 I want to welcome you to the Unitarian Church of Montpelier and to our event this afternoon responding to the humanitarian crisis at our borders. I'm Reverend Joan Javier Duvall and I serve as pastor of the Unitarian Church of Montpelier. It's a great pleasure to have you all here and you may have already seen that there are many organizations that have resource tables set up around the site of the bestry and during our break and after our panels you're invited to go and check out their resources and sign up for more information from their organizations. I also wanted to note that ORCA, our local public access television station and media outlet, is filming today's event so that it can be viewed later on by others who aren't able to be here today. So I want to just spend a few minutes starting off our time together by speaking briefly to what brings us together this afternoon. By way of just some historical background to our event today there was a group of individuals affiliated with various faith communities that came together last year all wanting to find a way to be in support and solidarity with immigrants and asylum seekers migrants and refugees in our state and together they formed an kind of informal organization called the Interfaith Committee on Sanctuary mostly based in Chittenden County and many of those folks are here in the room today. Together they put together an event a sanctuary summit last April that was held in Essex and I think probably some of you were at that event or any of you folks at that event back in April you can use your hand if you were so a handful of folks who are here today were there and after that summit which really focused on and explored what it means to create designated sites of physical sanctuary for those who might be looking for that kind of safety this group continued on and and wanted to continue exploring what other actions might we take together and since then our political landscape and the realities faced by immigrants who are looking to enter the United States has really changed pretty significantly and so this group continued on and asked again what can we do what other kinds of learning do we need to do to take effective action with one another and so this the idea of having a kind of follow-up event emerged out of the group and to really to look at what else can we do beyond providing physical sanctuary some folks have continued to look at doing that I think especially in the Burlington area but what else what what does it mean to be in solidarity with immigrants and asylum seekers and I think we're we're drawn here all of us because of a deep sense of compassion for those who are arriving to our country and facing injustice and indignity upon their arrival and who are fleeing some pretty dire circumstances I know we are together witnessing children who are continuing to be held in attention centers with plans for expanding those centers by for-profit companies we're witnessing people being held in inhumane conditions at the U.S. Mexico border and throughout the country we're witnessing humanitarian aid workers being criminalized and put on trial for their compassionate acts of justice and we are witnessing the continued expansion of border patrol presence setting up checkpoints right here in Vermont and creating a more threatening environment for the immigrants who are living here in our state and other people of color so we witnessed all of this and wonder how can we respond so one of the purposes of today's event is to learn more about current needs and how we as people of faith or good conscience can take action of solidarity and support here in Vermont and we want to learn today from people who are directly impacted and also from those who are engaged in supporting immigrants as asylum seekers in Vermont and also in New England and we hope that from this learning we can develop new partnerships and collaborations amongst ourselves and across our local communities and to that end you're really encouraged to introduce yourself to someone you might not already know someone you didn't come here with during our break and after the panels when we'll have some more time for connection with one another. It's also important for all of us to keep our learning and our actions grounded in our local context here in Vermont and to keep our actions done in partnership with communities that are being directly impacted by current policies and political realities. One key organization that's doing this work locally is migrant justice and unfortunately migrant justice couldn't be present here today. They do have some resources on the resource table back there so if you're wanting to learn more about what migrant justice is up to you can sign up. Many of you know that migrant justice has been leading the way in our state in organizing with migrant farm workers and much of their work focuses on ensuring the rights of workers in their workplaces but they also are working hard to make sure that Vermont is a more just place for immigrants to live. The detention and the deportation of migrants workers from Vermont has been a reality since before the current administration and is an ongoing focus of migrant justice. Most recently they have been working on strengthening the fair and impartial policing policy to ensure that local law enforcement is not collaborating with federal immigration officials and so if you're interested in learning more about those efforts I encourage you to sign up for their newsletter. As we learn today about how we might support those who are most recently arriving to the United States and into our communities we can also look to find points of connection with the realities being faced by those who are already in our communities and the struggles of their leading. And now I want to especially welcome two guests that we have with us today Melvia and Yesica who are going to share a bit of their story with us Melvia and Yesica live in Brattleboro and have come here from Honduras and so I will pass the microphone to them to share and I thank Melisa Oliva for being our translator this afternoon thank you First of all I want to say good afternoon to everybody who is here and Yesica No, it's bad. We have 10 months of living in Brattleboro and the pathway has been very hard. It is not easy not easy to come from a different country here to come from Honduras and it's really hard for me to speak. I don't even know what to say It's very hard for life in the things that we go through in the border And I just feel that I can't talk in this language Hi my name is Melvia and I'm from Honduras and I'm very glad to be here in this meeting today because for us it is very hard to remember all the things that we have gone through in our country Today I don't want to talk about my personal life because honestly it's very hard for me to speak of all the and go through the memories of the things that I have gone in my life in my country But what I can do say is that the situation that we lead in our country is so hard that that is what make us take the tremendous decision of the upper country I I can't share some with you about our personal life But not all of it because if I start to speak about it, I will cry so loud that I will not be able to hold myself so But I'm here and I'm willing to share a little bit of our story Because I'm a lesbian, I like women, and for this reason we had a problem with what we wanted to attack And the only way out of our country was to refuse to go to this country because I know that here many people would give us a lot of support so that in Honduras we can't get anything The reason why we came here is because I am a lesbian and Living as a lesbian in Honduras means a lot of threatens to our lives We were persecuted and we have to decide to seek asylum in this country because we knew that in this country We could have a better life in the United States The way towards here it's been very hard to leave our country We have gone through a lot It took us two months to come here We have to walk, we have to be, we were very hungry, we have to beg for food And it's in the only reason why we were doing it because we were looking for asylum to this country We don't have anything in this world After our pathway to come here we were detained in a detention center And in those places humans are treated like if there were nothing, like if there were no humans And we go through a lot of things there And we have to wait for two months and 15 days After spending these two months in the detention center, thank God we had the possibility to have free lawyer And these lawyers started the process and then we went to another detention center and these other lawyers Thank God, contact the organization that has been helping us, it's passed And they were able to connect with the family that it's hosting us here and they were The people who made possible to us to be here today The organization, we were able to be in this place in Pratvo and we are very grateful Because this organization has supported us at all times, in many things And we hope that this way they can continue to help more people like us immigrants Thank God we had the help of this organization cast, they have been helping us in many ways In any way, and we're so grateful to them and we're grateful to God that we have had this opportunity We wish that this organization can keep its labor, its work of helping other people So more migrants just like us can have the possibility of getting the resources that this organization has been giving to migrants We're very grateful for all the work that this organization has been doing to help us The only thing that I can say is that we're very grateful for this opportunity For all the work that this organization has been doing to help us the work that this organization has been doing to help us. The only thing that we want is to accomplish our goal, our purpose in life. And we think that we will be able to adhere. We hope that this organization can help older peoples that are in the same situation as us. And that they can. And that we will win the asylum to this country because coming back to Honduras is not a possibility for us. And we're very grateful that you're here and that we are being able to share this with you. And we're grateful for what you're willing to be here. Thank you so much, Miliya and Yasika, for being here and sharing a bit of your story with us. You all should have received a schedule for the afternoon. And I'll just quickly review that. So we will, in just a moment, begin our first panel. We have two panels set up. One is really looking at the legal context of migration. And that panel will be introduced in just a moment. Well, then we'll have time for questions and answers and a short period of any community announcements that folks might want to make and then take a break before our second panel, which will include representatives from two different organizations that have been providing solidarity and support