Category: Immigration

A Story From The Borderlands

December 9, 2016 | Heather Vickery | Congregational Trip, Immigration
Shelly Koo is the Associate for Online Content at UUSC (one of UUCSJ’s parent organizations). Her post was originally published on UUSC’s blog. Update November 30: David has been released and is now reunited with his family in the U.S. Last month, I had the opportunity to go on a Borderlinks trip with the UU College […]

Responding To The Challenge The World Has Laid At Our Feet

September 21, 2016 | Heather Vickery | Congregational Trip, Immigration
Rev. Carolyn Patierno talks about how her eyes were opened by CSJ’s Border Witness Program and how this helped motivate her congregation’s decision to buy a house for refugee families. For more on this audacious decision see the linked Boston Globe article. For a brief moment in the fall of 2014 I had the eye-opening experience that […]

Volunteering In A Family Detention Center

August 4, 2016 | Heather Vickery | Immigration, RAICES, Volunteering
Chris Casuccio is UUCSJ’s Senior Associate for Immersion Learning Programs. For a week in July, I had the privilege of leading a group of five dedicated volunteers to San Antonio, TX to serve as Spanish translators and legal volunteers with UUSC partner RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services). This is the […]

We Can Do Better – Reflections From A Border Delegation

May 13, 2016 | Heather Vickery | Congregational Trip, Immigration
Kim Duncan is a CSJ program leader from Portland Oregon. She led a delegation from two churches in Oregon, including her own. Last October, a group from three UU congregations in Oregon went on CSJ’s Border Justice tour on the Arizona – Mexico border. On April 19th, we presented our experiences following the service at the […]

Operation Streamline

January 29, 2016 | Heather Vickery | Congregational Trip, Immigration
Tucson, Arizona – November 2015 “Sentencing” by Lawrence Gipe, ca. 2012-2014 Sixty two detainees, migrants from Mexico and Central America caught crossing the border illegally, sit in the large courtroom facing the judge. On his right is an interpreter. Our BorderLinks contingent sits in back to witness the proceedings, to keep the system “honest.” The […]

U.S. policies could be deporting women and children to their deaths

January 26, 2016 | Heather Vickery | Immigration
By Janey Skinner, guest commentary © 2016 Bay Area News Group Originally published – The Contra Costa Times on January 16th, 2016 While much of the world’s attention is focused on Syria’s refugees, there is another refugee crisis that no one is talking about: Central Americans fleeing the worst violence in the world outside of an […]

260 White Crosses

December 8, 2015 | Heather Vickery | Congregational Trip, Immigration
This post was written by Pat Caren from the UU Fellowship of Marion County Borderlinks trip in November 2015. To cross a desert on foot is to risk your life. In Cochise County, Arizona, more than 260 people have perished this way since 2009. Every Tuesday evening in the border town of Douglas, the Healing Our Borders […]

Reflections in Shade of the US-Mexico Border Wall

September 28, 2015 | Deva Jones | Immigration, Youth
This post was written by Jack Spector-Bishop and originally posted on Blue Boat. “What do you do when you come head to head with the very evil you are working against?” “The ants crawl under it, the birds fly around it, the sky connects over it.” This is what I wrote in my journal while I sat […]

Ending Detention Centers, a Volunteer’s Perspective

July 13, 2015 | Deva Jones | Immigration, RAICES, Volunteering
The following post was written by Melanie Poeling, a participant in UUCSJ’s RAICES volunteer program. Imagine that you are a mother with small children and you have traveled over a thousand miles from Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador because of extreme violence against you and your family, only to be detained after requesting asylum at […]