Building a Welcoming Future: Caring for ALL

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) is hosting a special community conversation on December 7^th bringing together leaders working on the ground in Black and Brown communities to discuss current tensions and how to build the solidarity we need to create a society that cares for everyone.

December 7, 2023 | 12pm

 Live from University Church Chicago

on ICIRR’s Facebook and YouTube  

This landmark event is recommended to you by our Immigrant Solidarity Team and our Racial Equity Action and Leadership Team.

In today’s environment of political unrest, nations at war, economic and social disparity, and unimaginable change, it would be easy to withdraw and find a safe, quiet place to get away from everything.  But is that really who we are? As Unitarian Universalists we are called to continue our work for a world made whole. That means we need the strength of others and the willingness to stand with those without our privilege.

 

We need to stand in solidarity with all communities to create a society that cares for everyone. This includes Black communities who’ve suffered long-standing disinvestment, immigrants waiting for decades within our broken immigration system, and newly arriving migrants and asylum seekers. We hope this conversation will spark new ideas on how we can support each other not only in this moment, but in our future work building power together.

 

Panelists

Andrea Ortiz-Landin Director of Organizing, Brighton Park Neighborhood Council

Fasika Alem Programs Director, United African Organization

Dixon Romeo Executive Director, Not Me We

Reverend Julian DeShazier Senior Pastor, University Church Chicago

 

Proceeds from this event will further ICIRR’s organizing and advocacy for economic and racial justice and our long-term alliance building in Black and Brown communities. A portion of the proceeds will go to folks working on the ground to welcome new arrivals.

 

 

Through our contacts at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, (ICIRR) the UCE Immigrant Solidarity Team has learned of efforts to help those seeking asylum at our southern border.  Below are some ways you could help.

In response to the of asylum seekers and requests to help from area citizens, a collective of organizations and advocates including ICIRR formed “CITA,” Chicago Immigrant Transportation Assistance.  CITA aims to support asylum seekers leaving detention centers with ground transportation needs.

Detained families and individuals, mainly from Central America, with credible cases of persecution are admitted into the U.S. to await the outcome of their asylum application. DHS does not provide asylees with winter clothes, food or information on how navigate ground transportation.

CITA has supported over 60 asylum seekers traveling on Greyhound over the last three weeks. CITA has distributed food, winter clothes, provided phone calls, translation services and other immediate needs.

WHATS NEXT: We have designed a volunteer/donation program to support asylum seekers who arrive at the Harrison Greyhound Station.

• Spanish-speaking volunteers are needed at the Harrison Station to provide care and support to asylum seekers. Greatest need!
• All language speaking volunteers are needed to sort through donations, prepare comfort kits and help coordinate additional assistance to families. Donations are being collected at the ICIRR Office located at 228 S Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL 60604.
• Financial contributions to help maintain a storage unit close to the Harrison Station and have an emergency credit card on hand for other services (i.e., medication, fee for missed bus, etc.).
• We are need of savvy-tech professionals who can create a system of volunteers, donations and tracking that is efficient.

If you wish to volunteer with CITA please REGISTER AT https://bit.ly/2FSAYRA. The trainings will be held at the Red Cross located at 2200 W Harrison St, Chicago, IL 60612. Volunteers at the station will be asked to complete a brief background check.

Looking for a simple way to support the thousands of immigrants who have recently arrived (many on busses from border cities) in the Chicago area seeking asylum?

The Immigrant Solidarity Team of the Unitarian Church of Evanston is partnering with a local adhoc group of volunteers to help asylum seekers currently living in police stations, schools, park district buildings, colleges and other public buildings around Chicago.

 

From June 5-26 we are collecting:

● Thick Yoga Mats or Sleeping Pads

● Sleeping Bags and Clean Blankets

● New Socks and Underwear all sizes

● Back packs and small suitcases

● OTC Cold Medicine (adults and kids)

● Lice Treatment Kits

 

Drop Off at UCE

Dates: June 5-26 Monday-Friday during office hours 10:30-4:30

Sunday immediately before or after the 10:30 service. Please contact Michelle Novak through the Realm or theUCE office or comment and DM me on messenger if you have questions or need pickup or drop off arrangements.

 

Thank you in advance for your support!

Highland Park Shooting – Opportunities for Action

The July 4th Highland Park shooting  has impacted our local immigrant community hard. Please see this message from ICIRR, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, one of IST’s partner organizations.

 

From: ICIRR
Date: Wed, Jul 6, 2022 at 1:24 PM
Subject: Highland Park 

The ICIRR family has been devastated and angered by the events in Highland Park this past Monday. Leaders with our member organization Mano a Mano Family Resource Center have lost relatives. We cannot imagine the pain that they and the entire community are enduring right now, and we mourn with them.    