with asylum seekers and migrants here in Vermont and also in Boston. That also will be followed by a question and answer period. And then we will wrap up our time together and have more time for connecting with one another. So now I'd like to invite up Jan Stuyfauer, who will introduce the first panel. And I also just want to say that the second panel we would invite our head and right in Libya, and yes, we're going to share more some of the practical aspects of their story as well. Along with Steve, I should mention him, Steve Croft, the executive director. And you'll notice that we have a translation here. It's a little bit loud in one here. We'd like you to go to the other side, but we certainly want our guests to be able to participate fully. It's still a new translation. The next panel, the first panel, is migration and legal context. And we're delighted to have two folks who are working in this area here in Vermont. First is Erin Jacobson, who's assistant professor and managing attorney at Vermont Law School's South Royals and Legal Clinic, where she is the lead project attorney of the clinic's Vermont Immigration Assistance Project. Prior to that, she was the lead staff attorney at Vermont Immigration and Asylum Advocates in Burlington. Through VIA, Erin and her students provide free legal representation to low-income immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Erin is committed to public interest law and to doing work that promotes human dignity and human rights. She is licensed to practice law in the state of Vermont and then the United States District Court for the District of Vermont. Let's be welcome, Erin. And also on this panel is Brea Yazik. Brea received her master's degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages in 2017, and she works part-time as a means language learning teacher in Burlington, Illinois. But a year ago, Brea decided she wanted to help with immigration in the light of the Trump era and began interning with accredited representative Michelle Jimenez at AALV in Burlington. In January, Brea volunteered at Otrilado in Tijuana, Mexico, for two weeks, and she learned firsthand about what has been happening at the southern border. Brea is hoping to continue in this path, and she is currently applying for partial accreditation to the Department of Justice. We welcome both of you. I've like won too much today, so I'm going to start that effort by sitting down. I don't have a podium, and that's just fine. I guess I would like to start by thanking Melia and Jessica for being here and for sharing your experience. You're the reason that I do the work that I do, and I hope that through my very brief explanation of the legal process, everybody in this room starts to also gain an understanding of exactly what asylum seekers are up against once they even get to this country. They've already been on a very difficult journey, and in some ways, their difficult journey is just beginning, and I think as everyone in this room knows, that certainly has not gotten any easier in the new administration. So this might be a little dry and boring. I'm going to try not to make it so, but I do hope that it starts to give you a picture of exactly how complex and fraught the legal system in America really is for our migrants and asylum seekers. I'll start with some definitions and terminology. I'll give a legal overview, and then I do want to talk about immigration under Trump. So it's essentially what things should be like, and then what they're like now. It's a little bit hard to read. Sorry about that. So some status definitions. When you're talking about immigrants in the United States, it's really about the particular legal status that you might have here. A refugee is somebody who is forced to flee their home country because of violence or persecution. An asylum seeker is someone who claims to be a refugee, but they have not been adjudicated as such. So a refugee comes into this country with that designation. An asylum seeker is seeking that designation from inside the country, their new country. A migrant, this is the UN definition. A migrant is someone who leaves their home country for a better life elsewhere. That could be for work or to join family, maybe for education. The term migrant is a little bit controversial right now in terms of its usage. The UN definition really stresses the fact that a migrant is not coerced to come here, that they choose to come here or to another country because they seek better opportunities. The term has evolved somewhat to be more of an umbrella term where a migrant just might refer to somebody who has left their home country. Maybe a refugee or maybe an asylum seeker could also be a migrant. It just means you've moved. And the term refugee is very limiting because of its legal definition. So for example, you are not going to be a refugee. You're not going to get that legal definition. Or if you're not going to win asylum, it's because of a natural disaster. Whereas a migrant might be fleeing their home country precisely because of a natural disaster or climate change. But technically under the law, someone who leaves because of climate conditions would simply be called a migrant. A legal permanent resident, if somebody who has already gained status in the United States, they're authorized to stay here permanently, if you hear about someone having a green card, that means they're an LPR. That means they're a lawful permanent resident. And then a US citizen, I think we know who those are. But it's important to know that you could be a US citizen by birth. Maybe you acquire citizenship from a US parent. Or maybe you naturalize after you've been an LPR for several years. Those are the main categories of immigrants in this country. Or maybe you don't have any status at all. Which brings me to a quick note. It's really offensive and inappropriate to call somebody an alien or an illegal. A person cannot be an illegal. An action could be illegal or unlawful, but a person cannot be an illegal. Unfortunately, the term alien is a legal term. It is in our statutes. It is in our regulations. It is in policy, memoranda. It is a term used throughout our laws to describe anybody who's not a citizen. I try very hard not to use that term, but sometimes as a lawyer, as an immigration lawyer, I have to use it for its legal definition. But in terms of just maybe you're a reporter, there's actually no reason to describe somebody as an alien. There's better options that I've listed on the slide. And if you're talking about the immigration realm, you could also be specific about being offensive. You could say someone is an asylum seeker, a permanent resident, maybe a migrant worker. Maybe you don't need to describe anyone by their legal status at all. There's something to think about also. Okay, so this is going to be a race through immigration law. I usually teach this in five months. We have approximately 15 minutes. Okay. All of immigration law, as I think you've just kind of started to get a sense of, is about categories. Categories and statuses and definitions. It all describes how permanently you can stay here. And there's two basic categories. There's non-immigrants and immigrants. Non-immigrants are those people who are here for a temporary purpose. Maybe you're a student. Maybe you're a tourist. Maybe something fancy like a diplomat. Also, technically, under the non-immigrant category, would be those people who are undocumented or out of status. Because really, what the category of non-immigrant means is that you can't be here permanently by law. And then there's immigrants. And those are the people who can stay here permanently under the law. Those are LPRs. And there's all different ways you can become an LPR. In other words, you can get that green card. Or maybe you are a refugee or an asylee. Those are the two main categories. This is how you get to stay here permanently. You start with an entry into the United States. Maybe the entry is unlawful. Maybe you've snuck across a border. Maybe you came in in one of those non-immigrant categories. Like maybe you came in with your tourist visa. Or maybe you came in with the green card. You already came in as an LPR, for example, if you're a US citizen's spouse file paperwork for you. At any rate, it starts with an entry into the United States. After that, you can become a lawful permanent resident. Maybe, if you have a pathway to doing that. Maybe you already have that lawful permanent residency. But if not, there has to be a second step that you have to be eligible for that allows you to become a lawful permanent resident. That is the bulk of my work. My entire job is trying to help people stay here lawfully. It's very complicated, it's very difficult. It takes a long time. We're talking about a very broken, very inequitable system. There's different ways you can get your green card. My job primarily is through the humanitarian applications. And I'll talk about that in a minute. If you manage to become an LPR, you then can apply to become a citizen. Generally speaking, the first time you can do that is after you've been an LPR for five years. There's a special rule for if you got your green card through marriage to a US citizen, you can apply to be a citizen after three years. That is because the US government thinks that if you're married to a US citizen, you can assimilate faster. You can learn civics and English faster. So, whatever that's for, I'll leave that aside. But that is the general rule for why people who marry US citizens are allowed to naturalize sooner. All right, this is a big deal part of why we have the problems we have with immigration laws. Both of these agencies, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security are in the executive branch. The Department of Justice oversees the immigration courts. That's that lowest blue box, the Office of Chief Immigration Judge. That's our immigration courts. If you lose an immigration court, you're appealing to the Board of Immigration Appeals. And above that is the Department of Justice. If you have a case, an immigration court, if you're seeking asylum in immigration court, the judge works for the Department of Justice. It is very unlikely that you will have an attorney with you because most people do not have attorneys in immigration court because they can't afford them. And the government, unlike in criminal cases, does not appoint attorneys in immigration court. Even though it's absolutely true that your life could be at stake. You have the right to an attorney, but not at government expense. So there you are in immigration court. The judge works for the Department of Justice. You probably don't have a lawyer. And who's over there to your right is the government attorney that is paid for by the government. And that government attorney works for the Department of Homeland Security. So the judge and the government attorney, the government attorney who's trying to deport you, that's the government attorney's