You Don't Need Bullets to Terrorize a Community

This was written by David V., a DREAM Act student, as a letter to President Obama.

Mr. Obama, please take the time to examine how militarizing our border affects Latino communities in border cities, wherever border patrol has jurisdiction to wreak havoc in our communities, and stop catering to calls from white landowners in border states!

You must realize that you don't need bullets to terrorize a community.

I'm not talking about relatively unpopulated towns with ranchers spread out here and there. You would go out of your way to ensure their protection and safety of mind. I'm talking about the cities in which your officers terrorize communities with their presence having no discretion because your system deems us all criminals.

I'm talking about the multiple times I've seen strollers left on the side of the road after mothers have gotten picked up by border patrol. People being afraid of visiting their local grocery store because they have become a trap for deportation--where you have to bus people out.

I'm talking from the sad experiences of my mother, my father, my brother, my sister, my cousins, and uncles getting deported. Where is their peace of mind that they can walk down the street without fear of being asked for their papers? Thousands of families are torn apart everyday by your agents, and when one rancher is killed you respond?

You easily crack under the pressure from some rich white folk while our community has been pleading for years for dignity and discretion. You promised reform and you are delivering a record number of deportations. You are militarizing the border, for what? To prove that you took a stance against the cartels but never took a drastic action to address the high drug demand from your drug-duped nation?

But come November you will easily forget that you need the Latino vote to keep your party afloat, then you will seem to care. Your publicity team will try to spin this and sell it to our community but we are fed up! If every time the first lady asked you to do something and you said, "Yes baby I'll do it," and every time you failed she would have left you a long time ago. Your credibility in our community is diminishing, we have hope but your unwillingness to whip your party to move on immigration reform shows us how much you are really willing to do for a community that helped you win key states in 2008 or did you forget that already?

We elected you based on Hope, not that you were going to change anything individually but that you would move forward with a positive honest dialogue on the issue of immigration but I think you have been brainwashed. You honestly think that the immigration system is functioning when you have 12 million people undocumented in the U.S. living as second class citizens. And you think that you are doing the right thing by sending troops to the border? Please! Spare us the trouble and just tell us that you care more about what people say about your buddies at the Democratic National Convention then you do about people with real pain, real suffering, and whose dreams are shattered because your lack of action.

A little honesty is all I ask. The GOP isn't afraid of saying they repudiate us but want our vote. Why don't you own up to it and admit that, at least tactically, you hold to the same premise?

I have never looked at the U.S. as a land of the free, it's more a land of those misguided by media biases and bigoted diatribes of politicians that care about our community showing up to the ballot and checking off their name.

I call on every one who reads this letter to demand accountability of their politicians for our communities, on all issues not just immigration! Remember that people are not fighting for your party's ideals, we are fighting to win our humanity back, to live better lives in coexistence with our brothers and sisters, and to ensure a better future for our youth.

My Letter to President Obama

A blog post by Bill Mefford
Please consider writing your own letter to President Obama.

Dear Mr. President,

Last week you made an eloquent statement in response to the Republican budget plan that would take away important programs that benefit the most vulnerable in society and give even more tax breaks to the most powerful and affluent. You said, "Nothing is easier than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor, or people who are powerless, or don't have lobbyists, or don't have clout. I don’t think that’s particularly courageous.”

Your statement powerfully expressed what so many people of faith feel, including myself, as we watch a national debate regarding the budget that so often ignores the marginalized and vulnerable. These are the people for whom Jesus came to share good news and with whom he incarnated himself among.

Yet, as I listened to you last week I could not help but take note of the stunning hypocrisy in your statement. I fully agree that what is easiest and least courageous is trying to solve national problems on the backs of the poor and most vulnerable. Yet, that is exactly what you are doing in your attempts to solve the broken immigration system.

During the brief tenure of your administration you have deported more immigrants than during the entirety of President Bush's time in office. You have dramatically expanded enforcement programs like 287 g and Secure Communities, which force local law enforcement to act as immigration officials thereby eroding trust by immigrant communities in their local police. These programs have resulted in racial profiling and have made the public less safe. You have also refused to grant deferred status to DREAM Act students and the families of citizen children, though you repeatedly make statements of your support for immigrants and their families.

I know immigrant families whose loved ones have been deported, whose families have been torn apart because of your extreme focus on brutal enforcement programs as the primary means of fixing the immigration system when other solutions such as providing administrative relief to DREAM Act students and families of citizen children are readily available.

The fear of local officials has become so intense that I know of one immigrant family in Iowa whose house was on fire and they called their pastor before they called the fire department in order to find out if they would be in danger of deportation for reporting the fire. I know of countless stories where immigrants are afraid to call the police to report crimes committed against them and their neighbors because they are afraid they might be detained and deported. I know of stories of immigrant women who endure domestic abuse because they are more afraid of themselves or their loved ones being arrested than they are of the continued abuse. The programs, such as 287 g and Secure Communities that you have dramatically expanded, are not bringing greater security to our country. They are simply state-sponsored terror.

