 Hi, my name is Jennifer Motha, and I brought a group of TLD students. We have Lisa Dangan, Lea, Kate, and Kevin, and Leslie. We're looking to work with Jane Friedman in the backpack ministry. Yay! Good job. Anyone else? Thank you. I've asked Lucretia Burton this morning to open our meeting with the friends. This summer, Terry and I were at a crossroads, and I was praying for guidance. And this is what the Lord gave me. Where were we when the Indians were being killed and their lands being stolen? And God's people remained silent. Where were we when slaves were brought to the United States, sold, families separated and were mistreated in unimaginable ways, and God's people remained silent? Where were we when Irish Catholics were refused jobs, asked to leave our country and discriminated against, and God's people remained silent? Where were we during the Holocaust when many families were separated and millions of people were murdered, and God's people remained silent? Where were we during World War II when Japanese families were separated, their goods and houses stolen, and they were interred in prison camps, and God's people remained silent? Where were we during the Civil Rights Movement when people were imprisoned, injured, and killed because they wanted to peacefully point out the discrimination of our nation, and God's people remained silent? Where were we when Harriet killed the children, two years old and younger, and Jesus' family had to flee to another country, and God's people remained silent? Where were we when Christ was crucified, and God's people remained silent, or cried, crucified Him, crucified Him? Dear God, are you giving us another chance to show that we are your people? We thank you that we are one of the richest nations in the world. We have more than enough. Our storage units, which are larger and safer from the elements than the houses of these immigrants, are filled with our overflow. Help us to be generous. Forgive us for separating families, putting children in cages, discriminating out of fear, ignoring pleas for asylum from those in fear of death, and allowing deaths to happen when we don't speak out. Help us to live so you will say to us, as is in Matthew 25, then the king will say to those on his right, come, take your inheritance, for I was a stranger and you invited me in. Help us to seek and do your will. Amen. Will God's people again remain silent? We're very grateful to have Lucretia and Terry on our organizing board. I'm Mary Grace Ketter, I'm co-chair of Interfaith Welcome Coalition, and Lena Baxter and I are the ones responsible for hurting these cats, so be kind to us. Our special guest speaker this morning, Terry, would you like to introduce Mariela? We have made two very special friends at the bus station, and to honor today that both of them are going to be speaking to us, Mariela Asso, and Primo Timo Torres, you heard him speak this a second ago. While we're handing out backpacks, they are very much involved in teaching people our bus immigrants, migrants, about their legal rights and the things that they should know. So we're very honored to have both of them come and speak with us this morning. They're very dear friends of ours. Thank you. This is good for everyone. Okay, good morning. Thank you for having us here today. My name is Mariela Asso, and I am the bus station project manager at RISIS, and we'll be talking more in depth about what the project is about and what we've been doing since May of 2018. Good morning, everyone. My name is Primo Timo Torres, and I'm very honored to be here as well. All right, so for those that aren't familiar with what our project is about, as Terry mentioned, we are at the Greyhound bus station and we're meeting all of the families and individuals that are being released from detention centers as well as the Customs and Border Protection Facilities down at the borders. We know that San Antonio is a huge release point for a lot of families and individuals that are being released from detention. It's also a major transfer point for families and individuals coming to other parts of the United States. So since the beginning of our project in May, we have provided legal orientations to close to 5,000 families that's around 5,000 adults and more than 6,000 children. What we've identified as the main objectives of our project is that we want to provide legal orientations to every single family and individual that goes through the bus station so that they know what the next steps are towards obtaining asylum. So the legal orientation that we cover has two parts. The first is an intake that we use to collect data that we hope to use for advocacy purposes and the paperwork orientation that we go over covers information about their ICE check-in, instructions about applying for asylum, so the one-year deadline to submit an asylum application, how to find out about their court dates and also have a know-your-rights component that is super important because we do hear a lot of the times from families that ICE officials or CBP officials are telling them that they have no rights in this country, that their children cannot be enrolled in school because that's against the law and we want to dismantle those slides because we want to make sure that all these families know that they do have rights in this country. So another part of the work that we're doing is that we're providing legal resources for whatever state or major city they're going to. Admittedly, our legal resources need some work, but we are in the process of updating those right now so that we make sure that they are in a good shape and that when a family reaches out to one of those organizations on the list that they can reach someone that can provide support to them. We want our work to extend beyond what we're doing here in San Antonio because we realize that it's very important that they're aware of what the next steps are towards obtaining asylum, but we also know that they're going to need support and going through those steps. So we really want to make sure that we're connecting them to organizations in their sponsor cities and states so that they have support. And then a couple of other objectives of our project are that we make sure that the injustices that go on in detention centers do not go unheard. We hear a lot of terrible things about these spaces, and so right now we're in the process of working with our litigation team at RISIS to use the data that we've collected all these months for advocating purposes. And then lastly, one very, very important objective is that we become symbols of support. You know that when these families and individuals arrive to the country, they receive a very harsh welcome. And so it's very important for us to be at the bus station and to collaborate with the Interfaith Local Coalition to provide a warm welcome to make them feel supported and to let them know that even though ICE officials and CBP officials can try to rob them of their dignity, no one can take away the strength and the courage that they possess because we know that they don't make this trek just for the hell of it. And so we want to make sure that we're there to support them. Just, I'm going to let you know just a little bit about myself before I start this. I actually was at the detention centers for the last year. So we worked at various detention centers, but I was at CARMS, I'll say like the last seven, eight months. And we were there since day one for the zero-tolerance purposes. So we saw it all, we heard it all, we breathed it, and unfortunately our government right now is causing a disservice to a lot of these people. And it trickles down to a lot of the ICE agents and they treat people with such cruelty and inhumane. And we're there to support as well, not just legal resources, but support. We have a lot of deaths who unfortunately try to commit suicide. We were there. We had children as young as four months be there with us. So it is very discouraging to see all this, but we're there trying to help. And seeing the coloration between the ICEs and IWC, it gives us such hope. And also at the same time, the welcoming is so important, not just the legal aspect of it, but IWC gives so much back-to-ex-food. But just the welcoming part is so important for these families to know that they are welcome in this country and that they are loved. So where do we see most people that are coming from? We see the triangle basically, which is Guatemala, Honduras and Salvador. We have 29% of people coming from Guatemala. 