Churches plan fight to welcome refugees
The New York Times
The fight against President Trump’s executive orders to turn away refugees, deport undocumented immigrants and build a wall along the Mexican border is about to escalate in many American churches.
A broad network of 37 Protestant and Orthodox Christian denominations will announce on Friday a campaign to mobilize its congregants — some 30 million Americans in all — to lobby the president and members of Congress to rescind the executive orders.
In a declaration hammered out over the last month, church leaders call the orders “unjust and immoral” and say they run counter to “the values we as people of faith hold dear: to welcome the stranger and assist those most in need.”
“It is imperative that we speak out against the notion that refugees are a threat to our safety,” the declaration adds. “They are not.”
The president’s Jan. 27 executive order, which he called necessary for national security, barred people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the country for 90 days, stopped refugee admissions for 120 days and banned refugees from Syria indefinitely. The White House is expected to issue a revised order soon.
American Christians have been divided over Mr. Trump’s order, according to a poll released last month by the Pew Research Center. White evangelical Protestants supported the order by more than three to one, the poll showed, while white mainline Protestants supported it by a slim margin (50 to 47 percent), and three in five Catholics opposed it.
The new campaign is being organized by the Orthodox and mainline Protestant churches affiliated with the National Council of Churches and Church World Service, a charity that resettles refugees.
It calls on congregants and pastors to appeal to their elected officials, sign postersize copies of the declaration displayed in their houses of worship, dedicate one Sunday before Easter to honor refugees and immigrants, and raise $1 million to support them.
Hundreds of churches and synagogues across the country have already offered to provide sanctuary or other support to undocumented immigrants in fear of deportation.
And other faith-based resettlement agencies have spoken out against the refugee and travel ban, including World Relief, an evangelical agency; HIAS, a Jewish group; and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Meanwhile in other migrant news, as the Protestant and Orthodox Christians prepared to act, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the leader of the Washington archdiocese’s 620,000 Catholics, said Thursday that Catholic values call on the United States not to deport people already living in our country.
Also, a group of 63 police chiefs and sheriffs from around the country, who formed a Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force in 2015, have issued a letter saying they do not want their officers acting as federal immigration officers.
At the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents nabbed a young “dreamer” applicant, Daniela Vargas, as she was leaving a news conference where she spoke publicly about her case.
Days earlier, an Illinois town in a region that largely supported Mr. Trump rallied around Juan Carlos Hernandez Pacheco after he was arrested last month for being in this country without immigration papers.