Our elected Federal officials are failing to treat Central American refugees with any kind of decency.
El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is a nightmare of not just grinding poverty and hunger, but also violence for children. http://bitly.is/VRwdvN is a collection of journalist reports showing that these are children fleeing for thier lives from organized gang violence in their home. These circumstances that they are fleeing qualifies them as refugees.
We are clear that The United States’ War on Drugs has created this crisis and has endangered these children.
The Bible tells reverent Christians and Jews… When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God[1]. Outside of being guided by faith, there are Americans who recognize that they are descendants of immigrants who benefitted from a much simpler and more permissive set of immigration laws. It is that spirit, that sense that immigration has built our great nation that drives us to support these refugees. |
We object to the opacity of the legal process that all undocumented immigrants are put through. There is no way of independently verifying that these immigrants’ rights[2] are protected. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have a legacy of poor and evasive communication with citizens and furtive conduct of their offices - we have no confidence in these agencies to respect migrants’ human or civil rights.
It behooves us to take these youth and grant them refugee status. Wild demands to seal our border are unrealistic. If these children come back, they won’t think of us kindly, they could remember our indifference and look at us as crime targets.
We instruct our Federal representatives to
- process these refugee applicants under Public Law 110–457 (William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008) in the same form as it was enacted on December 23, 2008.
- oppose any and all legislation to change that law
- oppose any and all attempts to circumvent the proscriptions of that law
- fully fund the asylum proceedings of all refugee applicants
- find appropriate supervision and housing of the refugees
- feed, clothe and educate the refugees while they are being processed in the U.S. immigration courts / system
- open all facilities and proceedings for these refugees for independent oversight by immigrant advocates and legal council
- No restrictions shall be placed on the disclosure of the findings of these oversight activities
[1] http://bit.ly/1kwt2zq Leviticus 19:33-34
[2] http://www.salon.com/2010/02/01/collins_5/ demonstrates that immgrants have civil rights like all citizens