You are attempting to solve an enormous problem on the backs of the most vulnerable in our society. You have chosen the easiest and least courageous path and that is through promoting the idea that the problem with our broken immigration system is immigrants. Not US foreign and economic policies which have caused millions of immigrants to flee north for the prospects of economic security; not on US businesses which have thrived on cheap labor. You are punishing the victims and the duplicity is shocking.

And so as I listened to your powerful words last week in response to the proposed Republican budget plan, I could not help but feel extreme sadness. Not even anger – not yet, though I am sure that is coming. The sadness I feel – and I know felt by all people of faith who are incarnated among immigrants and their families – is the same sadness felt by the prophets who came face to face with such blatant hypocrisy and abuse of power against the poor and vulnerable in their time.

Whether it was Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, rebuking Israel’s King for caring more about building his palace than caring for the poor, or Nathan accusing King David for abusing his power for sentencing Uriah to death in battle so that he could take his wife Bathsheba as his own, or John the Baptist’s condemnation of Herod, or Jesus’ denunciation of the Pharisees, prophets have been misunderstood as angry and irrelevant; someone to tolerate as long as possible, but then ignore, if not eliminate entirely. Prophets are irrelevant to those who want efficiency and who prize order above justice.

The truth is that as people of faith incarnated among immigrant communities, we are not irrelevant if the subject is justice and that is the case here. We are also not out-of-touch. We are quite in touch with the sufferings that immigrant families are enduring at the hands of your policies. And as the prophets who came before us, we are not angry – not yet, I would stress. That is assuredly coming though. We are deeply saddened and disheartened by the promise of someone who seemed at one time dedicated to the welfare of immigrants and their families and now seems bent on tearing those families apart.

Mr. President, you are choosing what is politically the easiest and least courageous pathway forward in refusing to provide administrative relief to DREAM Act students and families of citizen children. You, Mr. President, are choosing what is most politically expedient and least courageous as you continue to dramatically expand programs like 287 g and Secure Communities that are terrorizing immigrant communities. These are people who have no clout, who do not have lobbyists. They have looked to you for leadership and up to this point you have given them nothing. We hear your rhetoric about supporting comprehensive immigration reform, but it rings hollow as your policies continue to wreak terror and bring destruction to immigrant communities and immigrant families.

And so we must request - we must even demand Mr. President – that you heed your own words in regards to the broken immigration system. "Nothing is easier than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor, or people who are powerless, or don't have lobbyists, or don't have clout. I don’t think that’s particularly courageous.” Amen, Mr. President. I do not think that is particularly courageous either. So, stop the programs 287 g and Secure Communities, and provide administrative relief to DREAM Act students and the parents and families of citizen children. Be strong and courageous Mr. President and we can once again stand beside you. But we will not stand with you today. We stand with our immigrant sisters and brothers who are daily being terrorized by your policies.

Sincerely,

Bill Mefford

I encourage you to write your own letter to President Obama so that he can truly hear all of our voices.

Following Bud Fox and Esther in Resisting Temptation

A post by Bill Mefford

It was through the 1987 film, Wall Street, that I learned more about temptation than I ever learned at church. In the film Bud Fox opts for a quick path to affluence by ignoring the ethical constructs with which he was raised. For Fox, it is a battle between two fathers for control of his identity, even his soul. His father, played by Martin Sheen, is the airline mechanic who, though continually beaten down by forces much greater than himself, finds his power through his solidarity with his union and his unwavering belief that hard, steady, honest work is the only way to progress in life and as a person.

Gordon Gecko, on the other hand, is the father of Fox's ambitions: a man of power and wealth, whose monologues throughout the film reflect a cycnical realism where the individual is the final arbiter of all that is good and right. Justice, for Gecko, is ultimately utilitarian; doing anything to maintain one's own position and security at the top of the established social order. At the end of the film, Fox faces an impending jail term for giving in to the temptations offered by Gecko, yet experiences his liberation as he tells Gecko that he betrayed Gecko because he realized in all his attempts to be like Gordon Gecko, he will always just be Bud Fox. His father's ethic is rediscovered and it is that which saves Fox.

Many of these same lessons are found throughout Scripture of course, as we see once again in the story of Esther, which we discussed last week. In this book, all of the characters face temptations as well. And I believe these are instructive for where we are in our struggle to defend the rights of immigrants.

To recall, Haman schemes his way into the number two position in the Assyrian Kingdom and takes great offense at Mordecai's refusal to bow down before him. Haman, like Gecko, determines that justice is best attained through securing one's position and security by any and all means, including elimination of those who oppose him. Any attempts to challenge the rigid social order are seen as subversive to the point that Mordecai becomes a public enemy of the state, and he and his race must be annihilated.

