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President Biden Urged to Visit US-Mexico Border

~ by Kurt Jensen, Global Sisters Report/Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON, D.D. – The announcement that the Biden administration was raising the limit of annual refugee admissions from 15,000 to 62,5000 was cause for celebration at a Georgetown University online discussion of migrant issues last week.

Sr. Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville, Texas, said more visibility would help the cause, so she invited President Joe Biden to visit the U.S. – Mexican border.

“Sometimes I always say the best way to understand what is happening at the border is to come and see, you know?” said the Sister of the Missionaries of Jesus, adding that it makes a difference when you “actually see the face of a child, a mother hurting and suffering for their babies.”

She said seeing this pain and the suffering up close “you then understand that your policies and your leadership will directly affect that life.”

Pimentel urged the president and other national leaders to “please come and see” with open hearts what is happening at the border.

“At some point, I will,” Biden said, when asked on March 21st if he’d visit the border, but no plans have been announced. Vice President Kamala Harris, who met virtually with Alejandro Giammatei, the President of Guatemala, on May 3, likewise has not made a border visit.

Dylan Corbett, Executive Director of the Hope Border Institute, said he thinks there have been positive, significant changes under the Biden administration.

“You saw, for example, in the lifting of the refugee cap a real strong commitment to building or rebuilding our capacity to resettle refugees around the world,” he said.

We’ve been talking about immigrants in really bad ways for the last four years, as people we ought to fear,” Corbett added.

“We’ve been vilifying and criminalizing and demonizing our migrant brothers and sisters for too long,” he said, noting that now the President has “changed the tone around immigration and recognized that this is an opportunity for compassion and to treat people with dignity.”

To read the complete article please click

What Pope Francis can Teach Us about How to Respond to Migrants

What Pope Francis can Teach Us about
How to Respond to Migrants
~ by M.T. Davila, National Catholic Reporter

Once again our attention is at the U.S. – Mexico border. Increased news media attention to the situation of minors in immigration detention centers highlights challenges brought on by new waves of people, many of them unaccompanied minors, seeking to escape profound violence and the ongoing impacts of natural disasters and the pandemic at home.

President Joe Biden has assigned a new role to Vice President Kamala Harris to oversee conditions at the border and to engage in diplomatic efforts with nations of origin to understand the major push factors leading migrants to undertake a perilous journey to the U.S. Here responsibilities include shaping diplomacy and coordinating aid efforts to more effectively address the situation.

Welcome, protect, promote, integrate. Under Pope Francis these four verbs have become the rubric shaping pastoral, ethical and political recommendations for responses to migrations globally that faithfully witness to Christian discipleship and respect the human dignity of peoples on the move.

The vulnerability of migrants, and the responsibility of receiving nations to tend to them, are privileged in Francis’ most recent encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Altogether, migrants and their plight are mentioned over 30 times throughout the document, equal in concern only to the poor. Francis proposed that welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating migrants are key markers of truly human fraternity and friendship. Because of this, the document could also be considered a treatise on welcoming the stranger, a map for nations an societies to better understand how to respond to this most critical sign of the times.

While every wave of migrants at the border is often presented by the media and political pundits as a crisis and a threat to our resources and security, our common humanity ought to ground our responses. Fratelli Tutti insists, “All individuals, whatever their origin, know that they are part of the greater human family, without which they will not be able to understand themselves fully. …No one people, culture or individual can achieve everything on its own.”

Our current moment challenges us as to how best to respond to the call to welcome, protect, promote and integrate those who arrive at our borders seeking safety in a land not their own. Pope Francis asks us to recognize them not as usurpers of unearned goods, but as essential to the vary fabric of who we are, a critical piece of our self-understanding, and contributors to the common good.

Biden’s language around this moment in our story of immigration echo some of the essential principles of Catholic Social Teaching. It is imperative that all the faithful in the U.S. carefully consider the map laid out for us by Pope Francis when considering how to transform a broken immigration system that makes vulnerable people, especially children, even more vulnerable.

