At the end of September, LIRS led a mission to Tucson, AZ to bear witness to the conditions of detention centers and immigration facilities housing children and individuals. The following story is the final piece of a five-part series we’re calling”Border Trip 2018” — a firsthand account written by Pastor Clint Schnekloth, Board Chair of Canopy Northwest Arkansas. To read the series in its entirety, you can go here.
Breaking Down the Barriers
After our visit to Sycamore Canyon, our team returned to Tucson for visits with two immigrant advocacy groups. First, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which is “the only organization in Arizona that provides free legal and social services to detained men, women, and children under threat of deportation.”
The day we were out at Eloy, I was able to take a look at the list of approved visits to Eloy over the previous week. Many were contractors and construction crews, clearly there to maintain the building. Then, Casa Mariposa was listed. But the most frequently approved visitors came through the Florence Project. These lawyers give their time, they give it freely, and they give it frequently.
After the Florence Project, our team visited with AmyBeth Willis of the Southern Arizona Sanctuary Coalition. This “New Sanctuary” movement, birthed out of the original sanctuary movement of the 80s, has over time expanded to encompass a wider range of issues, but remains focused on the specific building community around the kind of sanctuary offered by churches to immigrants.
“As people of faith and people of conscience, we pledge to resist the new Administration’s policy proposals to target and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and discriminate against marginalized communities. We will open our congregations and communities as sanctuary spaces for those targeted by hate, and work alongside our friends, families and neighbors to ensure the dignity and human rights of all people—Sanctuary Pledge 2016”
For the New Sanctuary movement, sanctuary is something extended in physical places of worship, but also in the streets, on campuses, cities, counties and states, and more generally everywhere, ensuring safety and freedom for immigrants and asylum seekers. I especially love their fourfold definition. Sanctuary is a:
Response to raids, detentions, deportations, and the criminalization of immigrants
Strategy to fight individual cases of deportation, to advocate for an end to mass detention and deportation to amplify the voices of immigrants
Vision for what our communities and world can be
Moral imperative to take prophetic action, of radical hospitality, rooted in the ancient traditions of our faith communities.
What Can We Do?
On the flight home after these meetings, I confess I ended up in a kind of exhausted stupor. So much of this system seems so big, it’s difficult to know how to act. I felt morally traumatized simply by witnessing the punitive, degrading, dehumanizing nature of our detention system. It’s alarming to visit maximum security protocols enacted on a population that has really demonstrated no risk of violence at all. And as a parent, it’s dispiriting to encounter so many children separated from family and loved ones as they seek asylum in our country, and realize we are prioritizing supposed security needs of our own nation over the developmental needs of the children.
I believe expanding networks of sanctuary will be the most effective way to respond, strategize, vision, and center ourselves in the moral imperatives moving forward. But still I felt some despair: what can we do?
All of this takes me to life back in Arkansas. I’m out on the soccer fields between games, catching up on the news in one hand while carrying the bag of balls to the next field. I know, as the coach I should have my mind fully in game mode, but the visits of the past weekend are still capturing my heart. The headline reads: “ICE Arrested Undocumented Immigrants Who Came Forward To Take In Undocumented Children.” When the CNN article pops up, my first response becomes: “That’s messed up.” Actually, my internal language is more colorful and harsh.
My next response is then, “Of course they’re doing that.” Since it is this administration’s highest priority to send asylum seekers back to the dangers of the places they have fled, of course they would use suffering children as bait to trap parents and loving relatives.
Making the visits has both raised my awareness and turned me more cynical. Welcome to life after you realize we are living in an increasingly carcerial state.
Try to place yourself in the shoes of the undocumented immigrants and their children. Take this simple outline and imagine yourself through it. Your home, the place you and your ancestors have lived for generations, becomes so dangerous you decide your only option is to flee. You put together whatever resources you can muster, and begin the long journey, across multiple countries, to a place of greater security, and hopefully opportunity.
In order to get to safety, you have to follow carefully circumscribed paths. Often, you receive recommendations on the best way to get to safety. Sometimes this includes trusting your children to the care of others for a time. You get into the country. Your son comes across the border later, only to be detained by ICE. You learn he’s held at a shelter, and all you need to do is go in for finger-printing, identify yourself as the parent, and you can be reunited with your child.
However, you know what detention is like. You know the many nefarious ways ICE operates, how it treats undocumented immigrants. You’ve never been given a fair hearing for your asylum claims, and you figure you never will. So if you go in, get finger-printed, you might be detained yourself, then deported, while your child remains here.