job, both work for the executive branch. And the Department of Justice who oversees that immigration judge can at any point in time take case law from the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals and say, no, no, no, I get to decide. I'm making new law. And that is what our Department of Justice has been working hard at doing it for the past two or three years. Making asylum cases harder if not impossible to win and stripping discretion from our immigration judges. Turning immigration courts into part of the deportation machine, which it can do because it's in the executive branch. That's what Melvia and Nancy cut up against. The cases that I work on at the clinic include asylum. I have a lot of asylum cases, too many, lawyers in the room help out. Cases for victims of domestic violence, those are the VAWL cases, Violence Against Women Act, although they're not VAWL cases aren't just for women. Victims of trafficking and other crimes, those are the T visas and the U visas. Cases for kids that have been abused, abandoned, or neglected. That special immigrant juvenile status cases are Siege. And then occasionally we see some DACA kids and a lot of our clients also have TPS, which is temporary protected status. Neither DACA nor TPS leads to that green part. It's just temporary relief that allows you to stay, maybe if you meet the eligibility factors and maybe you can have work authorization, but it's not going to allow you to stay in the United States with any permanency. But those are, generally, those are the umbrella of humanitarian immigration cases. I know I gave a basic definition of refugees before, but I just, I need to further delve into this because again, I really want everyone to understand how very difficult it is to be designated a refugee or to win asylum. Refugees are fleeing persecution. Persecution has its own definition. Persecution is serious harm. Persecution is not discrimination. It probably would involve physical harm, death threats, torture, that kind of harm. The persecution also has to be on account of one of five protected grounds. It's kind of like, think about it kind of like a hate crime. So in other words, we all know things are bad in Syria. There's a civil war in Syria. Does that mean you're necessarily going to be designated as a refugee? No, it doesn't. You have to prove that you personally were persecuted and that that harm was because someone was offended by you, something about you. Or one is it coerced you in some way because of your race, religion, national origin, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. That last category, membership in a particular social group, is a really squishy area of law. What does that mean? I wish I knew. I would spend many hours of my week trying to win assailant cases based on membership in a particular social group. Those are the kinds of cases that our Department of Justice hates because those are the kinds of cases where people who've been harmed by gang violence, by gender-based violence, that's the only category for you. So DOJ knows that and has made case law to say, no, no, no, sorry, no more. That's not what asylum is for. And who are we talking about? We're talking about primarily, though not only, but primarily asylum seekers from Central America. That's the machinery. Refugees also have to prove that they cannot avail themselves of the protection of their home governments. That could be because it's their government who's the persecutor, but it also could be because their government is unwilling or unable to protect them from the harm. Again, when you're talking about gang-based cases or domestic violence cases, it's that the government is unable or unwilling to be the protector. Refugees are protected by international treaties, namely the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Treaty to Protect Children, but the U.S. is not a party to that treaty. And again, refugees have to get the status determination before they come into the country of protection. This often happens at refugee camps. It often takes years and years. We see, with some frequency, refugees in Vermont who grew up in refugee camps. Maybe they're entering the United States at the age of 16 and they were born in a refugee camp. But that refugee status determination is often made by the UNHCR. Maybe it's made by a government, but it in of itself is a long drawn out, disorganized, messy process. Asylum. So, as I mentioned before, asylum seekers do not come to the country of protection with any kind of status. They are seeking that status from within the, for example, the United States. And asylum application can be affirmative or defensive. What that means is, let's say you come to the United States on a tourist visa, but really you can't go back. You can't go back to the Democratic Republic of Congo because you will be arrested and tortured for your political opinion, let's say. Well, you could apply for asylum. You send in a form to the USCIS and the process is going to take years. And then maybe you'll be granted asylum. If you don't lose at that stage, you'll be put into removal proceedings where your case becomes defensive in immigration court. To the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to determine your fate. Or maybe there's been some kind of law enforcement action such as if you've tried to come to a United States border, maybe you tried to sneak in or maybe you just affirmatively quit yourself before a border patrol officer. Your application for asylum is going to be defensive. You are going to be an immigration court. Once you file your asylum application, six months later you can get work authorization. I bring this up because that wasn't always the rule. The rule that you couldn't have work authorization for several months after you applied was intended to court alleged asylum fraud. Our government thought that people were just applying for asylum so that they could come here and get a work permit. Now the new Boarding of Alleged Asylum Fraud is a policy they call last in first out. And what that means is they're going to adjudicate all asylum applications that were filed most recently. So I'll give you an example. I just filed an asylum application for a Venezuelan about a month ago. The asylum office will probably have a hearing for him in August. So we have to get our case together very quickly. In contrast, I have a Syrian asylum seeker whose application we filed in 2014. He hasn't had a hearing yet. His case just keeps getting shuffled to the bottom because our government is worried that my Venezuelan just came here for a work permit. Whereas my Syrian, who already has work authorization, who cares, just keep him in limbo. That's the system, that's the process. The other important thing about the work authorization aspect is it's six months after you file. If you have a lawyer, which is fantastic and also unusual because there's not enough of us to go around, lawyers are going to spend a long time working on your case before we file because we want you to win. And these cases are really difficult to win. So filing a complete asylum application can take months. So from the time you come here until you file your application, that entire time you're with that work authorization and then you might, and then you're going to have to wait an additional six months. And I bring that up because it goes to some of the solutions we're going to talk about, which is really about what are the needs and not just the needs at the border but needs of people in our own communities. People who don't have access to benefits and don't even have authorization to work. Once you win asylum, you're on a whole different step of your life. You are eligible for all the same public benefits US citizens are, but it takes years and years to get there. Oh, there it is. You can't even see all of the things Donald Trump has done since he got into office because I can't fit them on the side anymore. And I've made the font about a small as it costs as a hand. This I had to update just three days ago. Every time I've given this presentation the list gets longer and I know I'm missing stuff. But we started with the travel bands. Then we got executive orders on ramping up law enforcement, immigration enforcement at the borders and in the interior. Zero tolerance policies where we're going to detain all asylum seekers, family separation, fighting the flora settlement. The flora settlement was a settlement agreement from years ago that was intended specifically to limit the amount of time children can be detained. And if they are going to be detained about the conditions they have to live in while detained meaning they should have education and healthcare and food and water and warm places to sleep and safety. Our government is fighting that, actively fighting against that. We can't forget about the wall. Reducing refugee admission numbers to record blows. We have never allowed in so few refugees as with Trump ever. Last year the number was 45 million. We didn't even reach 45 million. So 45 million, I wish. 45,000, thank you. Dreaming for a minute there. 45,000, thanks, thanks, no thanks. 45,000, we didn't reach that number. So this year the response was 30,000. Canceling the CAM program. That was a program where children, again children were able to apply for refugee status from within their home countries. So and we were talking about children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador could apply for refugee status from home and then come to the United States with as refugees. That's canceled. So now they're coming to the border. Canceling DACA, cancelling temporary protected status. For nationals of various countries, punishing sanctuary jurisdictions by stripping law enforcement funds. The de-naturalization task force, that's a good one. That's where our government is spending time going looking behind all of those naturalization applications, people who are already US citizens and looking to see if maybe they think there's any fraud in those applications and then stripping US citizenship from those people and then deporting them. Putting the citizenship question on the census. Changing the USCIS mission and adjudication policy. So USCIS used to be considered a customer service organization. They just stripped that language right out of their mission which anyone who does immigration laws like, yeah, they weren't doing it anyway. They're definitely not doing it now. And USCIS when you will affirmatively apply for something, let's say a green card. They now have the authority and the mandate to also put those denials, people who've been denied in removal proceedings. So USCIS went from being a customer service organization to also part of the deportation machinery. Putting quotas on immigration judges. So telling judges how many cases they're supposed to be adjudicating daily. I already talked about limiting the viability of domestic violence and gang-based asylum cases. Sending our military to