52% of people are coming from Honduras and 12% coming from in Salvador. There's a smaller percentage coming from Nicaragua and other countries and also southern Mexico. We also see that as well. We know that 98% of the homicide cases go unprosecuted in these countries. And unfortunately, the poverty rate is close to 60% in these countries. So, like Mariela said, they make a trek here and that they want us out of necessity, out of persecution. So it is very important the work that we do to welcome them as well. After analyzing some of the data that we have collected since May, we have found that on average, people are spending two days in the Yalera with the highest number of days that someone has reported being 16. For those of you who know the Yalera is like a freezer box and they give them on an aluminum blanket and sometimes they go out without water for days, they can june certain things and when all these kids come out sick, most of the kids come out very, very sick. They have very inhumane conditions and so to think that someone has spent 16 days in a facility like that is horrifying for the Perrera we have you can't hear me sorry yeah, so on average they are spending two days in the Yalera and the highest number of days that anyone has reported being detained in the Yalera was 16 days. For the Perrera for the Perrera, so on average they have spent three days there with the highest number of days being 15 and the Perrera is like a bullpen but the freezer, the Yalera they have, they save on the floor it's a cement floor, that's what they see. And then for detention centers we found that they are spending on average 17 days with the highest number of days being 268. So this was from an individual that was released from adult detention that had been detained for this long and one in the last year, yes so all of this information that we're reporting on is information that was collected since May of 2018 until now. Just to clarify, the Yalera and the Perrera, those are on the border the detention center referring to as Dillian Carnes. Dillian Carnes and Peersaw, which are the major ones here around San Antonio. But Peersaw, the length of stay is much longer isn't it? Is that sort of a different level of case? Yes, and so we found adult detainees and so whereas in family detention the floor settlement sort of determines that they cannot be there for more than 20 days, there's nothing like that for adults. And for the zero tolerance spotters as we all know it, we had families that went there for seven, eight months for the zero tolerance spotters. And these guys were babies, they grew up basically in detention incarcerated. We also found that ice chickens are scheduled within nine days of their release but we have found that sometimes they are scheduled on the same day of their release. So these are mistakes that ice makes but have serious implications on these cases. I was just on a call yesterday with people in Tennessee there was a woman that was released from I believe Dillian and her ice chicken was scheduled on the same day of her release which makes absolutely no sense. Of course she missed her ice chicken and she showed up as soon as she could but was detained again and so these are mistakes that ice is making but have really negative implications on these cases and so what we're doing is trying to identify as many of those as we can and to be able to be there to support these people. We've also identified more than 900 cases of family separations in the Yeleras and Perreras and these are they can vary from a couple of hours to days but we know that it's still unjust so the justification that CBP officials say or have for separating people in these facilities is that if the child is older than 8 or older than 10 that they have to be separated from the parent but we know that this doesn't always happen. We know that it's very randomized and we know that it shouldn't be happening because it has psychological implications on the well being of these children and their parents and then we've also found 180 cases of port of entry denials of people showing up to an official port of entry and being turned away and having no choice but to cross through the river which is a huge risk for their safety and then additionally we have documented many many mistakes on their release documents so they I just mentioned the mistakes that they make in regards to their ice check ins but what we're seeing is that they're also making mistakes on the notice to appear documents which may be welcome to tell you more about. So what's going on then is that they're given a notice to appear and what's happening is they're given a notice to appear here in Texas even though they're moving to New York, California and everywhere else and there's a lot of confusion right now with a lot of the judges ice themselves and also with the families do I have to go back to Texas to go to court. So our litigation team is on it and trying to figure out what's going on. Ice, we figure this is doing it deliberately not just to cause confusion but at the same time the people don't show up to this to their court hearings out of nowhere they get what's called a default judgment against them so they can go back to the Intention Center deportation very very quickly so when they say do it the right way let me just kind of explain that just give me a sense we have people in Tijuana right now on the other side we have 10,000 people who are trying to apply for asylum yet they're only allowing 27 to 30 people per day per day. So the other 10,000 are susceptible to kidnap, susceptible to harm and that's what's going on right now it is very deliberate what they're doing the zero time response is very deliberate to cause harm to these children to deter other families from coming fortunately people have a need to come they are going to come to seek shelter and have a better life for their families so we are we're looking at destinations where are they going we notice they're the most states we basically this is out of over 4,800 families that we saw since May and the top five states where they're going is Texas which is number one then it's California Florida Louisiana and Maryland and according to the 2016 American immigration council it can be hard to refine a lawyer depending on where you live especially in the rural areas and a lot of these families without legal representation they're basically over 62% of people cannot get a lawyer right now 62% of the people are very hard for them to get a lawyer and the number could be even higher in the rural areas as well so we try as much as we can to keep up to date on resources we can say there's free lawyers where you're going there's a lot of them there they have no resources they take a month sometimes two months just to get to this point with basically just certain very small necessities until IWC provides so much for them here but they have no money for legal resources so we're trying to get our legal resources up to date and trying to get them legal representation because without that it's very