While I think there are challenges to comparing the Scriptural context to the current day, I believe we can find points of convergence in some of the underlying values and messages. For instance, Haman's treatment of Mordecai and the Jews is an extreme form of objectification as he carelessly is willing to throw their lives away when they no longer are deemed useful. While not nearly as extreme, this corresponds with the way that immigrants are often treated today. While it is commonly said by the media and elected leaders, including the President, that immigrants often do the jobs no other Americans want to do and that they are necessary to our economy, there has been little public outcry against the state-sponsored terror initiated by the Bush Administration and increased exponentially by the Obama Administration through indiscriminate raids, indefinite detention, and an alarming increase in the deportations of immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security is undertaking a mass family separation strategy and it is nothing less than immoral. The economic usefulness of immigrants, the demonization of immigrants by the media and elected leaders, the tragic number of deaths in the desert with zero public concern, and the state-sponsored terror directed against them reveal our society's objectification of immigrants.

More instructive though from the story of Esther are the temptations both Mordecai and Esther faced and how they responded.

Mordecai, in chapter 4, is presented with an alluring temptation that could have been disastrous for him and his people. Mordecai, joined by others in provinces where the edict to destroy the Jews was read, puts on sackcloth and ashes, and protests in front of the city gate in order to move Esther to action. Esther's isolation by her place in society is so entrenched that she has no idea what is happening to her own people. Her handmaidens are the ones who have to come and tell her about Mordecai sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

What is so stunning of course, is her response to Mordecai's protest: she sends down clothes for him to put on. Thus, the temptation for Mordecai is to react to Esther's tepid action by stopping his protest and perhaps trying other (more acceptable) ways to protest this edict. Or he could simply accept the current social order where Jews have no rights and are mere objects for the Assyrian rulers to use and then throw away.

Mordecai's choice, I believe, is in some ways a similar choice facing immigrant communities today. Immigrants can accept the status of objects, less than human, used for building the U.S. economy by working perpetually in low-income jobs no one wants, or waiting to be forceably ripped apart from their families and detained in private prisons for months at a time before being deported. Immigrants can be satisfied with the nice rhetoric of the President as he speaks of the importance of immigrants in the history of the United States and of his support for such things like "comprehensive immigration reform" while his policies continue to break up families and deport people at an unbelievable pace. The hypocrisy is stunning. The Administration mouths the words of compassion, while engaging in policies that are terrorizing.

Mordecai refused to accept the clothes sent down by Esther. And in doing so, he refuses to let her off the hook. She must act, she must risk, she must use her access to power redemptively so that those, like Mordecai, who do not have that same access may move from objectification to humanization. Immigrants can follow Mordecai and refuse to buy the rhetoric of politicians like President Obama and force him to act, to risk, to use his political capitol for the good of others and not merely for his own re-election. Immigrants can force him even now to stop such programs of state-sponsored terror as 287g and Secure Communities, and to grant administrative relief to DREAM Act students and the families of citizen children.

And of course, Esther faces her own temptations as well. She tries to get out of risky engagement by sending down clothes to Mordecai. That could have been so easy. Just do a little mercy, satisfy the immediate need identified from the comfort of her (suburban) palace (by other people than herself no less), and she could have gone on with her life. But Mordecai refuses the clothes, reminds her that her own life, her own identity that she has somehow forgotten because of her rise to affluence, is also at stake. And so she now must risk, she must reach out in her position and urge the King to rescind the edict.

She of course does and saves her people. She resists the temptation to allow herself to be paralyzed by the enormity of the injustice, or the enormity of the force of government bearing down on her people. What she did was utter bravery. She resists the temptation to allow her perspective to be tainted - as it so often is for those who benefit from the social order - to see the problem of injustice as one that is actually the problem of the victims than a problem of unjust systems. She could have easily joined others in saying that Mordecai "earned" his fate by not bowing down. No, Esther redemptively uses her place in society to defend the rights of her people, the Jews.

And should we.

Those of us in positions of power (those of us with legal status, in other words) must resist the temptation to feel overwhelmed by the power of the federal government being used right now in a mass family separation strategy and instead, we must fight harder than ever against the enforcement-first (read enforcement-only) strategy of the Obama Administration. We must act and risk our own position in the social order to push President Obama to do the same and provide administrative relief for undocumented immigrants. We must resist the temptation, as benefactors of the current social order, to join the media (and it is not just Fox News) and elected leaders in blaming immigrants for the mess of the broken system. It is not their fault, and they should not be forced to endure state-sponsored terror, discrimination, and massive family separation because the United States benefits from their labor but refuses to ackowledge their dignity.

Mordecai and Esther refused to give into temptation and I thank God for that. I pray we will do the same and that our ending will also find a people saved from danger and restored to full humanity. Like Bud Fox and like Esther, may we find our own liberation in advocating tirelessly for the protection of the rights of our immigrant brothers and sisters.