the border using tear gas on children and families. Creating an order, blocking asylum for those people who don't go through a legal process even though many people are trying to do that and then finding themselves unable to actually do that. And everything else that's been happening at the southern border, where you're gonna talk about it a little more, remain in Mexico using border control agents as asylum officers. And this is, I know this is just not a complete list either. Here's some very recent facts and figures. There's a couple of things I wanna point out about this. One is that the number of apprehensions in 2019 are nowhere near what they were in the year 2000. So although we are apprehending and detaining more families and children than we ever have before, and although CBP is getting billions of dollars in appropriations, they had far more apprehensions in the year 2000 with far less money than what we see now. And all the while, all of these apprehensions are feeding into the immigration court system that has a 900,000 case backlog. This is just, this is not a system. This is not a system of justice. Part of dealing with all of these apprehensions and feeding people into the immigration courts also means that what the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are doing is issuing people court dates that don't exist with phantom judges. I've had two cases in the past few months. One was a woman whose court date was on January 31st, 2019. There was no such court date. That didn't, there was no judge there. The other one was for another person who had a hearing with quote, visiting judge too. That was in the person. There was no judge there. It was just a ghost judge. Visiting judge too. This is our government. This is what our government is doing. This is the system of justice. This is our immigration courts. And I'm a lawyer. And I can't navigate this. Okay. Solutions. This is where I try to sound more positive. And I think three I handed out a flyer with some other ideas on the tables. Yeah, so I think also this is just me brainstorming. When we do the Q and A, in addition to any questions that anyone else has additional ideas or maybe the people who have things at the tables, if you wanna speak up too, I love hearing about solutions. But this is, a lot of this stuff is just stuff you can do right at home. You don't necessarily have to go down to Texas. Help meet basic needs. Housing, transportation, food, clothing. I explained how people can't even get jobs even when they want to because they don't have work authorization. And a lot of the people we're talking about are simultaneously trying to care for small children. Help people navigate social services. I'm not talking about the federal ones because they're not eligible. But local social services. School enrollment and school requirements. And if you know anything about it, lawyers, people who are trained in the law explain legal rights and responsibilities. Lend your particular expertise to an asylum seekers case. I always need help with people who have language skills. I can always use more legal assistance. Country conditions experts. Those are those people like professors who have expertise in geopolitical affairs. I might need affidavits about what's specifically, what's going on in somebody's country of origin. And oftentimes people also need psychological or medical help, but I also need psychological and medical forensic evaluation. So I can corroborate somebody's story. And all of this stuff is expensive. Or maybe it doesn't have to be. You can advocate at the local level for policy changes. The bias-free policing policy is a big one. There's the state policy, but also you in your local towns and municipalities, you can ask for greater protections than what the state policy says. And that's a really positive effort that's going on right now in Vermont. Think about immigrant inclusive legislation. For the most part, immigration is a federally regulated sphere. But we can be smarter than the feds and we can think about how we can protect our immigrant neighbors in our own blue states. So for example, what about licensing schemes? Why are so many licensing schemes based on whether you're a US citizen? What about things like making sure that our courts are accessible to immigrants and not a place for immigrants here they might be arrested? There's a whole realm that we can all get creative and smart about and think about ways that we can protect all of our neighbors, including our immigrant neighbors. Make sure that our places of accommodation comply with civil rights laws. I'm talking about schools, roads, places of the DMV, whatever a place of public accommodation is, those places need to have language access. If they don't, that's national origin discrimination. If you work at a nonprofit and you get federal funds, you too have to comply with federal civil rights laws. And even if you are not worried about the law, think about making all of our places more accommodating. You can volunteer at the southern border, for you to kind of talk about that. Get private prison stocks out of your portfolios. You might not even know they're in there. I don't even have to worry about it because I don't own stock. But if I did, I'd be looking closely at those mutual funds and where they bury a lot of stocks and probably not just socially unjust private prison stocks, but others do. And then the more obvious ones, but honestly, this is the only way that things are actually gonna change in any significant way. Vote, protest, call your representatives, write letters to the editor, donate to nonprofits. I know we have very liberal, supportive representatives in Vermont, but maybe they need to hear from us that we're thanking them. Senator Lay, he just issued a press release a couple of days ago about appropriations. About appropriations for customs and border patrol and how the appropriations committee is not going to just write a blind check, that there's going to be conditions on the checks that they give to border patrol. Those are the things that we need to be paying attention to and thanking our senator and representatives for. And it may be even giving them more ideas. Thanks. Thank you again, Erin, that was amazing. She wrote it with Claire. Okay, I think I'll also sit, this sounds nice. Okay, so I'm basically gonna talk about how some of zero tolerance and remaining Mexico, things like that, are affecting people as they approach the border to CECA-Sidon. I do want to sort of apologize in advance to Melvia and Yesica because I'm maybe talking about some of the things that I presume you'll have experienced and it might be a little bit difficult. So I went in January and I worked with a group called Aloe Cholado and they basically provide free legal services for people in Tijuana. Okay, so here are all the land ports of entry for the US on the Canadian and Mexican border. As you can see, most of the more highly crossed ones are on the southern border. Tijuana is actually the most crossed land border in the Western Hemisphere, not just for asylum, but in general. And so, people already talked about why people are applying for asylum, so I'll kind of move forward, but different countries are dealing hugely with these issues in corrupt government, gangs, domestic violence, poverty, and these are longstanding issues, many of which are directly related to actions of the US government itself. And there isn't a recourse for these governments to handle this, even if they wanted to. And I just wanna point out that Central American caravans have been coming to the US border for years. This is not new or unprecedented. This is sort of a different, it's a bar graph version of the same thing Erin showed, apprehensions are actually very low. And probably for this year, we might hit 400,000. It's not an unprecedented overwhelming emergency. There's no excuse. So metering, Erin mentioned, is basically arbitrarily limiting how many people can cross the border each day. So you'll have hundreds or thousands of people waiting at a port of entry and they basically just have to sit there until their name is called. And there's different processes for this. The one in Tijuana is literally written on a marble notebook with no security whatsoever. And people wait for about six weeks to cross. And in the meantime, they are getting kicked out of shelters. They may or may not be able, some people are lucky and get a one year humanitarian visa in Mexico and they can work. A lot of people don't. So they're basically sitting there with no shelter or food or anything like that with children. And they're only processing on average 40 people a day. So I just want to point out that increases the likelihood of people crossing illegally because they can't sit there and wait forever. A lot of people are unsafe in Mexico due to the same gangs they're trying to escape from. And so that sort of metering process actually increases the likelihood of people crossing illegally. So in Tijuana they refer to as la lista. And the way it works is asylum seekers stand on a line. Every 10 names are assigned the same number. And then each morning, starting at about 7.30 in the morning, people have to make their way over to Chaparral, which is basically just a square. There's no transportation, many shelters are miles away. Many people have all of their belongings and their children with them. It's hard to get there. And they wait to see if their number's called. And if you miss your number, you get to start all over unless they decide that they're going to recall numbers the next day and there's not really any way to know when that's gonna happen. And so it's just very, people miss their numbers. It just happens. You can't get there that morning. This process was actually thought up by CBP, Customs and Border Patrol. It was told to Grupos Beta, which is basically the humanitarian branch of Mexican ice. And it is run by list managers who are asylum seekers themselves. And this might be a way for them to get a little bribe, basically to cross early in exchange for their work. And so they're also victims of this process. They are often targeted in the sense of that they're seen to be working against the people that they are a part of. And it doesn't work out well for anybody. It's a very frustrating and inconsistent system. And that's how you get through your port of entry. So here's an example of la lista. It's kept in like an unlocked building at night. People are in danger when they're here. Their identities need to be secured and it's not happening. Here's an example of people just waiting. That's what it looks like every morning. So what happens after you cross the border? You've probably heard a lot about this in the news. There's basically these holding centers. And in the winter they were called Ileras, which means ice box. People were kept there for days on end. They still are being kept there. Apparently it's just not temperature controlled. So now sometimes they're too hot. And in the winter they were saying people were only allowed to have a single layer. We would literally go around and tell people to make sure they were wearing a sweater as their shirt or a sweatshirt, because we didn't know if their other layers would be taken from them or surely. They're given these aluminum mylar blankets that don't keep you warm. At that time too, children died of pneumonia and we think it's because of these Ileras. 