Deportation crisis lingers 7 years later

Fear, persecution, prejudice, families divided. This is the reality of thousands of immigrants — legal or not — who left behind country, culture and friends to search for the American Dream. Seven years ago, the previous paragraph was the opening of a column of mine. The fact that those words are as relevant today as they were in 2007 is a sad commentary on the inaction and sheer injustice toward immigrants of one of the worst-performing Congresses ever, and of a President given to pretty words that are much too often just that, pretty words.

Those were the days when the Rev. Donna Schaper, the senior minister of the historic Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, along with Juan Carlos Ruiz, a former Catholic priest and current- ly the Disaster Response Director of the Long Island Episcopal Diocese, founded the New Sanctuary Movement in New York.

“A lot of children have been brutally separated from their families, this is unAmerican; family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” Schaper said in those days.

Today, seven years later, Schaper and Ruiz are keenly aware that immigrants are still being deported at a record pace and their families mercilessly torn apart. That’s why they are once more working to revive the sanctuary movement in the city. The movement is already in full bloom in the rest of the nation.

“We will launch it in New York again at the end of the month,” Schaper said. “It’s so upsetting that Obama has deported even more people this year.”

Judson Memorial, Iglesia Española Evangélica in the Bronx, Iglesia de Cristo in Brentwood, L.I. and Good Shepherd Lutheran in Brooklyn are so far the churches committed to offering physical refuge to immigrant families at risk of imminent deportation.

And now, there are new elements to be taken into account.

One of them is that the City Council is about to approve legislation allowing New York City to stop honoring immigration detention requests without a warrant from a federal judge. This, Schaper and Ruiz believe, will reduce the number of deportations and consequently the number of families in need of physical refuge.

Also, because more people are coming from Central America fleeing persecution, the nature of the immigration crisis has changed.

“This is no longer just a humanitarian crisis, but a refugee crisis,” Ruiz said. “Many of the people who arrived in the last couple of years came fleeing organized crime and paramilitary violence.

“They have valid claims to refugee status and what they need more than physical sanctuary is decent housing and a work permit while they wait for their status to be clarified.”

It’s a whole new ball game for Schaper, Ruiz and the sanctuary movement in New York.