Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Mexican leaves church sanctuary free man
Facing deportation to Mexico and fearing separation from his children, Javier Flores Garcia took refuge last year in a Methodist church in downtown Philadelphia. Members of the congregation prepared a makeshift bedroom for him in the basement and promised to give him sanctuary, no matter how long he needed it.
On Oct.11, after nearly 11 months, Flores walked out of the church for good, a rare winner among the tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who have fought battles over deportation this year.
His case was resolved in an unusual way: He has been promised a special type of visa given to victims of crime who assist the police. But even so, Flores’ freedom gives the growing sanctuary movement, organized by houses of worship across the country to protect unauthorized immigrants, a small victory in the face of a widespread federal crackdown.
Flores’ case shows “that when we fight, and when we resist, that we win,” said Erika Almiron, executive director of Juntos, an immigrant rights organization in Philadelphia that took up Flores’ case.
President Donald Trump came into office vowing to rid the country of millions of immigrants in
the United States illegally, and immigration arrests have risen by nearly 40 percent in 2017, compared with the previous year, to a rate of almost 400 people a day.
Since Trump was elected, 34 people facing deportation have publicly taken refuge inside of churches, including four this week, according to the Rev. Noel Andersen, a minister of the United Church of Christ and the national grass-roots coordinator for Church World Service, an ecumenical
human rights and refugee resettlement organization. So far, seven of those 34 have left their sanctuaries after winning relief from deportation, he said.
“These are not only our friends and our community members, they’re oftentimes our congregational members as well,” said Andersen, who helps coordinate the sanctuary coalition.
Flores settled into life inside the church, helping out with painting and repairs, setting up tables for the church’s soup kitchen and praying in the magnificent Gothic sanctuary. His young sons, missing him at home, sometimes stayed with him overnight at the church.
“The hardest thing for me was all the suffering my kids had to go through, all the psychological trauma,” Flores said. “But we knew that I had a strong case, and I needed to keep on fighting to be with them.”
His stay in sanctuary was among the longest, but given that President Barack Obama also made extensive use of deportations, there are two other people still taking refuge after more than a year and a half. At the other end of the spectrum, Andersen said, one woman from Guatemala who took refuge in July in a Pentecostal church in New Haven, Conn., had her immigration case resolved in less than a week.
This week, churches in Raleigh, N.C.; Meriden, Conn.; and Highland Park, N.J.; announced that they were offering sanctuary to four people. The New Jersey church took in a couple who say they could face persecution for their Christian faith if they were deported to Indonesia. It is their second time in sanctuary in the same church, according to the pastor, Seth Kaper-Dale, an immigration
Science and religion are believed to be in harmony in the Bahai faith, Zohoori said.
“Religion without science becomes superstition,” Zohoori said. “Science without religion can lead to catastrophic things like the atomic bomb and unbelievable cruelty that one man can inflict on another.”
“If [science and religion] appear to be in conflict, it’s just because we haven’t investigated far enough to figure out where the harmony really is,” said Dan Reimer, a retired public health worker.
One of the main tenets also involves the investigation of truth, said Roy, who is involved with the Little Rock area spiritual assembly.
“We’re meant to investigate reality, we’re meant to investigate our spiritual lives — we can’t be told what we believe by someone else,” he said. “The belief is that we have to investigate [for] ourselves.”
For Bahais, that means making an active decision at the age of 15 — thought by Bahais to be the age of spiritual maturity — to declare themselves as adherents of the faith, because being born to a Bahai family doesn’t automatically mean a person is identified as belonging to the Bahai religion.
There also aren’t clergy to discuss the decision with, because the Bahai faith does not have professional clergy. At the area level there are spiritual assemblies, over which is a national assembly. The faith’s top governing council is the Universal House of Justice, a group of nine men elected by members of the faith who have headquarters at the Bahai World Center in Haifa, Israel.
At the area level, Roy said, places where residents worship are developed as community centers. Little Rock’s Bahai Center is one of those places, and Bahais consider it a community center as well as a center for Bahais.
“One of the hallmarks of our communities is what
you call an outward-looking focus,” Reimer said. “We’re not so concerned just with the needs of our members. We’re concerned about the world at large and the community we live in and what we can do to improve [those conditions].”
BEAUTY IN DIVERSITY
Ameria Jones of Little Rock, who is black, was well traveled by the age of 6 when her family settled in Little Rock in the 1960s during the civil rights movement.
“[Living in the U.S.] was quite a shock because we had been blessed to live very protectively on Army bases, and things [in Little Rock] were very different,” said Jones, whose father served in the Army. “We grew up [meeting] people from all over the world who worshipped everywhere, and they would make their worship home wherever they felt loved.”
There had been “uncomfortable moments” in the church the family attended while she was growing up
— such as when she brought to church a friend who was white to join the black congregation where her family worshipped — and it wouldn’t be until one of her sisters brought the family to worship together at Little Rock’s Bahai Center on Pine Street when she was 17 that Jones learned about the Bahai faith.
“I didn’t understand why we had all these differences, and the Bahai faith just answered all those questions,” Jones said. “The Bahai faith [expressed] that in diversity there is so much beauty.”
Myrick, a specialist in the data analysis field, said the diversity among Bahais challenges followers as individuals to “face our own prejudices and overcome them” and to grow spiritually.
“If I sit in a room [where] everybody that believes the same thing I do, then I’m not going to grow very much because I’m not going to learn very much,” Myrick said. “But if I sit with 10 people [and] every one of us has a different perspective and a different view, I’m
going to think about what they said … and so we would never seek to be a homogeneous group.
“We constantly want that diversity so that we’re growing as a community, because one of the things as Bahais we’re trying to — as God has asked us to do — is to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization.”
200-YEAR LANDMARK
In recognition of the bicentenary occasion, former President Jimmy Carter sent a letter of congratulations to the Bahais’ National Spiritual Assembly, citing its central tenets as having the “same aspirations” of the work of The Carter Center, which he and his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, founded in 1982.
“We are heartened by your global community’s rededication to peace, racial justice, the equality of women and men, and the essential unity of all religions,” Carter said in the letter. “As many of our people struggle with persistent systemic justice against African Americans
and the Indigenous Nations, chronic violence against women, religious conflict, and endless war, the centrality of peace, human equality and religious unity found in the Bahai writings and activities can serve as an inspiration to those of all faiths and creeds.”
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola has signed a proclamation designating this weekend the celebration for the birth of Baha’u’llah, and it will be present at a closed event today commemorating the occasion.
David O’Neill of Rogers said, although Baha’u’llah’s birth is celebrated each year, the bicentenary carries extra meaning to Bahais.
“We believe that Baha’u’llah is the return of the spirit of God … and that this is a watershed moment in the history of mankind, just as it was when Christ came, or Muhammad, or any of the other great messengers,” O’Neill said. … “It’s very similar to the celebration of, say, the birth of Christ that Christians celebrate.”