Webinar: The Only Secure Community is the Beloved Community
The message below went out on Friday, January 27, 2012 to Standing on the Side of Love supporters. You can sign-up for these emails here.
I’d like to invite you to be part of a real secure community.
To me, we find security in each other’s open arms, in seeking shoulders to lean on instead of backs to stand on. Security is a mother’s love or a sibling’s smile; a family gathered around a table filled with daily bread.
Unfortunately, such scenes are being threatened by a program that falsely shares the name, “Secure Communities,” but is better known as S-Comm. S-Comm is one in a series of federal immigration programs that enlists local police in the role of unjust immigration enforcement. It turns our public servants into “migra” and turns our local jails into check-points. It’s the main engine behind today’s deportation machine. Despite brave and bold actions and official opposition from governors in three states and condemnations from major newspapers, the Administration has pushed to make the deportation program mandatory nation-wide by next year.
However, the program can’t function without the voluntary participation of our local law enforcers. Places like Santa Clara, CA, Chicago, IL, and San Francisco have found ways to break ICE’s hold on our communities by treating all people who enter their jails equally regardless of documentation status and refusing to extend people’s incarceration just because ICE requested it.
Join us for a webinar next Thursday, February 2nd, at 8:00 p.m. ET to learn how to keep our communities whole by breaking ICE’s hold on them. Our families deserve to stay together, it’s police and ICE that should be separated.
Click here to sign up for the webinar.
This webinar is a collaboration of the Interfaith Immigration Coalition (IIC), of which the UUA is a member, as well as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM). The 90-minute webinar is designed to help congregations create interfaith teams to advocate for change in their communities. Combined with a downloadable toolkit [links to downloadable PDF file], the webinar will give participants concrete tools to launch interfaith grassroots campaigns to demand their city or state break ICE’s Hold on them. Give us 90 minutes and we’ll show you how!
Sign up to participate here:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1272/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=6419
We stood firmly together in Arizona; now it’s time to face the Arizona in our own backyards. Sheriff Arpaio of Maricopa County may be the ugliest face of these federal programs but there are lesser known Arpaios at work in all of our towns. Together we can turn the tide from hate to human rights, from fear to courage, from intolerance to the side of love.
Looking forward to working together,
B. Loewe
National Day Laborer Organizing Network
PS. To learn more about S-Comm and ICE Holds visit altopolimigra.com/detainers