hard for them to receive any kind of relief especially in sign language so as you see we've identified a lot of things that are really important about this project and so moving forward we know that there are a lot of areas of growth in terms of what do we do with this information moving forward how can we connect more families to savings of support and at the core of the work that we're doing is collaborating with others right and so we're very thankful for the relationship that we have established with the Interfaith Welcome Coalition for everyone allowing us to be on the bus station and to provide legal orientations to give this information to the families because we know that it is very useful for them so thank you to all of the Interfaith Welcome Coalition volunteers and everyone that has been at the bus station and has been part of this work and of course everyone that continues to be part of this work in other capacities we also have a really good relationship with great home staff and so we're really thankful for that as well and of course moving forward we're really moving into establishing national networks with organizations across the US right now we have six partnerships in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Charlotte, Kansas City Philadelphia and LA so those are our six partnerships right now so we've been able to refer families out to those partnerships directly and depending on the organization they offer different services sometimes it's only legal services, sometimes it's more mental health or just community services and so we're really working hard to make sure that we expand those networks so that one day we can connect all of the families that we're seeing at the bus station with someone that can support them when they arrive to their final destination and of course we couldn't do any of this work without the support of our volunteers that are there on a daily basis to make this work possible when I talk about legal services I'm just kind of, I want to give you just a quick notice you know having a lawyer makes it five times more likely to an assignment five times more and more likely a lot of lawyers unfortunately in these areas they'll start at $5,000 we've seen numbers that are thrown out people cannot afford this so we're trying to do legal resources our vision is to have 100% representation for these families that is our goal so what is our vision? well we talked about the resource guide and about the legal representation for the families but also court accompanies I think court accompanies is so important to their ICE check-ins because if they miss that first one they're basically I'm not going to say this is screwed when they leave the centers and I spent the last year there I just give them a packet and adios people are something, a lot of them they cannot even read some of them don't speak Spanish they have a different dialect from Guatemala so many different languages so it is our job to try to catch those to let them know where they go and it's very critical that we're there in support so our mission is not just to be there we're also trying to move into NAICS as well and we're going to do that very soon and also on the weekends because there's a lot of need that are on the weekends they have buses that come to NAICS it's very hard for them to have any kind of legal representation or any kind of orientation so we're moving into that also expanding our services not just legal, but people have to see the doctor so we're trying to expand our services for health services for mental health services we're psychologically scarred we brought the psychologists to our center to do this families that have been separated for months because they had their own psychologists at the center so they found that this kids were not impacted at all so we brought our own psychologists an 89 year old psychologist Dr. Kleinman he flew his own plane to the centers and he found we have 16 families he found that every single one of the children were psychologically scarred that's what he found in his findings there was not one day where he didn't leave crying talking to these children about their nightmares so it's very important that we have mental health evaluations as well so we are working with the psychologists as well see how we can find us racist and legal teams trying to find a lawsuit as well for what the Trump administration did to these families but also school families come in and they tell us we have no right to school that's what they tell us and we tell them you know school is the great equalizer it is what you know it is what equalizes the rich and the poor, it opens up the doors to an opportunity for you and your family so we try to find resources for schools how do you register the kids to school and ultimately we're doing this work for advocacy to shut those places down this detention center does not exist and that is our ultimate goal is to shut them down and that's all the information we have if you have any questions yeah we're going to open it up for questions absolutely, they brought their own psychologists because we found that these people need a lot of psych evil there's a lot of mental health the families that were at the detention center we had over 700 families at the detention center and I would say over 400 were re-separated twice from their children so ICE and the private prison system we usually can talk about that it's profit driven as we all know and the product is human suffering so these children have been affected so we asked, racist asked to do psychological evaluations so ICE brought in their own psychologists and also GEO GEO is the owner of this private prison system that we have down there and they found that there was no problem with this children so we had to bring an independent psychologist and he asked to talk to the psychologists in the centers and he was there for two weeks waiting they never met with him he wanted to know where did you find these findings I want to know your credentials because these kids are obviously traumatized for life thank you I know that there have occasionally been people from RISC and the airport as well I'm hoping that's part of your vision thank you for that and that is part of our vision as well I should have mentioned that we are moving into the airport as well so thank you for telling us yes I've heard of it but I haven't received an email from them but I would be interested to getting in touch with them so that maybe we can collaborate because Denise and I will video with them and they sent me the information and it sounded like I was trying to set up these types of setups in the major cities in the United States so I will send you that that would be great thank you yes I have someone who has had the opportunity to work closely with RISC and the bus station I just really want to congratulate especially Mariela on this I mean you have two organizations with two different missions working side by side in the middle of what is just chaos and doing it very effectively and very respectfully and we so deeply appreciate the work we are deeply honored to be part of that there's only one more thing that I want to say so we also have what is called a BAM program a lot of these families and Piersa as well right now they are posting bail for a lot of these families and the average is $8,500 average so RISC is able to post his balance for these families and I don't have quite a number I think Nick said over do you remember the number he had we don't know how many times we have but this is what's called NAD it's totally ridiculous we have one as high as $85,000 for our father and our daughter $85,000 for BAM it's totally ridiculous so RISC is also paying that upfront somewhere for paying ICE to make sure they go to the court