 

Lack of U.S. Plan for Asylum Seekers Tempers Hope among Migrants and Advocates

~ by Soli Salgado, Global Sisters Report

For advocates for migrants and refugees, the response to incoming migrants at the border between the United States and Mexico is a source of emotional tension.

There is a sense of victory for the migrants and refugees who made it into the United States after months or years of uncertainty. However, there are also rising frustrations from potential asylees and activists spurred by the new U.S. presidential administration’s lack of preparation and clarity regarding the ongoing expulsion of asylum seekers.

Joe Biden fulfilled a campaign promise once lauded among immigration activists when he ended the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. The 2019 policy under former President Donald Trump forced more than 70,000 asylum seekers to wait for their U.S. court dates in Mexican border cities.

But no concrete plan for asylum-seekers emerged in its place, so while thousands of migrants were able to enter the United States in triumph since Biden rescinded the MPPs, others who have arrived at the border seeking asylum but who were not affected by the program are being expelled to Mexico.

“We do celebrate the progress that has been made,” said Sr. Tracey Horan, a Sister of Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods and Assistant Director of Education and Advocacy for the Kino Border Initiative in Nogoles, Arizona. “At the same time, it doesn’t feel like the response that we’re seeing is equal to the urgency that the people living it are feeling.”

The driving factors that make migrants flee their homes are only adding up, she said: the usual violence and corruption are now met with destruction from hurricanes and extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic.

Ambiguity over action

Immigration advocates bemoan the Biden’s administration’s lack of transparency and clear plans for those who continue their months-or years-long wait to present their cases for asylum, as well as the continuation of the Title 42 policy, a public health order from March 2020 that allows the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to expel migrants to prevent the coronavirus from spreading in holding facilities.

Dylan Corbett, Executive Director of the Hope Border Institute said the government is capable of handling the number of migrants currently crossing the border. But any instability along the border is largely due to the government’s “ambiguous response,” said Corbett, who lives in El Paso, Texas.

Missionary of Jesus Sr. Norma Pimentel agreed, noting that a “crisis” indicates a shortage of options. “But, I think the options are there – they’re just not being put forward,” said Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.

Biden’s Department of Homeland Security, unlike Trump’s, is not turning away unaccompanied minors at the border. Though the policy is intended to keep vulnerable children safe in the United States, it also tempts parents with the tough choice to send their children north without them.

“When I say ‘children,’ I’m not talking about 15 or 14 years old; I’m talking about 3, 5, 7 years old, completely by themselves,” said Chris Cabrera of the National Border Council, adding he would not have believed it if he had not talked to the children himself.

Joanne Williams, the Executive Director of the Kino Border Initiative remarks that the Biden administration underestimates the desperation of individuals who choose to embark on the dangerous journey north, she added. “People are making rational choices to try to protect their kids as best as they can.”

The best ways to respond 

Advocates agree that the United States should work to stabilize the Northern Triangle – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – so families don’t need to become migrants or refugees at all. They are also clear about how the government can respond to the border’s immediate needs.

As Sr. Horan put it: more health and human resources, fewer troops.

“What we don’t need are more Border Patrol agents,” she said. What we need are social workers and asylum officers and judges, people to accompany these families through the legal process they have a right to.” To read the complete article please click here 

Chasing a Dream Because of a Rumor

~ by Rhina Guidos, Catholic News Service

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (CNS) Father Hector Maldonado of El Buen Pastor Parish in Apancoyo, El Salvador, said he recently tried to convince a family of five from his parish, who told him of their plans to leave [for the U.S. border], not to undertake the dangerous journey.

They sold all their possessions, the Catholic priest said, and he told them what he had heard and read: that people were being turned away at the border. But the family seemed intent on chasing the dream of entering the United Sates despite the dangers, full of hope because of the rumor that U.S. President Joe Biden had said that he would allow anyone who entered the U.S. within the first 100 days of his presidency to stay. The rumor is rampant.

The only this that Fr. Maldonado could convince them of, in the end, he told Catholic News Service (CNS), was not to turn over the deed to their house to smugglers as a down payment. The family needed to have a place to return to if they were deported, he told them.

