News

New Hampshire church fights for immigrant justice

By Hadley Barndollar
Portsmouth Herald
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — The faces of migrant children who have died in or as a result of detention at the southern border span the front lawn of the city’s historic South Church.

According to published reports, Felipe Gomez Alonzo, 8, died on Christmas Eve 2018 from influenza B. He’d lived in a one-room house in a rural farming village in Guatemala. He loved to read, count, play soccer, and sometimes, he accompanied his father in the fields to plant corn and beans.

One-year-old Mariee Juarez crossed the border with her mother in March after fleeing violence in Guatemala. Seventy days after arriving in the U.S., she died from a respiratory infection her mother testified she contracted in the immigration detention facility.

Designated as an unaccompanied minor, 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died alone in detention in May. He loved soccer and music, the bass and piano. His family called him Goyito.

The signs were inspired by ones already displayed by the Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. South Church member Janet Polasky happened to walk by them along Massachusetts Avenue recently on her way to work on the book she’s writing about refugees and asylum.

She emailed the minister, who responded immediately and provided her with the templates for the signs, which South Church, a Unitarian Universalist congregation, has since reproduced with its own touches, including United Nations statements on asylum and the text of the sonnet featured on the Statue of Liberty.

“Given that there was so much attention to children and detention and separation this summer, and then in the fall, it just seemed to completely disappear…,” Polasky said of the motivation behind the signs. “The issue is that the border seems so far away when people are here, and there are so many competing issues that are so urgent. So in part, putting the signs up was to remind people this is a national policy that violates international law. It’s also to remind people that yes, we do have a detention facility — the Strafford County jail — right in our own community.”

The recent signs are a piece of South Church’s ongoing work around immigration and immigrant rights. This summer, the church hosted a forum featuring an array of panelists working on the front lines of immigration, and a candlelight vigil for those held in detainment at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Immigrant justice has been one of the themes we’re working on over the last two years to act on our faith in the larger community,” said Joanne Foster, co-convenor of South Church’s Social Justice Associates. “Every once in a while, this issue gets high up in the public’s attention, and then it dives down because there’s another issue. We want to educate on inhumane practices of our immigration system. Right now is the most extreme result of this, but it’s a fact.”

On a more daily basis, church members work to support a statewide bond fund, started by the New Hampshire Conference United Church of Christ, to help pay bonds for immigrants detained at the Strafford County jail in Dover, as well their phone call fees.

Church board member Janis Wolak said the only way for detainees at the jail to get in contact with their attorneys or loved ones is through an “expensive private phone system,” so the bond fund, which anyone can donate to, aims to deposit $25 at a time into the detainees’ accounts.

The Strafford County jail is New Hampshire’s only Immigration and Customs Enforcement-contracted facility. According to county records, Strafford County received $3,358,844 in 2018 for housing ICE detainees, of which they typically have 100 at a time.

South Church is also affiliated with the Seacoast Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition, which works to provide safe places for immigrants or immigrant families to reside temporarily.

The Dover Friends Meetinghouse, a Quaker community on the city’s Central Avenue, voted two years ago to become a sanctuary place, said Dover resident Jim Verschueren, a South Church member and volunteer for the Seacoast Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition. South Church is currently unable to house individuals, but it is exploring that possibility, and it currently acts as manpower and a financial supporter for the initiative.

The coalition had a family living in sanctuary in Dover for two months, who now have an official asylum application in place. South Church, and about a dozen other congregations, provided 24-hour volunteer coverage and financial support to the operation.

“Even if you have the bond, you can’t get out unless you have a place to live,” Verschueren said. “So there are new coalitions being born, particularity a group out of Keene that is working to find places for people to stay. Groups are beginning to look at who could house someone if we can get them out on a bond.”

South Church members hope the yard signs will start conversations among passersby. They also have a second set they’re lending out, in an effort to “start conversations all around the Seacoast,” Wolak said.

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