families – Southwest Conference Blog

Hope of a Teddy Bear

This week, I have wept. Before this, I’d held back tears about the children in cages in detention centers. Maybe that’s why it’s been so long since I’ve written, actually, unwilling to open the flood gates. The dumpster fire is raging after all.

But many times over the last two days, I have wept.

On Saturday, an agency reuniting families sent a request for donations of items. While families have been held, there was little to collect in the way that churches do. The list was not long and many of the things you would expect: water and Gatorade, backpacks, pads, and snacks. I cried over one item, though: small stuffed animals. It wasn’t the stuffed animals, but the descriptor given: “comfort items for the children.”

My heart broke, the flood gates opened, and they haven’t stopped.

It’s a clinical descriptor, one I’ve heard before in education about child development. However, the deep place that I know it from is The Giver. If you haven’t read the children’s book, go get it and read it. I guarantee your local library has it. Like many of my favorite books, it’s set in a dystopian time–future or past, I don’t know. It is a world of sameness, though, and familial bonds have intentionally been destroyed. Children are born in one place, birthed by women of sturdy stock, but placed with families deemed more functional. Among many things, love is not a concept or a practice. Read the book; I promise that it’s really good.

In that world, children are given specific clothes to mark transitions. Items come and go at specific times in development, as they do for all children in the community. One of those items is a comfort object. The main character’s sister, Lily, is near to losing hers because of her age. It is, indeed, called a comfort object. She doesn’t realize in other places, it would be called an elephant. She has had it since infancy and sleeps with it at night. After all, that’s what comfort objects are for.

There’s some horrible reality when this phrase from dystopian fiction comes barreling into requests from churches. Last night, I went to Target and bought ten small teddy bears as my family’s contribution to the drive. Comfort objects.

My own childhood comfort object is stashed away at home. I’ve had it for more than thirty years now, a gift from family friends for my third birthday. At least that’s what my family tells me. I don’t remember getting Flop, but I do remember him always being with me. He’s a pink rabbit, now faded to nearly gray. His eye and head were reattached by my grandmother, her stitches still visible. Like Flop’s origins, my family remembers nighttime searches for him so that I could sleep. There were trips back to grandparents’ houses to retrieve him and flashlights taken to the playhouse. He was necessary and loved. My mom still rolls her eyes when I mention him, remembering the many times she moved hell and high water to find him; she’d do it, again. He’s still in my home for a reason.

Maybe I would not cry so much for these children if I didn’t have such an attachment for Flop. He represents a stability that every child deserves, from the bunny himself to the people who searched for him throughout my childhood. My parents still attend church with the people who bought him for me. There is so much stability wrapped up in that raggedy stuffed animal.

I am glad for these tears because we should mourn for these children who will never have that sort of stability in their lives. We should mourn for our complicity in their reality.

Strikingly, the best secular descriptor I have for the Reign of God also comes from The Giver. When the main character, Jonas, is realizing the gift he possesses, he catches a glimpse of red as he and his best friend are tossing an apple back and forth. In this world of sameness, most people do not see color. He only sees it occasionally and is never quite certain it was there and no one else sees it. When he does catch a glimpse, he wants to know more; it piques his curiosity. “Red” he learns later. “Red” describes this amazing thing.

I often think of that image. It’s Matthew’s “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” and all of the already and not yet of the Gospels. It’s the upside down of Luke that God would choose the poor over the rich, the child over the leader, and the simple over the complex. It’s beautiful and hopeful, even in the midst of threat.

As I write, people are dropping off the items needed. I have prayed over them many times today and will pray over them some more before handing them off. I hope they are at least a glimpse of something else. I don’t care at all if the people receiving would call it the reign of God. I hope they see a glimpse of a world where hungry people are fed, thirsty people are handed water, and children are comforted. I hope they see a glimpse of the fact that many of us would not choose their reality for any one. I hope it is a beautiful, wonderful glimpse of something, anything else.

Here’s hoping this little teddy bear does exceeds expectations in the Reign of God.

Not Your Kids

by Abigail Conley

A story flashes across my screen. Philando Castile. Charleena Lyles.

“Not your kids,” a voice says from somewhere inside.

It’s the voice of relief, a promise really, “not your kids.”

June is Pride Month, so there’s an array of rainbow everything on that same screen.

Pictures of happy couples, of families with moms or dads, of chestfeeding and breastfeeding, of pronoun etiquette and label etiquette. Amid those happy pictures, happy shares of stories, there are stories of rejection intermingled.

“Not your kids,” says the same voice from deep inside. I rest assured that my LGBTQ+ kids know they’re safe at church, if nowhere else.

I know the hijabs the little girls wear set them apart from their friends and neighbors. I know the color of their skin does, too. Their families are from Pakistan. I cannot imagine what many of them have been through in their lives. These Muslim children joyfully welcome their Christian neighbors, snuggling up to the adults who are more familiar. I wonder how often they are not safe outside these walls.