Scalabrinian Father Mauro Verzeletti who works with migrants in Latin America told CNS that he thinks the rumor of a border open to all began because of a mixed message sent by the Biden Administration when it announced a 100-day moratorium on most deportations.
“I think Biden sent a confusing message with the moratorium and others changed the conversation to say ‘the border is open,’” said Fr. Verzeletti.

And now it’s a message that is hard to reverse, he said.

Some smugglers have taken advantage of the rumor, offering among their services a drop-off of families and unaccompanied children and teens to border agents, telling them the agents will process them and allow them to stay in the U.S. as long as they turn themselves in.

At the migrant shelter he operates in Guatemala, Father Verzeletti said he has seen in recent days an increase in people fleeing as the consequences of multiple crisis are hitting Central America.

Crop destruction from storms produced by climate change, the pandemic’s destruction of small and medium businesses, and political upheaval in parts of Central America has accelerated the movement of people from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua as they flee poverty and hunger, Father Verzeletti said.

Migrant houses run by the Scalabrinian religious order and other Catholic groups are seeing children weighing half of what they should, said Father Verzeletti. Other countries should take notice because climate change and destruction of nature in Central America, as well as political strife, will only increase the movement of people. To read the complete article click here

Immigration Advocates Call on Biden to Address Border Crisis

~ by J.D. Long-Garcia AMERICA Magazine

Some things have changed on the southern border, but a lot of things remain the same, according to Catholic humanitarian groups on the ground.

The Biden administration last month began processing the asylum applications of migrants under the current Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a policy of the previous administration that empowered immigration officials to return thousands of asylum seekers to Mexico to await court decisions in the immigration court system. The highest concentration of migrants have been waiting in Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso. Texas

Dylan Corbett, the Executive Director of the Hope Border Institute, has noted an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors in the area. “The United States is obligated to receive, to ensure their safety and to keep them in the least restrictive setting possible – and to reunite them with their families of sponsors in other parts of the country,” h e said. But because of the overload at the border, some minors are exceeding a 72 hour court-mandated limit for detention with the Border Patrol.

Families with children are also showing up at the border in El Paso. “For the most part, nobody is being allowed [into the U.S.] through this sector, except for folks who are cleared for return under MPP or unaccompanied minors,” Mr. Corbett said.

The changes to MPP, also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, let to a lot of confusion among immigrants and asylum seekers south of the border, according to Rev. Pat Murphy, Director of the Casa del Migrante shelter in Tijuana.

“All they heard was [that] the border was open, that asylum was open, when in fact it was only for those who have been on ‘Remain in Mexico’ for the last two years,” the Scalabrinian priest, said. “They think that being there, the government is just going to say, ‘O.K., just come on in.” But, they’re not going to say that,” he said.

There is a lot of misinformation, and sometimes that misinformation is done purposefully by the coyotes [human traffickers] in the south, and they say, ‘Go to the border; go north. If you go to the border and wait in line, they let you in,” Fr. Murphy said. “The desperation of the people is moving them to do anything.” But, the Biden administration has yet to open the border to asylum seekers.

In the Mexican city of Nogales, Sara Ritchie of the Kino Border Initiative said they are also experience an increase in the number of migrants. Asylum seekers in border campus and vulnerable people seeking to flee Central America “have been enduring the pandemic for a year,” Ms. Ritchie said. Many of them have been out of work and cannot “sustain being unemployed” any longer, their poverty making them especially susceptible to pressure and threats from criminal gangs.

While she knows that MPP cases area being processed in California and Texas, she said few if any are being processed in Arizona.

Father Murphy expects changes to immigration and asylum policies will not come quickly.

“Biden can’t overturn everything in a month or so,” he said. It’s going to be a long haul process. Biden is going to get it from both sides. The people on the ground are going to want him to move really quickly and the people who are anti-immigrant are going to say he’s moving too quickly.”

But the immigration crisis is not going away.

