Episode 2 sheds light on the trauma of separation children face at the border
This article contains spoilers for Season 6 Episode 2 'Vivian's Here'.
It's the final year of law school on the final season of 'How to Get Away with Murder' and Annalise is wasting no time in mollycoddling her student "babies" anymore.
Neither is the show wasting any time in jumping to the harrowing social issues plaguing our society, tackling the case of abuse undergone by little children at the US-Mexico border, given the restrictions ICE is imposing on them.
Episode two sees Annalise giving out cases to her students, so they can work on them independently, and when she comes across a case of an illegal immigrant seeking asylum, she hands it to Connor, with Asher as his secondary.
When the two meet with their client, they find a scared, traumatized little eight-year-old child who can't even speak in English. When broken Spanish and drawings fail to get much out of the kid, they call Tegan down to be their translator.
This allows them to device an argument citing gang violence, but the whole ballgame changes when the kid draws a very basic stick figure of an angry man with a gun, and the words ICE written on his chest.
The two attorneys, once again, pull an illegal stunt by smuggling in a phone so the kid, Hector, can Facetime his mother. As the little child breaks down upon seeing his mother's face, the team learns that she had moved to the States a year ago and is currently living in Maryland.
She informs them that Hector got separated from his people at the border but they can't have her testify because of ICE's infamous habit of using children as bait to arrest undocumented parents.
To stop both of them from getting deported, Connor takes things up a notch and at the court hearing, calls an ICE agent to the stand. The moment Hector sees the man with an ICE jacket on, he breaks into deafening screams of horror, as if crying for help, as he hides under the table.
Connor then tells the court that the man isn't a real ICE agent, but Hector's reaction couldn't be any more real. Passionately, he rages and screams over the entire court, opening the discourse on how traumatized these little children lodged in cages and inhumane conditions eventually end up to be.
And while the judge can't really invoke precedents in the case, Connor's plan does get Hector placed in foster care, with promises of reuniting him with his mother, whom he plans to get to testify for seeking asylum from gun violence.
As sweet as Connor's gesture was, this is another feather to the show's bonnet of tackling social issues and the fallacies of the justice system prevailing in most areas of the world.
In that, we see both sides of the same coin of frustration and helplessness through Connor going above and beyond for the little child separated from his mother.
Yes, Hector's screams of agony were nothing short of heartbreaking, but Connor's conviction eventually resorting to a stance of acceptance also resonates with the powerlessness society feels in the wake of a problem ablaze.
Luckily, Connor's drive inspires us once again, allowing us vicariously to live through someone dedicated to bringing a change. 'How to Get Away with Murder' Season 6 airs on Thursdays at 10 pm/9 c only on ABC.