everything but it is very inhumane what is going on with our immigrant families from out of the board I have two other questions this little boy that following on for four years so screwed up because he was put in isolation and harnessed and he needs somebody to deal with his psychological problems talk about trauma that kid is traumatized that's one question the other question I have is what's going on in Laredo what's going on in Laredo because the people are going to come to Laredo okay so to answer your first question we don't have a point of contact in Sacramento but I'm happy to look into that because we do have contacts in LA that maybe could help us make that connection and so I'm happy to look into that we actually are moving to California we're working on that right now and it's going to happen in the next few months we are having enough of this it's going to be mostly our advocacy groups, a lot of media so maybe if we can find this information we can maybe contact them and for the second part what we do is we receive them directly and those are the ones that have the least time as IWC knows those are the ones that we have the least time we do try to catch as many as we can and try to give them a know your rights and also the legal information like the legal orientation and also work to report so we do try to catch as many as those as possible can you catch them in a minute? no wouldn't that end up bad still they're coming, most of them are coming here they're coming to our station so we do get buzzes on a daily basis from legal patents and we do try to do the know your rights as much as we can and for those of you that have heard about the caravan that arrived to Bieders-Negres I don't know a lot about what's happening in terms of processing people but I have heard from Casey Miller that used to be part of our bus station project she's actually down there right now and she's told me that the conditions in Bieders-Negres are way worse than what they were in Tijuana which is very alarming I've run the chapter for the Council on American Islamic Relations in San Antonio and this is a civil rights organization the largest for the Muslims in the United States had coded in Washington DC we do not specifically deal with immigration but of course the Muslim cases that comes to us my question to you is that you gave us the percentage of how many are coming from which country but there are also a whole lot coming from the rest of the world that's right and do we have any percentage of that you know when I was at the center I did have people coming from the Middle East from the Middle East Turkey, Russia, Brazil but here now working here at the bus station at the post release we get very limited very few it's mostly from Central and South America that we're getting I actually do get Brazil as well something but rarely do we are receiving anybody I dealt with a few cases as recent as four months ago where people were coming from India and Pakistan and Bangladesh through Brazil and all the way here crossing the borders and Garkwat and so once they are placed in a shelter then I am called you know I want to pass on my information that if you have such cases please call us we can help you it was so heartbreaking to see that a family of six or seven three were released because with the mother two were minors and the mother was severely diabetic the 18 year old daughter was in one detention center the father was in another son was in another this is heartbreaking so when we were told about it that was the time she, the mother and the two kids were already placed in the shelter and I was asked to raise the money for them because they did not want to live in the United States they wanted to cross the borders to Canada and go to Canada which they did they were right away they were there so this is it I mean if we know what you know in the beginning too bad we cannot help all the immigrants but at least one community among them I think collaboration and networking is the key now we do have a group of raices in fact they work, they run next to our office and they are part of the refugee and lease settlement program and our director is from Iraq and our organizers are from Afghanistan and South America and they run this big program for raices and they take so many families so if you let us know we can definitely collaborate thank you you know I think it would be good to have you also in contact with Joe Pendleton who is in charge of our shelter in case that there would be people that she could refer to you also so could you give your card also to Joe, Joe stand up so she knows who you are the one in the yellow yeah thank you thank you how do you move the families after you get them out of the detention centers where do they go, do they have families here yes, most people what they do is they cannot get out of detention centers unless they have a sponsor and most sponsors I would say like 7 to 8% are family members there is our friends, people who want to take them in but most people are family members just to give you a sense right now we have 45,000 people incarcerated by ICE 45,000 people that's 5,000 people more than all of Canada people who are incarcerated in Canada just to give you that 45,000 it is a big business and it's a profit that is the number one thing profit thank you all for your time thank you very much those of you who are right at the beginning know that things do not find as soon as they do today and I believe that most of our insister communities have a lot to do with that because of their kind attitudes we are going to have our different committee reports now we are going to go through them quickly in case we want to get through this part so, sister Pat good morning we have changed our advocacy committee meetings until 9 o'clock before this meeting and it was much better probably because we are not so exhausted after our general meetings right now we are tracking there was a lot of evidence that we have the issues that we are concentrating on that are coming before our legislature are real we are going to be going to committee etc and so as you know we concentrate on the immigration issues especially on immigrants those that are most vulnerable and so we are tracking the family detention centers especially child detention the situation with migrant workers and the changing issues here in the state of Texas that need to happen and also DACA so those are the four chief things that we are following presently we also looked at the lobby days coming up but I am just going to save them quickly and we will try to get them out on our facebook or website or mail chamber whatever the best thing for you to know Rita is going to have a rally a lobbying day on March 14th I am sure I am sure that is the right date and Catholic Church on March 26th Texas impact on March 28th so just mark mark out march as the month that you are going to go to Austin and just stay we will be sending out the bills as you know they are being submitted all the way to March 8th and then the committees will decide what is going forward etc so we will be sending that out again on a regular basis so that you can keep track of them if you do not have a common TLO which costs nothing which follows the Texas legislature I think it is very visitor friendly and you can put in issues like any of these four and find out where they are at that particular time it is a remarkable sight how about that we did today set up a committee of about 7 to look at the different issues and the different bills as they come off to put together what our approach is is IWC and then we will have and prepare people to give presentations to three minutes is all we have at different committees and different parts of the legislative process and make known where we stand on