24 people have died so far in detention through ice. So it's completely unhygienic and people were subject regardless of their health conditions. Here's an example of pictures that we found. Here's a sort of clear picture. These children probably separated of going to that. Now a lot of these holding facilities are outside. So in March and April there was a public outcry because especially under the bridge in El Paso, I don't know if you've heard of the El Paso del Norte Processing Center. There were, basically there was a public outcry because pregnant women and children were sleeping outside for days and they moved everyone inside, which there was a sort of a pop inspection happened and they found out that these places were like many, many times overcrowded, standing room only, very dangerous conditions and they just started again holding people outside but now they're only holding single people and mostly men so now I guess it's okay. And yeah, and they've been, this is supposed to be holding facilities. They're supposed to hold a person for 72 hours and there are cases of these people being held here for days, weeks, more than a month. And many times they have had their belongings taken for security reasons so there are an even change of clothes. And another thing that's tricky with this is that people are often trying to find people. There are people who try to help them in Tijuana, they connect them with a lawyer, their own family members and when someone is processed they get an A number and who need that A number to find someone and so people sitting here for days and weeks don't have that A number which means no one knows where they are. So here's an example. This was a few weeks ago I think this picture particularly. So child separation is still happening. I know there was like that very short period of time last year when it was happening to everybody but now it's happening basically through the lens of we don't know if these are their real parents, we don't know if they're safe with these people. So if you're crossing with your sibling, your adopted child, your grandchild, maybe a close friend asked you to bring their kid up to the border. If you don't have papers proving guardianship, you're very likely to be separated from your child. I don't know if they're doing this DNA test yet. They've been throwing this idea of DNA tests around which is completely unnecessary and it doesn't solve this problem at all. And so there have been multiple cases of people being forced to sign waivers basically handing over guardianship against their will. I recommend reading, I think it was in the New Yorker about this little girl Helen. It's a really good article that sort of lays down an example of what can happen to a family. She crossed with her grandmother, was separated and was basically lost into the system for months. Okay, so I already talked about that. When you are done, when they decide that you're done waiting in these places, you'll have what's called a credible fear interview. Actually, can I go back? Okay, so you will have a CFI interview, a credible fear interview, and it basically is a very quick and dirty determination of what Erin talked about, where you persecuted on account of your race, religion, national origin, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. This is not an asylum hearing. This is only an immigration officer basically determining could you have a viable asylum claim? If so, you'll move forward. If not, you are deported. I also want to say that CVP, this is Erin mentioned this as well, increasingly CVP are now doing these interviews who are, they're not trained to be asylum officers. They don't know how to do this and it's resulted in more denial. And people aren't given officially information about what this interview is going to be like. As part of what Elector Lado does is telling people about this interview is happening and preparing them for what they need to say because sometimes people deal with a lot of trauma in that journey to the border and if they talk about something that happened to them in Mexico and then from El Salvador, then they're basically gonna be denied saying, oh well you didn't talk about El Salvador so you don't have a real asylum claim from your home country. So it's very important that people know exactly what they need to say at these CFIs. After you pass the CFI, in the past most people would be released. They might've been given an ankle monitor set up with a case manager, it depends on the situation. But people were not detained unless they were a convicted felon, which has its own issues. But 90% of people were not detained. Now it's the opposite. Most people are being detained because of Trump's zero tolerance. And detention is horrible. It's like prison but worse. You have no rights of which to speak. If you are stuck in detention you're expected to be able to file your asylum application by yourself. You get an A list of pro bono lawyers but it's usually the same list which means some of those numbers don't work anymore. Some of those lawyers are, most of those lawyers are completely exhausted and overwhelmed. And it's sort of up to volunteers on the outside who might've known someone to find somebody and see if they can find them a lawyer. It's not a real process. So you can read basically what's happening. Even every phone call costs money. So I've been working with one man who's detained in Louisiana. Louisiana is particularly a black home for asylum seekers and immigrant detention centers. So more and more people are being sent there. They're being sent to private prisons in Louisiana who basically they're gonna get more money by doing that by holding asylum seekers from the government. And just to talk with him, I need to put money in on a regular basis and he can call me, I can't call him. He's basically has nothing to do for 23 hours a day. They can go outside for an hour I think and then other than that they're in their cells. And he's very strong. He's been taking this pretty well but it's just you're stuck there. And the only reason that he has any hold at all is because he knew someone who knew me, who knew this other girl, who called through a line and I ended up finding a lawyer in Ohio. So it's crazy. So options for leaving detention. If you crossed out of court of entry and you might be able to apply for parole, which basically means you don't have a criminal history, you're not a threat to the US, you have a place to go, that's where sponsors come in. And you might be given parole. It is often arbitrarily denied. In Louisiana, they effectively don't give parole. Just deny everybody. And sometimes they require bond money as part of that, which is weird because it shouldn't. Bond is basically like bail if you enter between points of entry. You might be eligible for bond. It's a little bit more strict determination that you're not a threat or a flight risk. And average bond price is about $7,500. The minimum is 1,500. And so even if someone gets bond, they have to have a money source somewhere. I remember most of these people don't have any money and that's part of the reason why they came here. So and of course the reality is that before this happened, according to CVP's own reports, 94% showed up to their asylum hearings. So the idea that people need to be in detention to show for their asylum hearings is complete bull. So I think I talked a little bit. I looked at Lado basically talks to people in the morning, encourages them to come to our free know your rights lectures that happen every day. And every day whoever comes can get free lunch, free childcare, this free meeting about basically what your rights are gonna be in a little bit about what the process will look like. And then there's this key, they get to sit down with a law student or a lawyer and talk about their case and get bona fide opinion from an immigration lawyer as to whether or not they even have an asylum case. So there are a lot of people who come up because for example, like their business was extorted by a gang, but they were able to move to another party of their country and have not been bothered since. And therefore they wouldn't really win asylum. They've proven just in living that they could go to another part of their country. And so it's important to tell them, hey, this isn't gonna work for you because the worst thing that could happen to them is that they do pass a CFI for some reason and then go through this whole process, sit in detention for months, years and are denied and go right back home. So just giving people sort of, but trying to give people other options of asylum if they don't have a viable claim or if they do have a viable claim, helping them with awareness of how are you gonna go through this process? So here's an example of one of the handouts there we did in all different languages. Oh, another thing is there, oh, I look a lot of attorneys are also playing significant roles in major legal cases brought against the Trump administration for many of the things that they've been doing, which is really, really great. And they started in the past couple months, I'm hoping to go back at some point in 2019, these sort of remain in Mexico pro say asylum clinics because, so 11,000 people so far have been returned to Mexico. Well, like they are from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, mainly, even though that's what it's supposed to be, which is discriminatory, obviously, but there have also been people from other countries who've also been sent back to Mexico, including Mexicans, and they need to wait there, and their likelihood of getting a U.S. attorney is extremely low, immigration attorneys would love to help them, but it's very hard to get in and out of Tijuana. Some actually, two attorneys were blocked, their passports were blocked. They haven't figured out yet that it was a U.S. government or a Mexican government. So it's not like, it's that much more difficult to get an attorney when you're in Mexico. And so, El Salvador is setting up clinics for people to learn how to do their own cases under the assumption that that's what they're gonna have to do anyway, so that when they do go back to San Diego for their hearing, they have a chance. They at least know what's going on and know what to say. My time's pretty much up, but there's just, everything is happening. Elna Company minors are in these sort of detention centers that are apparently in agreement with Flores, but not really, and their abortions are being blocked as Calvoid. He