Celebrating Accomplishments

Initially, we thought that we would be able to continue to advocate for immigrant families using the mechanism of deferred deportation, which utilized a national criteria for prioritizing detention and deportation so that families fighting a broken system who were actively contributing to our communities could check in annually and continue to live their lives free from fear.  (DACA, or deferred action for childhood arrivals is a form of deferred deportation.)  However, we quickly learned that the Trump administration was determined to deport as many people as possible regardless of contribution or status. (Detentions of immigrants who have not committed any non-immigration related offenses rose over 30%.) Still, we learned by uniting across denominations and advocating in prayer and action, that we could still have an impact. Our first victory was to win the release from detention of Pastor Noe Carias, who has a US citizen spouse and is a pastor in good standing in the Assemblies of God, who would have been deported because of deportation orders received when he was a teenager, recently arrived from Guatemala.  In the process, we changed the hearts and minds of many leaders in the Assemblies of God and allied denominations who had not taken this stance before. 

We have continued to advocate for detainees and have been able to secure the release in certain cases of asylum-seeker, particularly those who are medically vulnerable to COVID.  It has been increasingly difficult to win release as the administration continued to add restrictive regulations (over 448 since December of 2016.)