these particular issues and again we are representing IWC so we will be receiving more information and if you have something you really object to we would be surprised but we would consider it okay so any questions or anything from the group that I missed I just want to add that I did find out where the immigration lobby is and that is February 25th it is a Monday so I am sure you will be getting some kind of notice but whether you want to participate on that day there will be groups from all over the state so if you are to put that on your calendar February 25th is Monday Bobby Day and Austin okay we will give you as much information as we know about that anything else in the committee great so the next meeting again come at 8 o'clock then we will move forward together thank you if you have something to say please come up yes I just wanted to let you know that we have a new partner in storing supplies for the airport ministry and that is abiding presence Lutheran church which is right out 281 at winding way just near bitters between bitters and brook hollow and it is very handy for our airport volunteers when they have an emergency or run out of something we just heard that we have 200 families coming in today and I have a feeling somebody is going to be out there getting additional supplies today 200 from Dilly okay I was looking at you Terry about collaboration or I said sister Sharon I can't get him up here sister jt I am sorry do you want to say something about collaboration this slide presentation for the collaboration of course for the meeting and I just want to emphasize on the first slide we will show you there is a URL if you just write that down you will be able to come back to that later on or if we make revisions it is an address that we can put in to the computer and put tiny.cc forward slash IWC 2019 02 is for February is 2019 and 02 all together you will see it when it comes up I just want to emphasize that this is a pattern that we may be able to do where the notes that were really important to us that we want to be able to come back to are going to be online they are immediately and they can be edited we may be adding more information into this presentation so the collaboration nothing about fundraising Sister Susan Sister Susan Mika I am with the Benedictine sisters and our monasteries in Burney and our office puts together this handout so if you have it you can get it out and if not Ruben and Mina could you just raise your hand if you still need one okay I will grab them and pass them out we kind of do a lot of the research and documentation of what's happening so we put together various articles and forms and different things the very first page we try to document what's happening in those detention centers we participate in the family detention calls that are every two weeks and as you can see a couple of paragraphs down when we were on the call this week 559 individuals were in carns and Sister Denise estimated a little under 1700 individuals detained in Dilly so we just keep this as like an ongoing running tab you've heard from other speakers how people are released etc we just keep trying to document what's being said as well as how many people have been detained according to our government statistics and that type of thing so if you need some of these for speeches or so you can look in this the rest of that handout is court cases that we continue to try to follow and document and at the end there we did put in the government shutdown we felt like that was very important because it had a profound effect on many many things many people's lives but it also the immigration and hearings etc the next page is a lot of opportunities and you can use this in so many ways with your groups when they say well what is it that we can do and we continually update that thanks to the city of San Antonio as well as those of you among us that keep track of all the IWC events and then we also at the very end of that try to put different websites so that if you're doing research especially like TOU students if you need resources like those are some of the websites also that we check and everything we try to be fact based I think that's really important for your research and anything that that you put together the next section is key articles and so in here we try to get especially ones that have statistics again for you to be able to use in your information in that very first one I mean we know this that so many children are being held youth 14,600 up approximately from 9,200 when President Trump took office two years ago etc in the very last thing there in that article we highlighted temporary shelters built the government about $750 per child per day while permanent shelters charge $250 both seem exorbitant so when we're looking for money for things in our budget right? anyway and then this just happened this week where this whole thing about in McAllen Catholic Charities has been ordered to vacate the immigrant respite center and then there was a second article about the mayor saying that I think it was the commissioners there in McAllen that said that and the mayor then pledged the next day in his State of the City speech that he was going to help find a new home so that was a bit hopeful in that sense so we documented both of those things there the next article we're just documenting the closure of Torneo, the tent city outside of El Paso and some of that relates right back to those statistics that we were just talking about how many children were held there and how much money was made off of those children etc and then we just put in this article we didn't know whether this was going to become held this week or not about the immigration detention beds became a new issue in this whole fight over keeping our government open so this did not materialize in any significant way in what is being proposed and we still don't know whether today it's going to be passed or we'll have the government shut down but anyway so and then you may have heard this from the El Paso detention center some of the silent seekers that are on a hunger strike are being force fed and so that was ordered by a federal judge that that was going to be okay and so there's questions of whether or not that is against the UN convention against torture so we wanted to document that that's going on when you ever think why are judges so important why are people's systems so important I mean right here you see it affecting people's lives when one judge has the power to order this force feeding so and then we just have another article in here about like force labor in detention it goes with everything everybody said already about making money off people that are in those detention centers and how little is paid if they're in a work program the border crossings I mean so much is happening there we just put in several articles on the day that our president was giving his speech in El Paso more than 1800 Central American parents and children across the border that day into El Paso area that was the most recorded in a single day by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection so I mean these numbers are you know so big in that sense but again just to try to keep documenting all of this and then the second article so many people are going to more remote areas of the desert and it's just so much harder to have resources or find resources so we just wanted to document that and that next article also talks about that in the Arizona desert and then we just documented some other things about the caravans and in Tijuana and California approving funding to help asylum seekers the next couple of articles are about our government shutdown and how it impacted the immigration system because so many of those the courts were closed and so you see the numbers