“The reality is that migrants are going to continue to come to the U.S.-Mexico border fleeing a toxic cocktail of causes, whether it’s climate change, or it’s political instability or violence or unemployment and the effects of the COVID crisis, or the hurricanes that recently hit Central America,” Mr. Corbett said.

It is a time for the Catholic Church to step up its efforts, he said. “We need the moral voice of the church right now to make the case to the nation and our policy makers that this is about welcoming Christ in the stranger.”

To read the complete article click here

“Oh Mercy”

“Oh Mercy”- A Documentary on Migration
Highlighting the Refugees and Migrants Entangled in the Crisis at the U.S. – Mexico Border
~ by Soli Salgado, Global Sisters Report

A face familiar to most North American sisters takes center stage in the upcoming film “Oh Mercy,” a 10-minute documentary that highlights the refugees and migrants entangled in the crisis in the U.S. – Mexico border.

The filmmakers chose Missionary of Jesus Sr. Norma Pimentel to be the lens through which they view the issue of migration, focusing on the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, where she regularly ministers.

With Pimentel as the film’s “heroine,” the audience can witness the realities on the border in a “highly compassionate, not preachy way,” Robert Bilheimer, the director of the documentary, said in an interview with Global Sisters Report. Bilheimer thought Pimentel was a “compelling figure” to tell the story at the border.
(Bilheimer’s previous films covered South African apartheid, human trafficking and the AIDs epidemic.)”Oh“If you can help people see and believe that basic goodness and humanity in people, and if they see, unvarnished, their suffering – our experience is that people respond to it,” he said.

Seeing [migration] as the “defining geopolitical, cultural, humanitarian issue of our time,” Bilheimer said the series was an effort to “deconstruct” the many forces behind the involuntary migration seen around the world, whether it is due to climate change, gang violence or government failure.

The documentary depicts just a few of the thousands of violent and desperate situations that have driven families to flee their homes in Central America. Bilheimer said it’s up to the viewers to determine what the film is about, but for him, it’s a demonstration of the capacity for “deliberate evil – and I use the word carefully and advisably” – in the form of exclusionary U.S. immigration policies. “It’s a scar on our nation’s history.”

“Oh Mercy” will premiere today, Thursday, February 25 at 5 p.m. EST, and a panel with Sr. Pimentel, Bilheimer and other speakers will follow the premier. To read the complete article, click here

To view a short promotional video on the documentary, click here

To register for the premier of the documentary and panel discussion, click here

Asylum Seekers at the Border Express Hope

MATAMOROS, Mexico (CNS) – Idalia Reyes is living in Matamoros – opposite Brownsville, Texas, as part of the Migrant Protection Protocols, (MPP) which forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases are heard in U.S. courts.

Adalia Reyes, an asylum-seeker from El Salvador, poses with a friend’s child outside a Mass celebrated Jan. 9, 2021, in a tent camp for migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in Matamoros. Reyes said, out of desperation, she sent her two children unaccompanied to the United States, where they were reunited with their father. (CNS photo/David Agren)

Details on what comes next for the asylum-seekers remains uncertain, and many still have U.S. court dates, which had been pushed repeatedly into the future during the pandemic.

Catholics working with program participants are urging them to remain patient. Some are encouraging the Biden administration to wind down the program, which they describe as “unjust” and designed to discourage asylum-seekers.

“(It) should be eliminated. It doesn’t make sense for anyone,” said Scalabrinian Father Pat Murphy, director of a migrant shelter in Tijuana. “An asylum process that is fair should be started after so many years of injustice.”

Despite the dearth of details, the prospect of an overhaul under a new U.S. administration has buoyed the spirits among asylum-seekers stranded in unsafe Mexican cities the length of the U.S. – Mexico border.

“Biden is their hope,” said Juan Sierra, a lay volunteer with the Diocese of Matamoros’ migrant ministry. Adding to the expectations, he said, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden visited the camp in December 2019 and served them lunch.Sierra and the local diocese – along with volunteers, mostly from the United States – have attended to the camp, which once hosted an estimated 3,000 asylum-seekers. Its population has dwindled to roughly 700 as people found other housing, applied for asylum in Mexico, returned to their country of origin or risked [crossing] the Rio Grande.

