Our UU value of world community puts us in partnership with people fleeing violence, poverty, and persecution in their home countries. The accident of a person’s place of birth should not define the scope of their lives.
“Every year people come to the United States seeking protection because they have suffered persecution or fear that they will suffer persecution due to:
Race
Religion
Nationality
Membership in a particular social group
Political opinion
If you are eligible for asylum you may be permitted to remain in the United States. To apply for Asylum, file a Form I-589, Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal, within one year of your arrival to the United States. There is no fee to apply for asylum.
You may include your spouse and children who are in the United States on your application at the time you file or at any time until a final decision is made on your case. To include your child on your application, the child must be under 21 and unmarried. For more information see our Form I-589, Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal page.
If you have an asylum application pending with us, you can check your case status online. All you need is the receipt number that we mailed you after you filed your application.”
That information is on the website for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under the subsections Humanitarian, Refugees, Asylum.
But the response from the United States for people seeking asylum by presenting themselves to immigration authorities at ports of entry along our nation’s southern border has been anything but humanitarian.
Here’s how the conditions in the ICE detention centers were described by a group of migrants who had recently been released to a shelter operated by Catholic Charities due to overcrowding at the detention center: This is from an article in the Los Angeles Times from March 20, 2019 titled, “Border Patrol Says Detention Centers Are Full — And Starts Releasing Migrants” reported by Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Molly O’Toole
“Some migrants said they and their children had been detained by the Border Patrol in crowded, chilly cells they called hieleras, or iceboxes. Others said they were held for nearly a week behind chain-link fences in the processing center, which they referred to as la perrera, or the kennel.
They slept on pallets that lined the concrete floor. Border Patrol provided medical care, but many of the children developed coughs, colds and fevers, migrants said.
‘It’s uncomfortable,’ said Kerlin Lopez, 21, who was released with his 3-year-old, fever-stricken daughter Tuesday after four days in the icebox and planned to join family in Los Angeles. ‘They don’t have enough space.’”
Why don’t we have enough space in our detention centers?
Because earlier this year we were holding about 50,000 persons daily, while the detention centers have the capacity to house about 40,000 persons. After the government shutdown in January (remember the government shutdown?) Congress passed funding to increase average capacity to 45,000 persons daily.
Why are so many people being held?
Because, “The number of border-crossers taken into U.S. custody topped 100,000 for the second consecutive month in April.”
That’s the first sentence of an article titled, “From The Border, More Frustrating Immigration Numbers For President Trump” by Nick Miroff published in the Washington Post on Wednesday (May 8).
Here’s a little more from that article:
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detained 109,144 migrants along the boundary with Mexico last month, a 6 percent increase from March, as monthly arrests reached their highest point since 2007. Unauthorized border crossings have more than doubled in the past year, and they are on pace to exceed 1 million on an annual basis, as Guatemalan and Honduran families continue streaming north in record numbers with the expectation they will be quickly processed and released from custody.”
Because the Trump administration lies about everything, and invents threats and incites fear as a deliberate tactic, it’s tempting when Trump describes the situation at the border as a “crisis” to counter that “no it isn’t.” But the situation at our border, and our immigration system in total, is, in fact, a crisis. It’s is a humanitarian crisis of suffering people, sick people, children separated from their parents, persons seeking help with no place to go, and no place to go back to. And, it’s a crisis now, only because for decades we have had a byzantine, laborious, bureaucratic, underfunded, immigration system. And we have a byzantine, laborious, bureaucratic, underfunded, immigration system because for decades, even centuries, the Untied States has been deeply ambivalent about persons entering our country, resulting in confused policy.
We do have a crisis at the border. A humanitarian crisis for suffering migrants. And a spiritual crisis for Americans who don’t know how to respond to the suffering of our neighbors.
From the Washington Post
“‘Our apprehension numbers are off the charts,’ Carla Provost, chief of the Border Patrol, said in testimony to senators in Washington on Wednesday afternoon. ‘We cannot address this crisis by shifting more resources. It’s like holding a bucket under a faucet. It doesn’t matter how many buckets we have if we can’t turn off the flow.’”
