Prior to our last Presidential election, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were already cracking down on undocumented immigrants with deportation orders. In 2016, churches across the country, the most honored of American sanctuaries, re-employed the disobediently civil practice of hiding undocumented immigrants.
Deportation orders can be and often are death sentences for people who’ve fled violence in their home countries. Refuge granted in American churches became an answered prayer for those lucky few in 2016, and then some dozens more in the following years.
For some church staff and volunteers, taking on this work has proven to be quite difficult to impossible, especially since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic this year. The Church World Service, on the other hand, has been on this mission since the 1940s. But even they’ve stated that “the need is greater now than it has been in decades.”
Today, Hilda Ramirez and her now fourteen-year-old son, Ivan, have been living in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church for nearly five years. Though they can’t leave the church for fear of arrest, this article from the Austin American-Statesman tells us what they’re doing to give back to their community.
-Maude
November 2, 2020