Immigrant

A line of people wearing hats and sweatshirts lean against a low fence next to the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Mountains are in the distance.

Migrants from Venezuela, who are subject to Title 42 and unsure of whether to turn themselves in, wait next to people from other nationalities who are in line to be processed by United States Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas on Jan. 4, 2023. REUTERS/Paul Ratje

During his recent visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, President Joe Biden announced changes to border enforcement and the asylum process — the legal process that allows people fleeing danger to seek safety in the U.S. One of the most concerning changes was an expansion of Title 42, a public health policy invoked by former President Donald Trump that weaponized the pandemic to turn away many Black and brown migrants looking for asylum.

Liuan Huska 5-09-2022
Aline Mello stares seriously at the camera wearing a multicolored skirt and a t-shirt that says "Immigrant"

Photograph of Aline Mello by Stephanie Eley

ALINE MELLO WAS 7 years old when she left Brazil with her parents and sister for what was supposed to be a short-term stay in the United States. Growing up undocumented, Mello turned to writing to process her questions about belonging and relationships. More Salt than Diamond (Andrews McMeel Publishing), her debut poetry collection, pulses with themes of identity, religion, and living as an immigrant in tumultuous times. Sojourners columnist Liuan Huska spoke with Mello, a graduate fellow in creative writing at Ohio State University, about race, language, and coming back around to God after disillusionment with the church.

Liuan Huska: What were the circumstances of your family’s emigration from Brazil?

Aline Mello: We emigrated in 1997. We were pretty poor. We had a lot of faith that if we were going to the U.S., it was because God wanted us to go. My uncle got a tourist visa for the four of us to go to Somerville, Mass. It was just going to be three years.

My father had this thing where he would follow charismatic pastors, and we followed one to Atlanta in 2000, right before 9/11. I had been told [incorrectly], “If you stay here for 10 years, you automatically get papers.” I thought, “Okay, I’m going to be fine.”

Right when I graduated high school, in 2007, my father left us. My mom literally got home from work one day and got a voice mail from him saying, “Hey, I left the country.” I realized I couldn’t go to college in Brazil because I didn’t know college-level Portuguese. And I had scholarships here. The goal was to go to college and then go back. Then DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] happened. So I thought, “Obviously, God wants me to stay.” You keep getting scraps enough [that] you don’t starve.

Josh Axelrod 3-02-2022

Photo courtesy Tania Fernandes Anderson.

Tania Fernandes Anderson, Boston’s newly elected councilor, embraces struggle.

In November, she made history as Boston’s first Muslim, first African immigrant, and first formerly undocumented person to be elected to the city council. Now, with an ambitious slate of policy goals, she hopes to transform the city she calls home. While politics brings a new set of challenges for Anderson, her struggle doesn’t take place at city hall. Rather, her struggle is spiritual.

Amar D. Peterman 7-09-2020

Living an embodied faith asserts meaning upon our bodies both as individuals, and in relationship to one another. This means that the places our non-white bodies inhabit tell a story in itself, just as God enfleshed “entered our lives, calling us from the tomb in which society has sought to confine us.” The shared space of believers living out the Christian faith in diverse, multi-ethnic communities is a witness to our world of the power of Jesus Christ.

 

Image via REUTERS / Jose Luis Gonzalez

Christ, you taught us to give water
And to help the ones who thirst.
Yet in places near the border,
We confess we’ve done our worst.
Those who walk must now walk farther.
We have made their journey harder;
We dump water in the dirt.

Image via REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Trump is fighting the battle on two fronts, trying to stop migrants from coming in the first place and deporting those who have been released into the United States.

Aaron E. Sanchez 1-23-2019

NEW YORK CITY - Julián Castro, March 23, 2016. Editorial credit: a katz / Shutterstock.com

It is said that politicians must campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Presidents, perhaps more than any other national figures, must tell the nation a story about itself — of its heroes and villains, of its problems and their causes, of its promise and future.

Dhanya Addanki 12-12-2018

I’ve been undoing this cycle for years now, grasping for whatever bits of myself I could salvage and building a whole woman with these fragments, gently weaving them together with truth, with pride, with love, and with hope that I now know. Because for all the ways America has taught me shame and taught me to hide, the people of America have taught me hope. That hope has filled in my gaps.

Billy Honor 5-30-2017

Most often Pentecost comes to us as a momentous Christian occasion of spiritual power, ethnic unity, gender equality, multi-generational comradery, and immigrant hospitality. But when the moment has passed, it gives way to the more ignoble features of life and community, like spiritual apathy, sexism, racial prejudice, ageism, xenophobia, etc.

