As a volunteer with our local Amnesty International chapter, I’ve had the privilege of befriending Tamador Gibreel.
She works with Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, a group that regularly brings refugees into the United States. Thirteen years ago, Tamador invited me to tutor a family newly arrived from Sudan — and I became “woke” to the lives of refugees.
June 20 is World Refugee Day. I was going to jump into discussing how our nation “welcomes” refugees by holding them in detention centers. Then an event occurred last month that redirected my focus to what is happening right in our neighborhood: Lucio Perez, in sanctuary at the First Congregational Church of Amherst, is rushed to Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton with a ruptured appendix.
And we witnessed our community form a kind of web of human protection around Lucio as he left the hospital to return to the safety created in Amherst. It was a web spun not of silk by a lone spider to catch prey, but of strongly woven fibers formed by a “village” of neighbors, hospital employees, elected officials, the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Interfaith Sanctuary Network and other faith-based organizations, among many others. Adding to this web are the contributions of organizations like Lutheran Social Services, Center for New Americans, The Literacy Project and Jewish Family Service in welcoming newcomers into the community with resettlement support ranging from shelter to guidance to education.
What a paradox that the current administration’s fear-based policies have jolted us out of complacency and roused us to weave such locally based fellowship webs. The notion that “it takes a village” may be a cliché, but it offers a stark contrast, and perhaps an antidote, to President Donald Trump’s polarized world view. As long as 150 years ago, novelist George Eliot underscored this value of local networks: in “Middlemarch,” she portrays a supportive “web” of social intercourse connecting small-town residents.
Still, the refugee crisis is exploding at global and national levels: an estimated 65.6 million people forced to leave their homelands due to such factors as war, government- or gang-inflicted violence, environmental devastation or famine. Our government is responding by outright banning (Syrian refugees) and rejecting or imprisoning most who come here in fear for their lives, despite Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 which guarantee humane resettlement. We are witnessing the destruction of the meanings of refuge and asylum.
I would need to write a long essay to fully document the current abuses of parents and/or their children at the Southwestern border. It is only the tip of the iceberg to share the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s findings that since October more than 700 children have been “removed” from their parents at the border and some placed in peril.
The U.S. now vets refugees for up to two years before they can come here, which is a long wait. When many claim asylum instead or cross borders without documents, they find themselves — not, at last, in safe environments — but rather held in detention for months to years with their young children.
Many have fled horrific violence in Central America and Mexico with bona fide claims for protection. Yet these families discover instead that they have traded one set of traumas experienced in their home country for another in detention centers, aka prisons. Let’s not candy-coat the terminology.
The Department of Homeland Security holds hundreds of these families for up to two years at four detention centers in Pennsylvania and Texas. These centers not only treat detainees harshly, sometimes separating mothers and children and providing subpar health care and food, but also criminalize them while blocking legal access to asylum.
Regardless of losing its license in 2016, the Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania continues to operate. It must be acknowledged that much of this inhumane treatment predates Trump (despite former president Barack Obama’s detention reforms).
Successful community-based alternatives to detention exist. For example, the Stanford Law School Immigrants’ Rights Clinic issued a report for the Detention Watch Network that called on the Obama administration to reduce the unprecedented rate of immigration detention by adopting community-based programs shown to be cheaper, more effective, and more humane than the current detention system.
What can we do about current policies of detaining families?
On Monday, June 18, at 6 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Amherst, there’s a potluck dinner with Lucio Perez, hosted by Amnesty International’s Amherst chapter along with the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Interfaith Sanctuary Network and the church. There we will hear from Perez, learn more about these detention centers and community-based alternatives, and sign petitions, one which will be sent to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.
Step by step, we can work locally to weave a larger web of protection.
Fanny Rothschild, of Amherst, is a human rights activist, writer, editor and Reiki practitioner.