was legally stopped from doing that, but then it found out it kept happening, and so these are young women, 13, 14, 15, they're pregnant, they may or may not have been raped, they want an abortion, and they are being held out until they passed a second trimester. And so then they can't have one. Things like that just happen to people in detention because you have no rights when you're there. So I have any hope. Donating is huge, so here are some, examples of good places to spend your money, to get ACLU, RACs, the kids in need of defense is kind. They do a lot of really good work. I put out on tables little half papers that talk about the Vida Lever Bond Fund, which basically is a revolving bond, which means when money goes to pay for someone's bond, assuming they get that money back, which they're supposed to. It goes back into the fund to help pay for somebody else's bond. There's also a Vermont Freedom Bail Fund for migrant workers who, oh, they're rare. Migrant workers who are basically caught by ICE and detained in New Hampshire, and it's also a really great way to help locally. You can also volunteer at El Elato. If you have a week, just a week, and you can get to Tijuana, they will take anyone, especially if you have language skills, especially if you have like psychology skills or legal skills, but you don't have to have those things. And it's a really great way to see first hand what's going on and to help them in their process. And for, I was thrown out there for my guy, Louisiana, were working really hard to find him a sponsor to use as part of a bond request. And I found him an attorney and I'm trying to pay her and it's hard, so. If anyone, I didn't write this down on the paper, but just throw it out there that if anyone has anything to give to help this lawyer is really fantastic. And, or if they have any leads on anyone who might be able to house a very kind gentleman for a few months, that'd be great. All right, that's all. Michelle, you're gonna have to raise three, that's two. But we'd like to call Michelle Janesse up here to explain a little bit more about what's called the Safe Third Country Agreement. That affects a lot of people in Vermont because it has to do with a cross-border agreement between Canada and the United States and Michelle's an expert on this as she is the foremost expert in Vermont on everything immigration. We will learn from her. Thank you, Michelle. Good day. So since the end of 2004, asylum seekers transiting the US to make a claim for refugee status in Canada at a port of entry are subject to the Safe Third Country Agreement. And this bilateral agreement is recognition of each country that they have equitable asylum systems. Well, since Trump came into office and launched his campaign against undocumented asylum seekers and other immigrants, over 40,000 people have entered Canada in between ports of entry which they're still able to do and make a refugee claim in Canada. The majority of these people have crossed at one particular border crossing which is at the terminus of Roxham Road north of Blacksburg, Vermont. Canada has recently worked, actually for the past year, has been trying to negotiate the Safe Third Country Agreement. It was negotiated in favor of Canadian interests and a Canada's request. And now what they would like to do is apply across the whole border. So just zip the whole border. If somebody is apprehended at an interim point of crossing, they will be brought to a port of entry and subject to the Safe Third Country Agreement. I feel like there's a great likelihood that this could backfire on them because once Trump realizes, well, this would be keeping more asylum seekers of the United States. They might not get what they want or the US couldn't pull out of the agreement. Last July, the Trudeau Liberal government appointed its first border security minister, Bill Blair, whose mandate is to manage the surge at the border. Something else that they've done is in April, they put an amendment to the Integration Refugee Protection Act which would bar people who had initiated a claim in certain other countries, including the US, so initiated into the asylum claim, from having their day before the Immigration Refugee Board in Canada. This would have a great effect on survivors of domestic violence. Whose cases Trump has basically ignored and said this is not a grounds for asylum. So this could have huge effects. Yes? I'm sorry to talk about that. I'm confused about what's happening about people who have crossed the US and are fighting in Canada? Correct. Are people who are fighting in Canada and Vermont? No, it was the former. So people who are realizing that this system nowadays will not offer them protection and are trying to access the Canadian asylum system. And one other bad thing that's recently happened in May, Ontario, took away any legal aid monies from indigent asylum seekers and immigrants so that they will have to navigate the really complex asylum process without representation. So things to the north are quickly changing. And if anybody who knows who wants to go north, please contact me. Thanks. Michelle or any of you, can you also speak to the, can you also, and I'll address the issue of, I have been hearing that there are some people who are coming to the Northern Triangle countries who realize how hard it is to get them to the south and who are saying it's better to pay instead of pale day to pay for a plane fare up to Canada and then try to cross in from that way. Is that happening a little bit? Well, it's harder to get visitors due to Canada and there are fewer community and embassies worldwide in relation to the US. So it's mainly still us in here trying to get on with it. So a lot of information is going to need to reach soon just to absorb it all. Are there any questions? I don't find questions I think that people have. Yes. I'm not exactly sure if this is a question, but I know as somebody who's lived in central Vermont for quite some time that it's very frustrating thinking about what's going on in southern Northern but recently I've come in contact with some of the people who are undocumented who are living in Vermont. And this is in our backyard. This is next door to us. There's a tremendous need amongst those people and I know that this conference is not about that, but I just wanted to raise that issue because it's been quite a shocking thing to see what these people are going through and those are our neighbors who are employing those people and that's a place where I think we could have tremendous effect. Thank you. I know that we have been focusing a lot on the border, but it is also about who is here already. We'll be talking a lot about that, I believe, in the second half. Do you want to respond? I just want to mention, and you might have to run off many more copies because this is so wonderful that so many people came. But our local Amnesty International has call-ins to our legislators regarding different bills that are going to counter all of some of these bad, bad things. And so there's also a call-in for Scott Warren, who's trial witness, who's a humanitarian aid worker who could get 20 years for getting water for people in Arizona. We have a postcard action and a script sent from the district attorney there, but we also have a call-in because the government's going to try and read. I just got this from Amnesty International, or A.I. USA, that the government's going to try and retry, have another trial because they want to get a, Trump wants to make an example that you cannot be, if you're a human rights defender, he's going to try and get you somehow. And Amnesty International is nonpartisan, I just say that. I just took off my hat to say that, but we know this. But we have some call-ins here. We also have thank you cards. Again, they're little, but we can write on the back, to Lady Sanderson Welch for co-sponsoring the Dignity for Detained Immigrant Act. It's not getting rid of detention centers, but it's making standards, appropriate standards, and it also has to do with children. In September, Amnesty's coming out with this brand new, big campaign comprehensive about detention. But please come over and we'll make more copies if all of these begin to disappear. Thank you, Caroline. I just also want to lift up again that we're not, they all come, I think we'll probably talk about that specific in the second half, so I'll address you more. Peter, you had a question? Aaron, is there any appeal from the Immigration Court system? You mean any ideas coming from the Immigration Court system for how to address the problems, or are you talking about appealing your case if you're denied? So, yes, you can appeal a denial at the Immigration Court stage to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and then you might be able to appeal a denial at the BIA to our circuit courts. But there's also laws on the books that strip jurisdiction from our circuit courts over many, many, many immigration decisions. And those laws basically say that, sorry, not sorry, the immigration judge does have a lot of discretion to make these decisions. Can I just answer the first question I thought you were asking? There is a really big policy advocacy effort underway to take the immigration courts out of the Department of Justice and to make them Article I courts, that would be a court that Congress would oversee, not the Department of Justice, so that could help someone. Could you talk about sponsorship? What does that really mean? Do we want to get into that now, or will we talk about that in a second? So, Steve Crofter's going to talk about that in detail. That's where we'll get to the big recap. The good news time, all of that means. We'll end it at. So what percentage of the people who arrive in Tijuana or out of court of entry to make it through the process and actually get asylum? I think asylum approvals in general are about 20% on average nationwide. I don't know of those who come through Tijuana specifically because they shipped out all over the country after that. Just to note about asylum approvals, it's really arbitrary and it's going to be so judge dependent. There's judges working in our immigration courts that have grant rates of 5%, and then there's judges that have upwards of 75, 80%, but also it's going to depend on the kind of case. If you have a gang-based or domestic violence-related case, you're very unlikely to win, with the law as it is now. There is a chart. Actually, I don't have a listing, but I was on a cast list in May and there was a whole chart given how they listed the towns, not where you come in, but where your case is, and it was that. Well, cast was like 3%, Boston was 85%. What determines where your case is? What determines where your case is? Where you live? Where you're a sponsor is also? Where you're living, right. Where your residence is. Michelle, Janessa talked about getting contact with her, how do you do that? I work with Brea Association of Africans living in Vermont. Email