SANCTUARY
activists are taking against the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
Another took place on Tuesday night at the church. Faith in Public Life, a strategy center of which Clark is the state director, hosted an event to unite faith communities offering sanctuary and to call on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to end what they call “aggressive deportations.”
Activists said it was the first event of its kind.
“Do not be discouraged, because we are going to win this fight,” Espinal said to the more than 120 people at Columbus Mennonite and to others in sanctuary in North Carolina, Texas and Pennsylvania via video, and to a live Facebook audience. “We will not stop fighting and we will show this administration that we are here. We’re here as people to
follow our dreams.”
The event supported what some experts are saying: that the sanctuary movement is growing nationally.
“It’s a very profound and active form of resistance that has really been sweeping the country,” said Katherine CullitonGonzalez, senior counsel at Demos, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit group fighting for democracy. “It’s not only helping individual immigrants but raising awareness, and it’s a moral call as well as a legal call.”
There are 37 immigrants in sanctuary in the United States, said the Rev. Noel Andersen, Washington-based grassroots coordinator with Church World Service, which coordinates churches’ sanctuary efforts. Churches are labeled “sensitive locations” by ICE, which will try to avoid “enforcement actions” inside. Before, those people had received stays of removal under the Obama administration, he said.
“What we see then is a shift in political policy that is politically motivated,” Andersen said. “... It’s to show they are enforcing these anti-immigration policies.”
In November, ICE released statistics saying it had arrested more than 41,000 people in the country illegally in the previous 100 days, an increase of 37.6 percent over the same period in 2016. Three-quarters were convicted criminals, ICE said.
ICE was “given clear direction to focus on threats to public safety and national security, which has resulted in a substantial increase in the arrest of convicted criminal aliens,” said ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan in a statement. “However, when we encounter others who are in the country unlawfully, we will execute our sworn duty and enforce the law.”
ICE isn’t “dismantling organized crime,” Clark said, it’s “detaining mothers.”
That’s why activists want to come together to further their resistance.
“It’s an important step in the resistance movement, in the sanctuary movement, to come together,” Herrera said. “The power of coming together will be very, very historical, radical and groundbreaking and moving.”