“Not your kids,” comes the same voice.

This is the echo of privilege. The fears that accompany so many people do not accompany my kids—the ones from my church, the ones of my own I may have some day.

Children seem to be the great equalizer among people. Children are easier to play with and easier to talk to. They seem to more easily embrace any adult willing to play with them. They worry less about language barriers. My Spanish is even perfect for hanging out with preschool kids, where I can quiz them on colors and shapes.

I remember a plea made in my own denomination that stopped some of the fighting about LGBTQ+ welcome: our kids are dying.

Even the naysayers realized that’s the worst sort of pain.

The voice comes often, “Not your kids.”

If it’s not your kids, it’s easy to forget the sort of desperation that comes with it is your kids. It’s the kind of desperation that dragged Jairus from his home to find a man he’d only heard about. It’s the kind of desperation that made him pull Jesus along with him through the city streets, to a house where mourning had already begun. It’s the desperation that will do anything to save a child’s life.

“Not your kids,” will echo, again. Our privilege will remind us of the fears we don’t have for our children. I wonder, can we learn the answer, “But they’re somebody’s kids”?

Stop Operation Streamline

by Rev. Randy Mayer and Christian Ramirez

(originally published on thehill.com; reposted with permission)

The clank of chains resonates through the federal courtroom in Tucson, Arizona, as a group of 70 fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers shuffle along with shackles on their ankles linked to handcuffs on their wrists. This was just one of hundreds of draconian, rapid-fire mass trials of individuals, most of whom are only trying to reunite with their families in the U.S. or flee persecution in their home countries. This is the cruel and costly process of criminalizing migration, the most egregious form of which is known as Streamline.

While this version only happens in Tucson, brave people who make the decision to risk life and limb to provide for their families or find safe haven are now charged with illegal entry and illegal reentry nationwide. Nonetheless, the district of Arizona ranks second in the nation for immigration-related criminal convictions.

When lay leaders from the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ, a member- organization of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, first observed these proceedings a few years ago, they were sickened by what they witnessed. Since then, it has become our spiritual obligation to bring fellow people of faith and conscience to the courtroom to be a quiet presence of solidarity for the migrants who are corralled through this unjust process. Over the years, we have watched the proceedings become worse, with higher charges and longer sentences. Often the scene is unbearable as the hopes of 70 families being reunited or finding safety from persecution unravel with the word “Culpable” or “Guilty” muttered by the individuals to the Judge.

Migrants referred for these mass hearings meet with their court appointed lawyers for fewer than 10 minutes and make hasty, pressured decisions that impact their ability to reunite with their families and pursue new opportunities. By the glossy look in their eyes it is clear that most, if not all the people facing charges in the courtroom, have not had their rights properly explained and do not realize they are being subjected to a system of excessive punishment. Yet this is the purpose of Operation Streamline, to move so quickly that no one can object, to keep individuals in the dark, and to erode the 5th amendment of the U.S. Constitution which upholds due process as a fundamental American value.

These costly, unjust prosecutions for those hoping to be reunited with family or seeking safety are lauded as a successful deterrent strategy by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and other policymakers. If politicians took the time to visit border communities and meet eye-to-eye with these family members, as many of the humanitarian groups such as the Samaritans, Kino Border Initiative, and No More Deaths do on a daily basis, they would see how these proceedings violate our nation’s basic principles of fairness and justice. A 2013 study by University of Arizona students, In the Shadow of the Wall, found that people will face any hardship to reunite with their families. Love and family ties know no borders, and criminalizing the basic human right to reunite with loved ones is shameful.

A recent Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General Report on Streamline found that Border Patrol is unable to demonstrate that Streamline prosecutions deter unauthorized migration. The report also found that Border Patrol may be referring asylum seekers for criminal prosecution, a clear violation of the government’s obligations under both domestic and international law.

Operation Streamline has also drastically increased the profits of corporations that run both federal prisons and immigrant detention centers, some of which have recently started to jail mothers and children fleeing violence and persecution. These private prisons receive about $3 billion each year in revenue. Although the recent OIG report noted that government authorities do not know how many millions of taxpayers dollars are used to fund Streamline, estimates from the U.S. Marshals Service indicate that the incarceration costs in Tucson alone amount to $63 million per year.

In July, more than 170 civil rights, human rights, and faith-based organizations urged U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to end this costly, ineffective, and immoral program that erodes due process, violates human rights standards, and contributes to the unethical practice of mass incarceration for a profit in this country. Communities in the border region and faith communities from around the country are united in saying that this program needs to end.

Mayer is pastor of The Good Shepherd Church of Christ in Sahuarita, Arizona. Ramirez is director of the Human Rights Program at the Alliance San Diego and staffs the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium and the Southern Border Communities Coalition.