me. It's the ALB website, it's right on your show. It's not just for Africans anymore, for a whole piece of worldwide. That's how it started. Other questions, if you want to ask? Yes. The answer to that was a show of people that are sensitive and excited to think about it. The picture you put up there is a department of justice and it's a return there, more specific to the outreach means. But it's a report from a sponsor here that's a diverse participant. Again, they represent themselves with a different classification of the case. We're going to choose race about what we're the party. As to representation and ever tracing, deportation or admirable proceeding. Because you're not allowed to have a government paid for attorney, because the government does not provide attorneys to people in removal proceedings like they do in criminal proceedings where you get a public defender. Most people, most asylum seekers do not have representation. There are many, many, many efforts of blood and programs that exist to provide some consultation so that people who go forward on their own at least have some information. But it's not nearly, those people are not nearly as successful by percentage as those who have attorneys working on their cases. And yes, there are places where public defenders are government funded to also provide representation in removal defense cases. Vermont has a statute on the books that says public defenders can represent people in removal defense cases. But as far as I know, there's no Vermont funding to pay for those public defenders to do that. So it's an opportunity. What happened to you, honey? Thank you. I could give some clarification about the apprehensions. What does that really mean? My impression is that the need for granting asylum is even greater now than it ever was. Is that correct? That more people need asylum? So I don't, what is the apprehension's detailed need? Like why were there more apprehensions once and what's the effect of that? So you hear in the news a lot about unprecedented numbers that's used a lot. There's more women and children and families who are coming now because a lot of the forms of persecution and suffering that people are escaping is more widespread than when it was more focused on young men. In terms of the, why the numbers have decreased since 2000? Do you know? I don't actually know. Does that help at all? Customs and water protection has been a tutorial discretion about whether to apprehend and detain someone or not. And what we're seeing now that is unprecedented is the apprehension and detention of families and young children. The numbers in 2000 was primarily single males of majority age and that's not what we're seeing in 2019. Yeah, Easton. Easton, are they under age and is it, is this part of the apprehension? I think this is mostly going to be covered by the second half of the conference. If you have specific questions about this specific person, feel free to email me. Let me just say that there are lots of different organizations that are doing good work, including what you were connecting with, the groups that I've visited and I'll pass them on down to the gala, so to sound. And there's a time for announcements. I just wanted to ask Mel if she would like to speak a little bit about the website idea. Do you want to come up here and we can use that? She asked for some announcement time. And while she was coming up, I just wanted to mention that I got a phone call, for instance, just before the email. Made a phone call to her, somebody over in Norwich who knows if a young man in detention in Dover is a kind of hooker up with housing for the summer and organizations and how does that happen. So I told her that we'd get back to her. It's just like here in Young Man and many others. We want to know what are the specifics that we could do, is it money, is it other things like that. So we look forward to the second half hearing that. I just also wanted to mention, just so you know, we are not filming our two guests today, just the audio. So if any of you have cameras out at all, please don't share any pictures for our own safety and out of their families. And let me just have Mel speak a minute and see if there's any other announcement and then anyone left up all the other resource people here. Okay, Mel. Thank you. I'm Mel Hawk from Christchurch Presbyterian in Burlington, which was a sanctuary church in the 80s and we were involved in many other activities, just as individuals. I worked as a reporter in Brownsville, Texas for several years and I'd like to invite anyone who might be interested in collaborating with me on developing a website which would connect corner missions, create a place where they can post their needs, and also connect them with people in other parts of the country who would like to support these missions. I discovered that there are a lot of people who are very interested, but don't know how to get in touch with the projects on the border. The website will include updates on conditions on the border and in the migrants home countries and explanations of legal issues. There could be a section for churches and self-solidarity groups to describe their work so they could get in touch with each other. And the current plan for distributing this is doing it through the denominational offices. That's not exclusive, that's just kind of the starting point. Pardon me, I have a cold. If you'd like, are people who would like to join me in thinking this through, I would welcome participation because I want to make sure first of all that there's enough support and also that what I've been thinking of doing on my own corresponds to people's needs. I think there needs to be a lot more input into it than I've been able to get so far. The way we would go about this is that my plan is to go to the border and I have a friend from Brownsville who was the head of the welfare department there and has been very involved with migrants. The two of us would go along the border visiting the shelters. I do interviews with the managers and do photographs from the website. And my friend who is a native speaker of Spanish would interview the migrants. I am back in the back corner of the table and there are some handouts. So anyone who might like to get involved in this can pick them up there and I'd be glad to talk to you in a minute. Is anybody from VIA here, mind if we have action? Okay, so you have to cast for an announcement at the time that I'm here. Are there any other general community announcements that anybody has to make similar to this sort of thing at all? Yes. I'd like to come on up here if you want to. Anybody else? Maybe at the time that I wanted to. I just want to invite Sandra. I'm not sure what's back at the table here but for folks living in the Montclair area we're working on fair and impartial policing right now and we would love to have your contact information if you're interested in being involved. Back of the table there with Sandra would you just wait for a hand? Let me just go and read off the list of all the resource tables that I know are here and I think there are real shores that have come from the panelists that they brought and I'm sure this is where they are. ALB. Believe it or not, the Boston Group has the materials out there. Steve, did you bring the materials? I'd like to thank you for the Phineas Island Seamers Project, the legal permit and the materials. I left my card back there. Okay, your card is there. ACLU materials are here. American Friends Service Committee, Central Vermont Refugee Action Network. We have representatives here, lots of materials there. Amnesty International, we heard from the Vermont Freedom Bank Fund or SOVI, it is. The website project you heard about are the others that brought materials that people need to know where you are. Yeah, I just made a quick announcement. The phineas community is trying to keep people in place, people who are otherwise economically being removed from their communities. People who are setting up cooperative banana coffee producers. So I would really urge you to support their creation. You're welcome. Okay, Erin, do you have one more thing you need to say? Yeah, Reverend Joan asked me to just explain something that is really important that I overlooked. And that is that it's important to know that for people who are facing removal proceedings who live in Vermont or Maine or New Hampshire, they have to go to Boston Immigration Court for their proceedings. And so that can be really a hardship for obviously for the person in removal proceedings, but then also it does go to the kinds of resources that the work requires, whether you're talking about transportation or for me as an attorney, it's a very resource-intensive case to have to be traveling down to Boston. So we're trying to collaborate with people closer to the court, but again, that takes resources. Another issue is that for our detained immigrants, the closest detention center is Dover, New Hampshire. There's another one in Blacksburg, New York, across the lake, but that's supposed to be temporary. And then those folks are sent off to have their cases in the Buffalo Immigration Court. So that, I think what this indicates is that we also are facing an access to justice issue. It's really, really difficult to communicate with people who are in detentions. And then if the next thing you know, you're moving to Buffalo for your case, probably not going to be all that helpful to have a Vermont attorney. So thank you for reminding me about that. So thanks again to Brea, Erin, Michelle for sharing. As we shift into our break and the second half as we alluded to, we'll get really kind of on the ground and talk more practically about experiences that two different organizations have had in providing accompaniment and support. I just invite us that that was a lot to take in. Some of us in the room have had some personal experience, whether volunteering at the border or trying to be of support to our neighbors or just personally being impacted, fleeing from our home countries and going through the immigration court system. So I invite all of us to just take a breath, a deep breath in and a deep breath out. And during this break time, I invite you to do whatever you might need to do for yourself to help move some of that, what we've taken in through your bodies and your spirits. I don't think it's pouring rain, so maybe a nice walk outside would do you some good, stretching the body, getting some nourishment. So our second set of panelists this afternoon will be speaking about their experiences, accompanying and taking action in solidarity with asylum seekers and other immigrants. I will introduce all of our speakers now and each organization will present for about 20 or 25 minutes and then we'll have time again for questions. So first we have Steve Crofter. Steve was raised in Troy, New York and Washington, D.C. and was influenced throughout his childhood by the Quaker principles of peace, goodwill