Image via Freedom Studio/Shutterstock.com

I continue to be surprised and disappointed by ubiquitous interpretations of [the Samaritan woman] as a “whore” or “prostitute.” John is using symbolism — the woman represents Samaria, which, according to Jewish reckoning, worshipped the five foreign gods. Samaria was seen as being partially faithful to the covenant (“the one you have now is not your husband”). John depicts Jesus as the bridegroom. When the Samaritan woman joins Jesus, the symbolized, divided but related ethnic groups will stop fighting …”

Matthew Schmalz 2-13-2017

Image via RNS/Fibonacci Blue/flickr.com

The world seems to be witnessing increasing levels of violence, fear, and hatred that challenge us each day. There are ongoing debates about how or whether to welcome immigrants and refugees to the United States; news headlines remind us about the plight of Syria and about the horrors of the Islamic State.

In such times, talk about mercy may seem more like wishful thinking. But mercy matters – now more than ever.

No president should be allowed, without any justifiable warrant, to deny the free exercise of their religious convictions, especially when those actions serve not their own interests, but the displaced, suffering millions of strangers in the world longing for welcome.

Tim Breene 1-31-2017

When our desire for security is so great that it diminishes our humanity and our capacity, or willingness, to see the world through the eyes of another, we lose a precious part of who we were designed to be. Our hearts are hardened, calcified.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Randall Hill

Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will be a rare woman on Donald Trump’s Cabinet-level team, and one of the few persons of color.

Knowing little about her foreign policy positions, given that she has little to no international experience, what should we expect from Haley once she is confirmed to be ambassador to the United Nations?

John Gehring 12-22-2016

Image via RNS/Tommy Lee Kreger via Creative Commons

You probably don’t think of Christmas as a revolutionary holiday. Twinkling lights on trees, Starbucks gift cards, and sweet carols are not exactly the stuff of subversion. A domesticated Christmas is comforting, but considering our fraught political landscape today, we might find better lessons by reflecting on the disruption caused by Jesus’ birth, and the radical implications of his life.

Eboo Patel 12-21-2016

Imagine receiving this message on your voicemail: “Dear Mr. Gonzalez, we regret to inform you that your heart surgery has been canceled. The medical professionals scheduled to perform it, Doctors Sarna and Latif, have discovered that they have serious disagreements about Middle East politics. Consequently, they are refusing to work together. We will do our best to find you other doctors, before your condition becomes fatal.”

Seem far-fetched? In my mind, it is the logical outcome of the manner in which many Jewish and Muslim groups have chosen to engage each other in recent years. Or, rather, not engage.

Image via RNS/Sikh Coalition

The man who led police to the bombing suspect in New York and New Jersey was [also] an Asian immigrant.

Harinder Singh Bains, a native of India who practices the Sikh faith, said he saw Ahmad Khan Rahami “right in front of my face” and made a call to the police after matching the man’s image with the one Bains saw on TV.

Rahami, who is accused of placing the bombs that exploded Sept. 17 in the Chelsea section of Manhattan and in Seaside Park, N.J., was sleeping in the doorway of Bains’ bar in Linden, N.J., when Bains spotted him.

Image via REUTERS/David Ryder/RNS

The 2016 Republican presidential campaign boils with anti-immigrant rhetoric but candidates’ harsh proposals don’t resonate with most Americans, particularly religious believers and young adults.

new analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute, released March 29 finds that many reject harsh proposals such as building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, said Dan Cox, director of research for PRRI.

the Web Editors 1-13-2016

Image via /Shutterstock.com

Due to a sudden wave of ICE raids and deportations of asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America, the White House has faced anger from numerous Democrats in Congress, who drafted a letter denouncing the raids. This new refugee plan, which sets up screening facilities in Central America, aims to reduce human smuggling as well to slow the flow of undocumented immigration.

Maria-Pia N. Chin 10-06-2014

MULTIRACIAL CHURCHES are becoming more common in this country—but that doesn’t happen by chance.

A 2010 study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, based on a random sample of more than 11,000 congregations, revealed an increase in multiracial congregations in the U.S.—30 percent of churches reported that more than half of their members were part of minority groups.

Members of three multiracial churches in and near the nation’s capital—one Catholic, one Methodist, and one nondenominational—say that at their church “people don’t look the same, or think that much about it,” and describe their congregations as welcoming places “where you can feel God’s presence, where you can be yourself.”

Though Sunday worship time is still known as “the most segregated hour in America,” older members of churches such as Peace Fellowship Church in Washington, D.C., St. Camillus Catholic Church in Silver Spring, Md., and Culmore United Methodist Church in Falls Church, Va., remember when things started changing. As migration and demographic shifts altered neighborhoods and communities, members sought to engage in “desegregated” worship, opting to join communities that mirrored a world with different cultures and ways to praise God.