Fear swept through the African immigrant community in Ohio when Donald Trump took office in 2017 and vowed to implement mass deportations and other hardline anti-immigration measures, activist Demba Ndiath said. Even longtime U.S. residents without criminal offenses grew increasingly…
Pray for immigrants? We need them to pray for us, minister-activist says
Religious leaders gathered at a vigil in December to declare support for Rosa Gutierrez Lopez, an El Salvadoran immigrant who had just taken sanctuary in a Maryland church to avoid deportation. Baptist minister and immigrant rights activist Julio Hernandez was…
How to help immigrants in detention
Some of the ways that individuals and congregations can help are to learn about the issues of immigration and advocate for humane, compassionate, and sensible public policies and laws which impact the immigrant community.
Awakening to injustice: a church goes on a pilgrimage to follow immigrants’ journey from undocumented to detained
Nearly 20 people arrived early in the morning at Myers Park Baptist Church to embark on this sacred pilgrimage to listen, learn and discern how God is calling them as individuals and us as a Church to seek justice for America’s immigrants.
Photo Gallery: Awakening to Immigrant Justice
Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C. embarked on a sacred pilgrimage to listen, learn and discern how God is calling them as individuals and as a Church to seek justice for America’s immigrants. The group followed the route to Georgia many undocumented immigrants in North Carolina must follow after being detained.
Video: Awakening to Immigrant Justice
“By placing our feet on sacred grounds which are off our well-beaten paths, we hope to expand our listening and learning. Moving beyond head to heart, beyond words to feelings, we yearn to gain a fuller understanding of our systems of immigration.”
A white Jesus can’t save a brown child
I was raised in a brown evangelical church in a small, predominantly white town in central Texas. Our “mother” church was one of the many First Baptist Churches in the Texas Bible Belt. Our congregation was composed mainly of poor, uneducated, largely undocumented migrants from rural Mexico. And while we were a brown church, the Jesus we worshiped was white.
Baptists protest deportation of church member outside ICE office where he was detained
“When ICE trapped Gilles in Charlotte, they trapped Jesus. When Gilles was throw into prison and denied his medical care, Christ himself was imprisoned and denied treatment, ” said North Carolina pastor Lauren Efird.
The day life changed for a legal immigrant — and his church
I’ve never felt so helpless as a pastor as I did on Tuesday, Jan. 9, the day Gilles was unexpectedly detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. I couldn’t do anything to stop the horrifying set of events that was about to happen that was going to change Gilles’ life.