So what do you do? How can you decide? Leave your child in the shelter and hope that eventually you can circumvent the system and be reunited. Or come forward to take in your undocumented child, and risk further, even permanent separation.
And what if all your suspicions and worries are confirmed? The country you thought would offer refuge and safety really is separating families, really is permanently separating families from each other.
What will you do?
Or for you, dear reader. You learn your country is doing this to asylees. You may be a person of faith, in which case you know one of the most frequently repeated injunctions in all of Scripture is there to protect the refugee, and to remind the people of God that they were once sojourners, so empathize with those who seek asylum.
“Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner” (Deuteronomy 27:19).
“Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt” (Exodus 22:21).
We’re hitting the wrong targets, and missing the right ones. We’re filling detainee beds while failing to meet our refugee admissions goals. We are letting our borders define us.
But at least for people in my own faith tradition, we believe Christ is at the center, not our borders. So recentering in Christ will mean a new beginning, treating immigrants as neighbors to love, not scapegoats to expel.
It is our responsibility to do this, so no parent tomorrow ever has to make the decision we’re forcing on undocumented parents today. As I make my next drive to LaSale Detention Center in Louisiana to visit a parishioner, I’ll be praying no parent has to again. Heaven knows I’ll have time.
Thanks so much to you, Pastor Clint Schnekloth, for your fine commentary regarding our country’s attitude toward people fleeing from Mexico. Much of this same attitude is wrought upon the many refugees and asylum seekers from war-torn countries elsewhere in our world today. You argue the same points that I made in my recent book, “Refugees! A Family’s Search for Freedom and a Church That Helped Them Find It”.
In all seriousness, unless we have walked in these people’s shoes, there is no way we can fully empathize with their desperate situations. Nor can we begin to imagine the horrors that they have lived through when leaving their homeland.
When I wrote my book, “Refugees! A Family’s Search for Freedom and a Church That Helped Them Find It”, I chronicled the story of our church’s resettlement of refugees in Bryan, Ohio, where my husband was pastor. As the family learned English and was able to share their story of escape, there were numerous times when, emotionally, I lived their experiences with them. I had no schema for giving up my homeland or losing family members because of forced migration. I believe that many of the same emotions are similar to the experiences of people attempting to leave Mexico today.
In the year that our refugee family was with us, I worked alongside them, day by day. As time passed and we learned their story, I spent many nights agonizing over their experiences. In my twilight sleep, I ‘walked in their shoes’, listening to them again and again sharing how they fled their country, what it was like when forced to abandon their baby, their fright when soldiers threatened them in hiding, etc…
In time, I was able to chronicle their escape, but at other times, while writing their story, I had to lay down my pen because I could no longer fathom their horror.
In the months that followed, as their English progressed, I began to realize that I would never be able to fully understand their family’s plight unless I was a refugee, too. Thus, after our visits during the day, I spent many a night, unable to sleep, re-living our conversations, and jotting them down under my pillow. During these moments, I tossed, I turned, I cried, and prayed while re-living their agony. They didn’t want to leave their homeland, but circumstances beyond their control forced them to leave.
The worst occurred several months into their resettlement when, as their English improved, we learned that they were forced to leave their baby with their elderly parents in Vietnam for fear it would cry and give them away in hiding. After the war, it took many years before they were able to retrieve her.
Contrary to the vitriol that we hear in today’s public arena, people who are fleeing their homeland are some of the most desperate people on Earth today. Would we be in their situations, we likely would do the same, in the interest of our survival.
Refugees have no country to call home. Many of their relatives have been killed or are missing. All too often girls are raped and forced into brothels. Young boys are captured and, if they’re not slaughtered, they are incarcerated.
We who live in America, the land of the free and the brave, have little to no schema for what it’s like to be an asylum seeker, an IDP (Internally Displaced Person), or a Refugee who can never go home again. These are some of the most desperate, and the most vetted people on Earth, when it comes to crossing a country’s borders. Even today, there are refugees from the Vietnam war who still live in huts on the island of Pulau Bidong. Many have been sequestered there for more than 30 years. Thank you again for a heart-felt essay that, hopefully, will change the world for the better.
Dr. Jeanne Jacoby Smith, McPherson, Kansas
A note to readers of this message:
To empathize with the trauma of people, world-wide, who are in similar situations such as those who are leaving Mexico, my book, “Refugees! A Family’s Search for Freedom and a Church That Helped Them Find It” may be found in your local library or on amazon.com.
If you should decide to read it, let its message sink into your heart until you, too, are compelled to cry out on their behalf, so that they may find asylum in a welcoming country.
Pastor Clint Schnekloth, blessings to you and your church as you salvage the lost and forsaken.
Most sincerely,