Trump’s policy to turn off the flow has been to remove Kirstjen Nielsen as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and vow to go in a “tougher direction.” Again from the Washington Post:
“Toughness, for Trump, includes the deployment of razor wire, thousands of U.S. soldiers and plans to build hundreds of miles of barriers, as well as threats to close the border entirely. But physical measures have done little to discourage Central Americans who are fleeing grim poverty, endemic violence and crop failures and see their relatives and neighbors successfully completing the journey to the United States.”
Carla Provost, chief of the Border Patrol, says that the response from the US immigration service has been “like holding a bucket under a faucet.” She says we have to turn off the flow.
Imagine that you had a leaking pipe gushing water into your house, or, I don’t know, a leaking pipe flooding the bathroom in the church office at your church. How would you respond? How would you, “turn off the flow?”
President Trump’s response is to deploy troops, spread razor wire, separate parents from children and make detention centers so otherwise miserable that people stay away, and build a wall.
If we had responded to the flood in the church office by building a wall around it, we would currently have an office full of water with a wall around it. If we had deployed our church volunteers to get tough with the flood, and to make the water miserable so it would voluntarily retreat back into the pipe, how successful do you think we would be, and what would the church office look like today?
Turning off the flow is not building a higher dam to hold back the flood that keeps coming. Turning off the flow means solving the conditions that create the flood in the first place. It means going under the sink and turning off the valve. It means going to Central America and finding out why Central Americans are so desperate to get out of their country in the first place.
Here is a little more from the same article in the Washington Post this Wednesday.
“Officials say many of the migrants continue to stream north from Guatemala and Honduras, countries where massive numbers of residents are fleeing extreme poverty and domestic perils.
‘Guatemala and Honduras have seen over 1 percent of their total population migrate to the U.S. in the first seven months of this fiscal year,’ acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan, Nielsen’s replacement, said in a speech Tuesday that outlined his border strategy. He cited a U.S.-funded Vanderbilt University study that found 1 in 4 Guatemalans are interested in emigrating. Of those who want to emigrate, 85 percent said the United States is their preferred destination, McAleenan said.”
What is the response from the Administration to the “extreme poverty and domestic perils” in Central America? Well, it is mostly entirely about wrong.
Here’s one last little quote from the Washington Post article.
“Trump has directed the State Department to sever aid to Central American nations in response to the border surge. At other moments of pique he has blasted Mexican leaders, saying they are “doing nothing” to deal with the wave of migration moving through their country.”
In what way will severing US aid to these countries help resolve extreme poverty and domestic peril? It won’t. Less aid will actually increase the desperate conditions in Central America and convince even greater numbers that migrating to the US is their best hope for the future, even despite the incredible hardship of immigration and the less-than-welcoming US response.
Other parts of the Administration’s current plan, according to the acting DHS secretary are “eliminating the magnet for the most vulnerable migrants” meaning making the journey so perilous that people don’t attempt to emigrate. Adding barriers, technology and personnel along the U.S. Mexico border, in other words building a more forbidding dam; partnering with Mexico to increase its immigration enforcement capacities, in other words helping Mexico build their own forbidding dam. And finally, only one of the four pillars of the policy, partnering with Central American leaders to address “push” factors driving migrants to leave.
Can you imagine living in a place where conditions are so intolerable, that your best and most realistic hope for the future is to leave your home? To pack up your spouse and your children. To abandon your property. To leave your friends and extended family. And to begin walking, or perhaps to hitch a ride on a train, to travel for hundreds of miles (Honduras to Texas is about as far as Los Angeles to Des Moines) toward a place where you will be greeted with hieleras, iceboxes, and la perrera, the kennel, where you do not speak the language, and where your right to work and live permanently may never be legally recognized?
Here is some information about living conditions in Honduras according to a non-profit organization called the Borgen Project.
The murder rate in Honduras is one of the highest in the world. Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala form a particularly violent region plagued by political corruption, drug trafficking and post-war instability.
