 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
May
21, 2007 
VOL.
45, NO. 10Oakland,
CA
Religious groups
launch new
sanctuary program for immigrants
 |
| Juan, an illegal immigrant from
Guatemala facing deportation, sits with his daughter during the
public launch of the new sanctuary movement in Los Angeles May 9.
|
WASHINGTON
(CNS) -- With immediate plans to shelter families in Los Angeles, New
York and San Diego, an interfaith coalition calling itself the New Sanctuary
Movement announced plans to try to protect families from deportation in
churches and other faith-affiliated places around the country.
Following the example of the 1980s church-based network that sheltered
Central American immigrants who sought refuge from civil wars at home,
the New Sanctuary Movement hopes to enlist religious congregations around
the country to publicly shelter people who are at risk of deportation.
The organization is particularly focusing on “mixed-status”
families, or those that include a combination of people who are in the
country illegally and legal residents or U.S. citizens.
Among the initial steps announced by the organization May 9:
• Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church in Los Angeles will host
a single father identified only as Jose, who has two preteen children
who were born in the United States. Jose faces deportation to his native
Mexico.
• Three Lutheran churches in Brooklyn will share hosting a Chinese
couple and their two U.S. citizen toddlers. The couple, identified as
Joe and Mei, failed in their attempt to obtain legal asylum in the United
States, sought out of fear that they might face prison and involuntary
sterilization under China’s family planning laws.
• In San Diego, a Quaker congregation has taken in Marco, a college
graduate who came to the United States on a temporary visa as a 4-year-old
with his family. He excelled academically and worked his way through college.
Bad advice from an immigration attorney hired to pursue legalization for
his family more than a decade ago left them facing deportation to Mexico.
• Three Manhattan Lutheran churches are sponsoring the family of
a Haitian man who entered the United States legally in 1986, but now faces
deportation due to a drug possession conviction in 1989. The man, identified
only as Jean, has a wife and five children, including a newborn, who are
all U.S. citizens. His deportation to Haiti would force the rest of the
family to live in a country foreign to them, or struggle to survive in
New York without the help of the family breadwinner, according to sanctuary
movement organizers.
“Our concern is the separation of families, the anguish and suffering
they endure under the current law that doesn’t have a heart,”
said Father Juan Carlos Ruiz in a May 8 phone interview with Catholic
News Service.
Father Ruiz, a New Jersey priest who is founding director of Asociacion
Tepeyac, an immigrant community services agency in the Bronx borough of
New York City, said the situations of families like those being sheltered
illustrate that “the law needs to adapt to the demands of justice.”
He said the immigration problem in the United States is “not just
a political or social phenomena, but a spiritual and moral one. We are
speaking from our prophetic roots.”
Father Ruiz said 15 congregations in New York have committed to sponsoring
families in sanctuary.
Since April 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, a division
of the Department of Homeland Security, has dramatically stepped up its
enforcement of deportation orders. Currently 52 teams of agents are tracking
down immigrant fugitives or “absconders,” who have orders
of deportation. A year ago, 35 teams were doing that work.
By the end of fiscal 2006, total deportations, including voluntary departures
and other categories, were up to 186,000, over the previous year’s
total of 132,000.
A Chicago Methodist parish has been hosting Elvira Arrellano in its church
since August. She has a pending order of deportation, but she has said
she is unwilling to bring her 8-year-old U.S. son to live in Mexico, a
country he doesn’t know.
Arellano said she decided to seek sanctuary in the church as an act of
civil disobedience. ICE agents had made no move to arrest her at the church
as of May 10.
Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said Cardinal
Roger M. Mahony is leaving it up to individual pastors to decide whether
to participate in the project.