there I mean you just can't even imagine 42,726 scheduled hearings had been canceled and for each week each week was about 20,000 canceled hearings so I mean this is huge these are just huge huge numbers and then to try to get back up and running and it just documented our own area here of San Antonio saying that we had like five immigration judges and that there are about 350 judges and 58 immigration courts across the country you remember early on in this whole situation they were talking about we need a thousand more judges so that's not in the mix either at this point in our budget but I mean these are the kinds of things and I would appreciate too if you hear of anyone like a colleague of mine, her daughter works in that federal system as the prosecutor and she was telling me all the things that they went through having to report to work even though they weren't being paid and then also having to take time off and then they lost any vacation or any things that were scheduled during that particular time and then as the shutdown dragged on they were expected still to be there all the working hours no matter what and also to basically work possibly a whole week for free so these are really I don't know if anybody will go on the record with that but these are things that are actually happening in that whole system so and then we just were documenting about New Mexico withdrawing their national guard troops and stuff and then some of the lawsuits Honduran Nepali immigrants blocked the Trump administration to keep their temporary protected status this was just the other day the butterfly refuge in the Brownsville area they're filing a restraining order against our federal government to stop the wall construction in that area and many of you know that area is very famous for the butterflies and the birding there's so many birders that go there to be part of these areas and so the wall would just you know a whole stop to some of this that's happening and then on the other call we heard from the American Immigration Council they sent a letter to Secretary Nielsen to end immigrant protection protocols policy so that was a link to that on the last two pages we put in this article some of you may have seen it, it was in the San Antonio paper Roger Barnes is within current word and he wrote this along with another person Dennis Slattery and it talks about you know where population will be and they're quoting this study from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia that by 2040 the half of the nation's population will live in just eight states so we highlighted those eight states we are one of those eight states and they're raising the implications of our federal government governing in a way they're saying like okay for instance those eight states will have 16 senators so there will be 84 senators representing you know so many other states but not people and so you know what are the implications of this and I think it's just part of in today's paper there's an article and I didn't realize this but there were four lawsuits you know around the electoral college and this type of thing so it's just to raise our awareness like what's going on with some of that and then you know go forward and this morning I saw another thing from ABC News, lawyers sue ICE over video conference immigration hearings we've been talking about this here it seems like forever where you know people can't hear on the video or they don't understand the language or it's not clear or garbled et cetera so all of that's going on and sister Pat can I just ask you to come up and say what you heard on NPR yesterday because I think that was really important too you know as soon as we publish anything it's old but you know so she heard this yesterday on NPR it's just something to follow about the children's attention if I think it's gosh homeland home set thank you home set over in Florida that is the detention center for unaccompanied youth and what was reported and it's run by a for-profit but it's on federal land and therefore the state laws if you hire two children the children need help does not apply and the last part of it really concerned and said and they're establishing three more such centers in Texas my intuition would say probably on federal lands so we need to watch that carefully for watching out for our kids for the future okay thank you and I just wanted to announce also that our sisters gave permission for us to purchase shares in the geo group and Corsivic I've been attending those when the shareholders meet with those students as I reported to you several meetings ago and sister JT the daughters of charity also bought shares the Jesuits nationally are the ones leading some of those dialogues and like Corsivic is working on a human rights policy so we're waiting for that to be published and then we can critique it and talk to them more about that and at the last meeting with Corsivic as I reported to you I knew more about Dilly than the person that they sent to talk about it and he was quite surprised and I just gently kept correcting him with what he was saying because it was not right so I think that there's no way we can ever thank sister Susan and ribbon for what they do for us every month over the years as a non-profit person as a person who paid attention I thought was that someone was doing something bad and pulled your stock out and I learned from her that's when you buy more so that you'll have more influence and it was such a revolutionary thought for the good okay so we don't have a sanctuary update because many is with one of our folks that's getting her able monitor checked today so she did that sister Denise is at the bus station because of what's happening at the bus station right now sister Denise really regrets she can't be here but as you heard there's 200 releases just coming from Dilly so she asked me to just address just two items briefly just the numbers that we've been seeing they really decreased dramatically in January and now that they are increasing dramatically in the other direction so I figured the best way to communicate that was to give you a summary so in the last two weeks from the first of February and this is per backpacks which is our best way of keeping track of numbers we've handed out 832 backpacks just in the last two weeks just the bus station and that's like family yeah per family because it's not just Dilly and Carnes anymore so we just can't go by the numbers that we're receiving of releases a low of 38 to a high of of 92 and it's an average of 64 a day and that average is going to be blown today because we have 200 coming and with the census in Dilly at 1700 I think we can anticipate that that is going to continue so the other thing she wanted me to mention is we're working on a memorandum of understanding with corporate Greyhound and how can I put this there were some groups volunteering in Dallas and Houston that had a less than optimal relationship with Greyhound and we're dis invited to be at the bus station now we are the role model for a volunteer group as far as Greyhound is concerned so they asked us to formalize our relationship with them and to create policies and procedures and also guidelines for successful collaboration with Greyhound which we have done and thanks to Tino Guy Agassi put us in touch with law firm in Houston and they have taken our policies and procedures and our guidelines and they have put them into a memorandum of understanding and the reason that that is of value is because I mean it's legally non-binding but it formalizes our relationship and it sets out what expectations are of each organization Greyhound and us so right now our relationship with our general manager is amazing and also with corporate Greyhound she was invited on a conference call and