A large portion of Honduras is part of the Dry Corridor. The Dry Corridor is an area of Central America that has been experiencing prolonged and more frequent droughts in recent history. In years of extreme weather conditions, crop losses are reported to be as high as 60 percent in areas of maize production and 80 percent in regions of beans.
Food insecurity remains a serious problem, especially in rural areas. In the past four years, ceaseless drought has amplified this issue.
Data from 2016 show that more than 66 percent of the total population is living in poverty, with roughly 20 percent of the people experiencing extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day.
This is the cause of the flood. If you want to turn off the flow, these are the problems you address. Not merely “our” crisis at the southern border. But the crisis in Honduras and elsewhere that gives so many people no choice but to appear at our border asking for help.
And this crisis, not at our border, but in Central America, and in other parts of the world, is our crisis.
It’s our crisis because much of the suffering in those regions is directly connected to United States foreign policy over the years. It is our policies of deporting violent youth that spread the MS-13 gang from its origins in Los Angeles to El Salvador. It is drug users in America that make the drug cartels wealthy and powerful and dangerous. It is our policy of supporting corrupt right-wing dictators because we’re afraid of socialism, or supporting revolutionaries to start civil wars that cause untold chaos and misery. It is our over use of fossil fuels that contributes to climate change transforming once fertile farmland into “dry corridors”.
But more than that, it is our crisis, because the people who are leaving their homes and seeking asylum here in the United States are people. Because we, as Unitarian Universalists are committed to “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. These people are not strangers. They are not others. The accident of where you are born should not determine whether you live a life of health and opportunity. And until health and opportunity are available everywhere, we should not deny people the right to seek it wherever they can. They are our community. They are our people.
Throughout the church year we have been looking at the Five Developmental Tasks for a church moving through an interim period from one settled ministry to the next. As we approach the end of this year, we have turned to the fifth of the five, the tasks of connections. The connections task is to mark the ways that our congregation is tied in to partners within the denomination, and with local community organizations. Partnerships of mutuality where we find the support we need, and where we provide support to others.
Recognizing connections is part of the spiritual principle that calls us to work to improve living conditions worldwide, and to care for migrants when they appear at our border. We are connected.
And specifically this congregation is connected to several organizations that work on issues of immigration.
Every year our congregation raises money to fund scholarships for “dreamers” to attend college. Dreamers are the persons who were brought to the United States as children and have neither the documentation they need to reside legally in this country, nor any lived connection to the country they emigrated from. It is a moving part of our worship once a year in March when we get to hear testimonials from the young people we have helped and hear how they are creating lives for themselves that will help us all.
We also raise money annually for an organization called, Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition. Their mission is this: “We are a grassroots network of community organizations and individuals working for just immigration policies and practices that respect human rights and the dignity of immigrants, through education, services, and advocacy.” Church member Norma Chinchilla is the Executive Director of the organization, continuing advocacy work for Central American refuges that she has been leading for four decades now. We are privileged to have her presence and her expertise within our congregation.
In the future, migrants will continue to seek asylum and other forms of entry into the United States. It is a testimony of pride that our country represents a way of living that others see as a promise of hope and prosperity. While we work to end our foreign policies that create violence and poverty in other countries, and to provide aid in correcting the dangerous situations we have already created worldwide, we must also create an efficient US immigration system of justice and hospitality in our own country.
How will we meet the migrants at our border?
Let us offer them a seat at the welcome table. A seat available to all kinds of people.
Let us bid them welcome. Those who come with weary spirit seeking rest. Who come with troubles that are too much with them, may they find ease. Who come hurt and afraid may they find help and healing.
Let us be the people who see the troubles that others suffer through, so that nobody suffers alone; the people who know the sorrows of others, throughout the world and in our own community, the people who see the root causes of pain as well as the surface suffering, and let us be strive when the needful person comes walking along to our border, that we be the people who helps them feel that here, the heavens, at last, are breaking open and love is coming down.