Many people, in their desperation, go to the river and try to cross. But, many drown,” said Dominican Brother Obed Cuellar, director of the diocesan shelter in Piedras Negras.

Sandro Hernandez, an Afro-Honduran, traveled to Mexico in a 2019 caravan. “When I heard about Biden, I headed here,” he said. “I am looking for a better future. Hopefully, I can fix my paperwork like the U.S. president is talking about.” To read the complete article click here

Pope Francis: “Cruelty of the Highest Form”

~ by J.D. Long-Garcia, AMERICA Magazine

Pope Francis called the Trump Administration policy of separating children at the border “cruelty of the highest form” in a new documentary that premiered in Rome today.

cruelty, and separating kids from parents goes against natural rights,” the Pope says in the documentary “Francesco”. It’s something a Christian cannot do. It’s cruelty of the highest form.”

Under the Trump administration, U.S. border enforcement officials began separating children from their parents as early s 2017, according to the Associated Press. The administration implemented a zero-tolerance policy in May 2018, leading to more than 2,700 children being separated from their parents in less than a month. That June, a U.S. district judge ordered an end to the practice. Yet, today, three years after being separated 545 children have still not been united with their parents,
according to court appointed lawyers.

“We know that the separation of children was a willful and calculated strategy to weaponize against vulnerable migrants at the border the most sacred thing they had – their family,” Dylan Corbett, the executive director of Hope Border Initiative, said in an email to America.

The revelation that years later we still have not been able to reunite hundreds of families points to the lasting and irreversible damage of this awful moment of moral darkness in our nation’s history,” he said. “We need to remember, to make amends and end the cruel strategies of deterrence against migrants in every form they take.”

Ashley Feasley, the Director of Migrant Policy and Public Affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that while separations from children and parents happened on occasion under the Bush and Obama administration, the Trump administration policy is different. “This has been large scale and strategic and intentional,” she said.

The Trump administration also had no plan to reunite the children with their parents, and they have yet to establish a tracking system to keep track of children, Ms. Feasley said. She noted that Lutheran and Catholic agencies worked together to reunite 1,500 families in 2018. Yet, Ms. Feasley said, many of those families suffer ongoing mental health problems stemming from the traumatic separation experience.

“They knew they had no way to ensure that families could be reunited and moved forward anyway,” she said. “It was calculated to wreak havoc on families’ lives. And it did.”
To read the entire article click here

Parents of 545 Children Separated at U.S.- Mexico Border Still Can’t Be Found

~ Mark Katkov, NPR News
Despite a federal judge’s order that the government reunite families who had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s “no tolerance” migration policy, the parents of 545 children still can’t be found, according to a court document filed Tuesday by the U.S. Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Thousands of families were separated under the policy before the Trump administration ended the practice in 2018. The ACLU successfully sued the government, winning a court order to reunite families. Thousands of parents and children were reunited within weeks.

But about 1,000 families who had been separated in a pilot program in 2017 were not covered by the initial court order — reunification of this group was ordered only last year. The passage of time has made finding both parents and children more difficult.

“What has happened is horrific,” says Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, who has been leading the litigation. “Some of these children were just babies when they were separated. Some of these children may now have been separated for more than half their lives. Almost their whole life, they have not been with their parents.”

The update on reunification efforts was filed ahead of a status conference scheduled for Thursday before U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego.

The filing estimates that two-thirds of the separated parents are believed to have returned to their home countries. Nongovernmental groups appointed by the court have “engaged in time consuming and arduous on-the-ground searches for parents in their respective countries of origin,” according to the filing, but those efforts were halted by the coronavirus pandemic and are only now resuming in limited fashion.

NPR’s Joel Rose reports that the children initially went into a shelter system before being placed with sponsors across the country and that many will likely try to remain in the United States. The ACLU’s Gelernt says about 360 of the children still have not been located.

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