We specifically note that many of the victims are members of Highland Park’s thriving Latinx community. They, their families and neighbors need culturally and linguistically competent crisis relief services as they grapple with this horrible tragedy. Those who need immigrant friendly mental health resources can visit Mental Health Resources — The Coalition for Immigrant Mental Health (ourcimh.org).

The UCE Afghani family: Please support them! 

We wanted to give you a quick update about the Afghan family that the Refugee Family volunteers have been helping. We are proud to tell you that we have raised $6000 with another $2000 to go to reach our $8000 fundraising goal. 

The baby of the family just turned one and there is much to celebrate as she is a joy, toddling around and babbling away. The young man in the family (nephew of the mother) loves to practice soccer at the Weber Center in Skokie and is also in chess club at his school. 

Note: If you have a child who is around 10 years old and they’d be willing to practice soccer or do another fun activity with the boy—please reach out Jeanne Kerl (her email address is in Realm or use admin@ucevanston.org) and we can arrange an outing. 

The mother is working hard on learning English, and she often has two lessons a day online. We would love to see her taking classes at Oakton, but with a baby, childcare is an issue. We will be working with World Relief to try to get her a job and she will need childcare for that. It is a challenge. 

The family’s immigration issues are significant. The father is still in Afghanistan and Andy Schlickman and Marilyn Wroblewski have spent many, many hours pulling together information for his humanitarian parole case, which is now complete. Now they are working on the mother’s case with help from the Muslim Women’s Center. Because Afghanistan imploded so quickly, these families are not traditional refugees with a long vetting period, so they need to apply to stay in the U.S.  

NOTE: If you know of anyone with legal skills that might be able to help our team, please email Marilyn Wroblewski (her email address is in Realm or use admin@ucevanston.org). 

We are still trying to raise $8000 (or more) for the family’s rent. If you can donate any amount, we would be incredibly grateful. If we make enough money, we can help her with childcare as well. 

How to donate: 

Checks can be mailed to The Unitarian Church of Evanston, Refugee Family Fund, 1330 Ridge Avenue, Evanston, IL 60201. Or use this online form and scroll down to “Refugee Family Fund” and enter your amount and fill out the form to donate, as directed.  

If you have already given—thank you so much! If you have not yet done so, please consider helping this family navigate their new life here in the U.S. 

–the Refugee Family Working Group (of the Immigrant Solidarity Team)

The Immigrant Solidarity Team is so grateful for all donations to the Bakeer family last fall and winter. We were able to pay their rent through July and buy clothing as well with our fundraising and the generous support of an Endowment grant.  

Now we are shifting our attention to an Afghan family. We are not naming them because of privacy concerns. The young woman who heads up this family is in her 20s and her husband is still in Afghanistan, unable to come to the U.S. for now.  One of our volunteers, when making a visit to the apartment building of the Bakeer family (Syrian) was approached by this young mother—she asked “could you please help me too?” She was provided an apartment and some basics by the resettlement agency, but they are very strapped right now and she had no sponsoring family to help her learn the ways things operate in our society. 

This brave young woman has a 9-month-old baby and her 10-year-old nephew in her family. Two of our volunteers—Marilyn Wroblewski and Sheila Holder have taken the lead with this family and have been providing food, clothing, furniture and general advice about shopping, food stamps etc. Andy Shlickman is assisting with much needed legal help on behalf of the husband. Other team members working with the Afghan family include Jane Kenamore, Carol Nielsen and Jeanne Kerl and we are also collaborating with Building Peaceful Bridges (a local nonprofit). The young mother is taking English classes online and will be getting some tutoring help from another UCE member.  Other volunteers on the refugee team have also pitched in—getting her a new bed and other necessities.  She is very eager to work and earn money for her family. 

Her rent support from her resettlement agency runs out April 30th, so we are launching a fundraising campaign to support her with a goal of $7800 to pay the family’s rent from May until October.  Please donate on the page on the UCE website. Every amount helps us reach our goal. We will have Facebook posts as well and we ask that you share those with friends if you feel comfortable doing that. We want to get many donors outside our church membership as well. 

Please dig deep and contribute if you can. Checks can be mailed to The Unitarian Church of Evanston, Refugee Family Fund, 1330 Ridge Avenue, Evanston, IL 60201. Please write“Refugee Fund” on the memo line of your check. You can also use this online form and scroll down to “Refugee Family Fund” and enter your amount and fill out the form to donate, as directed.  

Any questions? Please email Jeanne Kerl at figkerl@gmail.com. And thank you for considering this. 

On October 27, the Immigrations Solidarity Team showed the film La Bestia, a documentary following a number of Latin American migrants who try to reach the United States by riding Mexico’s railroads, followed by a panel of Oscar Chacon of Alianza Americas and Charlotte Jones-Carrol, chair of Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice.  