they basically defined what is important to them among the groups that they let into their bus station and so that's all part of our policies and procedures now Robert had a major heart attack a couple of months ago and he's back now and he's going to retire in a year so our relationship with Greyhound cannot be based on one individual so the fact that we have formalized it with corporate Greyhound really protects our our position at the bus station so we're just doing some last minute modifications to that and the attorneys who have just been amazing and helpful are going to finish it and we're going to present it to Greyhound so sister Denise wanted you all to be aware that that's a work in progress last night the mayor's office you know San Antonio is an official compassionate city they signed the charter for compassion and so Mayor Norberg established the Mayor's Compassionate San Antonio award and when they asked for nominees of course we nominated sister Denise and she was one of nine really amazing people who were honored last night city council chambers and so I'm the one who nominated her and she will never forgive me for that she is the most humble person in the world and she hates to be the center of attention so we embarrassed her as much as we possibly could last night so if you're on Facebook we posted pictures of Facebook and then we took her out to dinner afterwards and continued to embarrass her so it was a great event are you sure that's okay no she won't I told her last night jokingly I said you know I'll be your agent okay but of course that will be a salary position there is the fact I'm hesitant because I don't know the details there is a national national national immigration policy institute and they are having a seminar and she's been invited to sit on a panel which is their national meeting and then and she just told me last night that she's been invited to present at the University of Chicago of course it's some immigration related panel so you know I said well that's great because when she's gone I said so if you could spread these out a little bit you know that would be greatly appreciated but she really is becoming a very nationally known respected figure she would be horrified right now I know be sure to get this in the manner but she's not here so we are really very she truly won't be upset about this we do need to get it in a minute so she has to read it okay so the next report but first I just want to know what it gifted is to have Jane here with us and it just reiterates how many people are doing this work from a place of woundedness and we continue to serve but it's really inspirational to see her here and speak in this way after this really really trying week I would like to note that Joe back there has been doing this incredible coordination of overnight hospitality so over the last month versus our last meeting it's been about 70 families overnight but even the midst of all that coordination with our house at the Mennonite church and the Catholic Charities department and private homes in the midst of that she also went down to the PMS Negas and if you haven't seen her email and her photographs they are fabulous but she walked across the bridge with her dog Patches and she went and visited one of the shelters where this caravan is passing and had conversations with folks through the fence and with the guards and so she was sort of our ambassador but also brought back this really important information so if you haven't seen that email with her photographs reach out to Joe Pendleton then I also want to make an advertisement for next Thursday at 7 o'clock and then next Saturday at 1 o'clock at the Mennonite church we're going to have this sister Denise calls it do no harm training and it's essentially a trauma informed training around this type of volunteer work and I will be co-facilitating it with one of the women who's come up from Honduras and seeking asylum so you can have the white guys perspective and you can have the woman who's been through these experiences perspective but it's amazing how we can show up to the bus station to pick someone up for overnight hospitality and because we've done something wrong or we weren't thinking about this one certain thing we are re-traumatizing them and they will refuse to go with this so over the last number of years we've learned a bunch of things to avoid and some specific techniques and a toolbox to use when you're at the bus station or the airport or in your own home or in the shelter so we'll be talking about that body language, the words that you say the things that you do and also actual physical props then so many of these families are evangelical Christians so how do you pray with an evangelical Christian who's in a traumatizing or something like a really difficult place so we'll talk about all of those things and it'll be very interactive and that's all I'm saying thank you for saving me because you're not on the agenda yet again you're supposed to be okay so the next person to speak is Mary Grace Kettner she is speaking for the airport group I can just say that since our last IWC meeting we've given out 783 backpacks at the airport and I didn't divide them by weeks but the majority of those were in the last two weeks January like the bus station was low and then we're high again the last couple of weeks okay Jane did you do what we agreed on? yes, those are the backpack numbers you can see them? just leave them up there while we're proceeding that way or you can see them the backpacks okay so we're now ready for reports from the collaborators did anybody bring a car to you? Carrie? yes those of our collaborators who have something to tell us announce please come forward and I'll leave the microphone to you the presentation before and I'm sorry for my lack of technicality the Chinese CC IWC 2019 02 if you type that in it's going to get this slide presentation which is going to have the notes that we're presenting we're asking our presenters to give us a slide of a card that's going to have this information maybe about 90 seconds to present one of the people that was going to be here is from St. Mary's and she wanted to announce she has to be in Austin today she wanted to announce that Thursday, February 21st there's going to be a pre-symposium presentation at St. Mary's this information is going to be on this slide and you can find it later on but the symposium and Tino did you want to talk about that a little bit so every year the scholar which is one of the law review student-run law reviews at St. Mary's Law School post-symposium on immigration so this year's event is going to be held on February 22nd it's at the Pearl Stable all day basically it's one of these kind of events that has training for lawyers but also really good information for the public the keynote speakers are not our Reynolds who work with Amnesty International Refugee steering committee for the United States for many years and she's an internationally known refugee rights lawyer and human rights lawyer so she's going to be speaking both on the Friday AFI event but also a free event at St. Mary's Law School on their campus on Thursday that's from three to five partner Fred Schellenberg he couldn't be here today but he asked that we continue to announce that they're going to have a citizenship naturalization workshop February 23rd and so this slide we give that information he's sent along a slide just a note if you'd send these to us early on or to me we can try to get them on this slide presentation in this form and Tom, I'm going to let you be the next Thanks Terry, I'm Tom Hager still a mostly retired Presbyterian pastor back again I said help the group of four from the state of Maine that were coming in mid-March became a group of 20 Travis Park United