McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — A nonprofit has made available for free an online toolkit that encourages thousands of faith-based organizations to provide sanctuary from immigration raids and tips on how to avoid arrest.
The “How to Protect People During Ice Raids” toolkit went online Tuesday and is provided by Vote Common Good, a nonprofit organization that promotes social causes and engages in political discourse.
It’s aim is to give churches across the country information on how pastors and their flock can help families threatened by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. It also gives advice on how they can document and bear witness and possibly change outcomes, Vote Common Good Executive Director Doug Pagitt told Border Report on Thursday.
“A lot of faith leaders and people in churches, they’ve never thought about having to interact with ICE. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know what the laws are. They are unclear about how much they can engage and how much they can act. So part of our work with our toolkit is to help them know what they can do and how they can act,” Pagitt said.
Pagitt is a pastor in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he says many congregations have never dealt with immigration issues before. He says many of their 5,000 churches in their network have members who voted for President Donald Trump and support immigration reform but do not agree with current ICE arrests that have gone viral in videos circulating on social media.
“We’re training those church leaders and congregants in what they can do to be supportive for people. And most importantly, these churches can create a support network that can run alongside the support network that so many immigrants in this country have, but they often will need someone who has other sets of connections, has other relationship,” he said. “There are many people in churches all over the country who every day say, ‘What can we do?’ I feel like we need to do something. There’s people who we know in churches who voted for Donald Trump. They even voted because they wanted to see a change in immigration. But this is not what they wanted.”
Pagitt says it’s especially important for faith leaders to be present and document and witness ICE interactions because he says that can significantly change outcomes.
“Our experience has been — we’re hearing this from pastors all over the country — that when ICE interacts with an immigrant and there’s no one else there, they act in one way. And if there’s any observer there, they act differently. And when there’s a faith leader there, they really begin to act in ways that honor the person’s rights and give them all the all the due process that they deserve,” Pagitt said.
The toolkit encourages pastors to preach about immigration justice and hospitality and information on how to become politically active in local communities at city council meetings and how to hold rallies.
It also includes information on:
- Legal rights.
- Spiritual care pastors can offer.
- How to set up a faith-based alert network.
- Coordination with media and how to bear public witness.
- How to form a rapid response team to act when an ICE raid is underway.
- How to make churches sanctuary spaces.
- De-escalation training to avoid conflicts.
- Working with immigration lawyers and other rights groups.
- Financially supporting immigration causes.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
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