from the WES Immigration Justice Team

• Blocked from federal aid, THOUSANDS of our immigrant neighbors still suffer from hunger and food insecurity. 

• 70,000 non-Mexican Latin Americans have been forced back across the border while they wait in squalid tent camps to present their pleas for asylum.

• Families with children are still detained in private prisons—like the Berks County, PA, detention facility—hoping President Biden will make good on his campaign promise before they are deported. 

In the past year, WES’s small but active Immigration Justice Team (WIJT) stepped up to confront immigrant inequities. We supported Rosa Gutierrez Lopez and her three children during her year-long sanctuary at a Unitarian Church in Bethesda. We organized letter-writing campaigns, collected food, and distributed supplies to immigrant families in dire need in Virginia and Maryland. 

We had the priceless experience of welcoming a refugee family from Afghanistan when they arrived at Dulles. The WES team outfitted their kitchen, furnished the rooms, tutored “mom” in English, and took her grocery shopping. We watched with joy as the three boys adapted, learned, and grew over the course of many months that WES served as the family sponsor. 

We stood together with WES partners and thousands of other people to demonstrate before the Supreme Court to support the Dreamers. We marched to the White House to protest unjust government immigrant detention policies that harassed immigrants and separated families. We joined our congregational neighbors at a DC City Council budget hearing to urge it to approve funding for immigrant legal costs (Our efforts succeeded: $2.5 million was included in the DC budget for immigrant residents of DC, including those detained by ICE.)

We expect we will soon see an increase in refugees from abroad, as President Biden has said he will raise the cap for refugees resettled here from a low of 15,000 to 125,000. Our efforts will be needed even more. Even now, immigrants seeking asylum need housing right here in our neighborhoods. As COVID vaccines take hold, there will be opportunities to open our homes and provide critical support.  

As WES members, we are keenly aware that we are privileged by education, life experience, profession, economic status. How can we turn away from the suffering and injustice right before our eyes? We cannot cure all the ills, but we can do something within our local community. 
And we DO.  We make a difference, one small effort at a time. 
YOU, too, can make a difference. Be a voice for some of the most forgotten people in our hemisphere. 

Join WIJT any time, in one small action, multiple times, in broader actions. Consider what’s ahead with the rapid pace of new Federal rules at the upcoming town hall/webinar presented by our UUSJ partners. Join us at the Zoom meeting, March 24, 7:30 pm. 

Information can be found here.

&

Registration can be found here.

WES was built by ethical agents.  Our good work awaits us. 

–The WES Immigration Justice Team