Methodist Church stood up, cops, a kitchen, showers accommodations are taken care of now I need your help filling out the two part four days they'll be here they arrive Saturday the 16th of March that's my wedding anniversary I better remember and they leave Wednesday morning the 20th so we have four nights and three full days to number one provide some hands-on direct experience and number two provide some advocacy resourcing so that they can go home and kick butt in the state of Maine a number of you, Janice and Jane and John and others have already begun to say I'll help with this, I'll do that Shara Vann is going to do an intro Elena Yala is going to do a workshop if you've got resources that would be helpful for this intensive care three or four days please chat with me today or follow up there's information all over the place let me thank you with a strange quote if I can manage a mic on my phone and be brief Howard Thurman black pastor prophet poet mentor of Dr. King's flips the usual motivation for the work that you're doing and says this don't ask what the world needs ask what makes you come alive and then just go do it because what the world most needs is people who have come alive thank you I'm a member of that as IWC is and many different organizations are I think a total of 26 organizations who are members of SA stands this is a collaborative and we have been working on site release of the city of San Antonio that means that for some minor misdemeanors people will be given a ticket and be sent on their way instead of being processed and arrested and so this program which has been approved and I guess Chief McMann spoke about it yesterday will start April April 2019 and it will be for the city of San Antonio Police Department the future steps at SA stands has to begin is to start training people training people the community about what this means and how it's going to work how it's going to be implemented and so we're trying to find groups that are willing to get trained on it so if any of you have access to groups who might be interested in this and it's not only for immigrants but it really is for everybody to have the huge fear of being reported if they were stopped and arrested there will be reports with extra transparency so they will be giving us reports every six months and then annually so we will know if what this site release is being implemented what's coming of it we're still working on making library cards it's one of the IDs that are acceptable by the city of San Antonio and you don't have any other ID with a library card be acceptable and so we're still in the process of being worked out this Saturday we still have the issue with the county we just worked with the city so now we're going to start working on the county and so this Saturday we're meeting at the San Antonio AAC offices from 10 to 12 and we're going to work out our steps to propose to the county because they do have the county jails and so if any of you are interested you may come it's at 9502 computer drive room 102 this Saturday from 10 to 12 thank you Hello, this is Sumera Egg from Granger Foundation I'm also with the Action Team Granger Foundation so as we contacted before and we asked here okay great sorry and as a community center we have volunteers that can do art for the refugees and immigrants and like our friends she can do because we always heard about all this trauma you know many things that I think we also as a community center what our strengths are we can cook and invite and we have a diverse community so we always invite our events local, American, Mexican or even all nations we have so we want to do things like that because we believe that even seeing the diversity in the city help the new comes so this is what comes from an immigrant from Turkey so we want to do that so I think now I know the content maybe I'll ask Lena again with the collaboration so we can either have our friends that she can go and do art with the kids or anyone else it's a modern modern art which is known as the for trauma you know it's about meditation or kind of thing so we'll do that we are late again I think the menu was fast enough to give the award to sister Denise and IWC but we have an upcoming annual event it is annual dialogue and friendship dinner every year we do this and this will be 14th and this year the opening prayer will be done by Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Silver and also every year we kind of highlight or recognize non-profits who are helping the community service education communication etc and two years ago it was Ryazis and this year we want to give it to IWC Interfaith Balcony Coalition so we want to highlight this and we are really working on this to get the work out so we believe that this is not a try award but hopefully we'll have some papers in the newspapers so we can have a voice over there and we usually have attendance of 250 and 300 and interfaith intercultural community so we are looking for and I have flyers of that event and we'll be in contact with IWC I don't know like sister Denise and yeah what's the date? the award Monday was on that skyline like your University Incarnate Award and it's the I have flyers but so we will ask of course more about and usually when the award is given by the person and hopefully this will be this will be the service award so Archbishop probably will give this award and then sister Denise from IWC we'll have a time to talk like a couple of minutes because we have another keynote speaker in fact the event is like about preface and democracy and exact editors view so keynote speaker was a former editor in chief of Turkish newspaper it was shutdown he's an exile model he's doing uber he's the speaker IWC will highlight that I recognize them hopefully so this is the thing March 6 p.m. it's a dinner any of our friendship dinner I'll leave the I can have the flyers thanks a lot flyers and we'll add it to our presentation this is two of our immigration days I'm filling in for Ann Humphrey she wanted me to announce the quarterly meeting for the working group and action teams that will be taking place on Tuesday February 26 from 1.30 to 3.30 at the downtown laboratory if you want any further information feel free to contact and directly but I think a lot of people who are here are actively participating in the working groups and action teams with the base initiative so this is just a reminder of the meeting and one of the things that she wanted me to stress to you is that they're looking for some volunteers to serve a couple of different committees one of them for the trauma informed care coalition and another for the census complete count committee that the city is putting together to ensure that we get a full count of all of San Antonio residents during the 2020 census two more slides we're here we talked about the trauma informed presentations here's a slide that's going to show you the time and place again Domestika's Rulitas has a special screening of the Oscar nominated film Roba February 24th at 5 p.m. Ushu American Gateways has a citizenship workshop March 9 from 9 to 2 p.m. and this shows that information that's it, thank you all this information they will be on the url site so go there get information the url the tiny cc the link that he did make it out of the cc yeah and read it for those of us with bad eyes okay tiny.cc slash IWC 2019 02 thank you are there any other announcements that we have failed to mention okay I think you can see as you hear the reports the many different committed people that do their job and it all comes together to do this ministry I think I speak for Mary Grace as well we are extremely grateful for everything each of you do each month to help others thank you for being here and we hope to see you next month thanks