Current US immigration policy toward Latin American immigrants, essentially unchanged since the 1940s, creates roadblocks to that immigration, but migrants continue to find ways around the roadblocks.  Oscar argued that our best approach is to try to address the intolerable circumstances in the home countries, which are the root of the migration.  More migrants are coming in family groups and even unaccompanied minors, people who often travel in “caravans”, or even on buses, who are seeking to join families already in the States.  One impact of the use of Rule 42, rejecting people on the relatively specious grounds that they represent a danger of covid infections, is that people turned back on those grounds do not face the potential 10 years’ bar that arises from legal deportations, so they continue to try to reenter.  

Oscar argued that the gradual predominance of Latin Americans in migration patterns to the US was met from 1940 on with a concerted white supremacist campaign that migrants are dangerous.  At the same time, he has noticed that Latin American migration tends to increase when jobs are more plentiful in the US.  Thus, he argued, Latin American migration, and migration in general, is actually a net positive for the US economy and for wealth generation and even tax collection.  Charlotte pointed out that the industries which are primarily reliant on migrants are hospitality, food preparation (including meat and poultry butchering), and agriculture.  Migrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.  

UUSJ is trying to address US immigration policies by lobbying Congress.  Charlotte mentioned that several reasonable legislative proposals have been submitted to Congress, but that the only avenue that has any reasonable chance of progress is Dream Act reform.  While that is a positive step, it addresses at most 700,000 people, while the undocumented population of the US is closer to 11 million.  Oscar argued that the persistent negative campaign against Latin American immigrants has made immigration reform a toxic issue for Democrats, who fear that they will be defeated in the polls if they push for such reform. 

We reached our $5000 fundraising goal! We are so excited, but please feel free to keep donating, as the need is great for the family. Rent is $1300 a month, so any donation helps them out. The Immigrant Solidarity Team thanks you for your generosity and support. The family is settling in, but it will take time. Carol Nielsen has gotten the mother a sewing machine as she sews for a living. Jane Kenamore is arranging rides for them to the doctor, so please reach out to Jane if you can help out with that as those arise.

We also had a few people ask us about the status of the Haj Khalaf family who we sponsored back in 2016 and who are related to this new family. Here’s an update about them:

Both Mohammad and Aya (who were young adults when they arrived) have gotten married. Aya and her husband just had their second son on 10/16/21 (pictured above). Mohammad and his wife have one child with another child on the way. They and the oldest sister (Beraa) and her husband have all moved to Louisville, KY.  That leaves Aya and her husband and the youngest son (Uday) here in Skokie. Both Aya and Uday began college at Oakton in the fall of 2020. Aya is not attending this fall because of her pregnancy and Uday is now working full time to support his parents and taking a single class. Aya will go back to school pretty soon, hopefully. The parents continue to have health issues,but are doing okay.

Thanks again to the UCE community for your compassion and support.

The Immigrant Solidarity Team will be showing the Movie La Bestia (2010) about the freight trains from southern Mexico to the US that refugees use to come north, at great peril to themselves.  The film will be followed by a discussion with panelists Oscar Chacon and Charlotte Jones-Carroll to give an update to the migrant situation currently unfolding in 2021.

For over three decades, thousands of Central Americans have lost their dreams and lives trying to cross illegally the Mexican territory hanging from the cargo trains. They travel thousands of kilometers to get to the Mexico-USA border. ‘The Beast’ as this mode of transportation has become known, is the most viable alternative when crossing a country filled with immigration checkpoints, thieves, Mexican mafia members and authorities who often rob, rape and kill them. In order to film this documentary, Pedro Ultreras risked his own life by riding this cargo trains across Mexico with hundreds of Central American migrants for more than two weeks.

The Beast, is a heart breaking film that shows some of the most profound suffering a migrant can ever live.

When: October 27 at 7:00 PM
Where: Room 3 at UCE and on Zoom – Click here to join.
Panelists: 

Oscar Chacon, Executive Director at Alianza Americas. Alianza Americas is a network of migrant-led organizations working in the United States and transnationally to create an inclusive, equitable and sustainable way of life for communities across North, Central and South America. 

And Charlotte Jones-Carroll, chair of Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice (UUSJ) which lobbies the Hill on social justice issues. She is a retired international development economist having worked for USAID and the World Bank. She is a member of the River Road UU congregation in Bethesda, MD. 

Please RSVP to Lee Bannor at bannor@sbcglobal.net or Michelle Novak  at michellenovak23@gmail.com   

People who wish to attend in person must let us know in advance due to the need to keep social distance. A free offering will be taken to cover expenses.