“I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”
While the great and powerful were fruitlessly arguing past each other over immigration policy Tuesday evening in Washington, the members of a small church in Salt Lake City looked the matter right in the eye.
And did the right thing.
The First Unitarian Church kept its long-standing promise to take in someone who was facing deportation when it welcomed Vicky Chavez and her two young daughters.
The family was in the process of being deported to Chavez’s native Honduras, which she fled in 2014 to escape a life of domestic abuse and widespread violence. The three got all the way to the airport, even checked in for their flight, before Chavez decided she couldn’t face returning, much less taking her children, ages 4 months and 6, to a place that instilled such fear.
The family will remain in the church, in a classroom that has been converted to living quarters, their needs met by volunteers, until her legal appeal for asylum goes through the long process. This is key to understanding why the Unitarians’ action is not only ethically the right thing to do, but legally and constitutionally grounded.
Being deported to a place where one’s life is quite clearly in danger is a step that, by our Constitution, should not be carried out until all legal processes and appeals are exhausted. The Chavez family’s petition for asylum is still up in the air and, as long as it is, deportation should be delayed.
That is particularly true in cases, such as this one, where the people involved have committed no crime or given other reason to believe them to be a danger to the community.
The idea that our system’s protections extend only to citizens is a symptom of the widespread ignorance of our Constitution — a document that repeatedly goes out of its way to refer to and protect every “person,” when it could have easily have said “citizen.”
The increasing number of deportations being carried out, and threatened, under the current administration is a disgrace. It does nothing to make us safer. If anything, by frightening so many immigrants away from full participation in society and from cooperating with police, schools, health departments and other public agencies, this immoral crackdown endangers us all.
Compassion for the lost and the refugee is a basic tenet of many religions. In a nation that so often claims to be a Christian one, one would think it would happen a lot more often.
The Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, mindful of its own refugee origins, is on record supporting immigrants and refugees. Only last week, the church’s new leadership called for quick action to protect the Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children.
But, as our government seems incapable of quick action on anything important, it will increasingly fall to cities, communities — and congregations — to do the right thing.