and social justice. His interest in cross-cultural relations began quite young when his professor father posted international students for Sunday dinner. After raising four children, Steve and his life partner lived for three years in a rural village in Mexico where they were the only foreigners. Although he has worked at many trades as a bus driver, the founder and manager of a moving and storage company, farmer and public school teacher, he is now the executive director of the Community Asylum Seekers Project, a nonprofit he founded in 2016. We also have on this panel Reverend Annie Gonzalez-Milligan who serves as the parish minister at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts, a Unitarian Universalist congregation. And Annie is also an organizer in the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network, also known as, as beyond. She lives in Boston with her partner Lucas, their kiddo Moira and housemates Elizabeth and Christie. You might also find Annie at a showing up for racial justice meeting at the small evening service at Hope Central Church in Jamaica Plain, jogging around her neighborhood or baking something sweet in her kitchen. And finally we have Reverend Elizabeth Nguyen who roots for the Wisconsin Badgers, lives in Boston and is learning all the time about liberation, solidarity, courage and cowardice. She is a community minister and part of the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network and serves on the advisory board of the Beantown Society and the board of Unitarian Universalist community cooperatives. Singing at the sanctuary Boston, cooking and remembering to pray are some of her spiritual practices. So first we will start with Steve. Very glad to be here. And it's really nice that so many people came out for this. I'm gonna start by telling you what happened back in 2014 when I was at a certain stage in my semi-retirement and I was looking for something to do a place to volunteer and I knew I wanted to do something international in some way. So I went down to McAllen, Texas and volunteered with a community, sorry, with a Catholic Charities Project there that was helping asylum seekers who were being released from detention and they were on their way to live with family or friends somewhere else in the US and a lot of that was just really short-term. It was a meal change of clothing into some used clean clothing, a shower. If they were staying overnight, they'd have caught the sleep on them but mostly they were getting on a bus in a few hours and they were on their way. And I learned a whole lot being there. I learned some of what Aaron taught this afternoon about the difference between a refugee and an asylum seeker and a little bit about the legal process. I also heard the stories, again, mostly these were people from Central America but what's the persecution that people were running from to really horrific stories that I heard. I heard also horrific stories about things that had happened to people on their journeys from Central America to the United States and then also heard stories about what it was like to be in the icebox, to be in the dog kennel, what it was like in detention. I was surprised to see in the photo of Peter sleeping in the icebox in the elevator, they looked like they were actual mattresses on the floor and when it was there, people were just on the concrete floor with a mylar blanket and that was all like that and that was where the air conditioning was turned down into 40 or 50 degrees. But after going several times to Texas to volunteer, which was very meaningful, as you can imagine, I began to wonder, okay, well this is what we're doing to help these people that are being released but who isn't being released? And I started asking questions and learned that those that didn't have family or friends somewhere in the United States would be kept in detention and that someone's chances of being successful in taking asylum on their own in English from detention was virtually no. So really, standing in detention meant you would ultimately be deported and I talked to enough people who said, oh yes, we had a neighbor who made it to the United States and he was in detention for a month and then was deported and he was killed within a few days of arriving back home and the deportation is in many cases, at that time. So the idea came to me like why don't instead of going to Texas to help people there, why don't we see if there's some way to provide a home, a place, a refuge for a few people that are in detention and otherwise wouldn't be able to get out. And so a couple of years ago, got together with some friends on neighbors and we started a nonprofit to do just that and it's kind of been slow going to set it up to kind of figure out how to do it, to build a network so that we can find asylum seekers at the point where we're ready to post someone, that we can find someone who's about ready to be released or could be released if we were to sponsor them. So it's been gone, like I say, it's been gone slowly but we now have five families in Southeastern Vermont and we feel like we've learned a lot in that process. I'm really interested in hearing these folks from the Boston area have to say and just a little bit of conversation we already have. There's some clear differences with how we think about what our model is and what their model is and it's all good, it all needs doing. There's pros and cons of each way of doing things and I'm really hopeful that one of the things that may come out of this is that folks here in Central Vermont or folks from Chittenden County from the north can figure out ways of doing similar things, whether it's similar to what we're doing, similar to them, just kind of any way to go ahead and help more people find homes is a really good idea. So I wanna tell you a little story about one of our asylum seeking guests. I'm gonna call her Rosa and Rosa was the first asylum seeker that came to us along with her then six-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son. They're from Mexico and had been in detention about a month and Rosa had gone through her credible fear interview and passed that and was called in along with a number of other women there and the detention center was called into a room with a pro bono attorney who was kind of explaining much about their rights and next steps and so on and as each person came in, the attorney handed each of these moms a pamphlet from the Department of Homeland and Security that explained in English and Spanish their rights and responsibilities in seeking asylum and on the cover of the pamphlet was the picture of the Statue of Liberty. So the attorney goes around the room and talks to each person there in turn and says, we've contacted your husband in Los Angeles or your cousin in Montana or whatever and we've arranged for you to be released, you'll have to get a ticket and so here's the process et cetera and one by one each person left and finally Rosa's the last asylum seeker in the room with the attorney who says, we tried to contact the one number you had for a distant cousin but there's been no answer and we can't get a hold of that person, do you know anyone else in the US and Rosa says no and she said, well, you have to have someone who will take you in otherwise you'll just stay here in detention and Rosa looks at the pamphlet and blinks at the Statue of Liberty and says, maybe shift, take me in. We're upon, the other way you're said, well, it doesn't really work that way but we have one slight chance, I've just heard about this small organization up in the far away state of Vermont, it's just the other side of New York City and we can see if they might have a place for you and so that contact was made and Rosa and her children came to live with us and they've been living in the poem with my partner and myself since October of 2017. I guess I wanna share with you some of the practical aspects of that, what was necessary for that to happen. So one is that our organization found that raising money actually wasn't such a challenge. I mean, it's important, we can always use more money. If we had more money, we could actually do more, we could help more people but with all the bad news over the last couple of years people are really willing to open their wallets and contribute when they see something, a chance for something hopeful happening and so it urge you all that if you have a good idea and you got the willpower to carry it out, the money will come so don't think you can't do something for a lot of funds. The practical aspect of getting enough volunteers to do the work has also gone pretty well, we've got a lot of people willing to step forward and do things. It is, I was having a conversation just a few minutes ago with someone here who was saying, she wants to sponsor someone and have someone at her home and I think that's a wonderful idea but I was urging her, don't do it alone, you really need a large team of dedicated volunteers around you because it really is, we have a 24 hour a day, seven day a week, 365 or six days a year commitment that's gonna go on for a long time. One of the differences that, Elizabeth and I talked about between our organizations is that we made the decision really early on that we were gonna do everything completely legally including asking our asylum seeking guests to never break any US or state law including not working until they have work authorization. And as Erin explained, that's not just six months after your asylum case is submitted to the government but it's also all the time it takes to find an attorney to talk with the attorney enough times to get the case written down and the case worked out so they can submit it. So in the case of Rosa it was close to a year and a half after coming to Vermont that she finally got her work authorization. So all that time we insisted that she not work which meant that we had to support her. So that means raising all the money necessary for food and finding resources for clothing and a place to live, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Every last thing has to come from the local community in our case. Now we could have said, and it might make sense to say, you know what, if you work illegally, we won't turn around our backs and not notice that and then you can be independent much faster. But that's an example of the kinds of decisions if you were gonna do something like this that you would have to figure out what's your policy gonna be and what are the pros and cons. I mean for us one advantage was that we've been completely above board about everything we're doing. We've actually invited the ICE community officer for Northern England to come meet with us to be aware of our program. And you know, we have nothing to hide from ICE. Everything we're doing is completely legal. But again, there sure are ways that you could help a lot more people if you didn't quibble about some little detail like working under the table than that. So I guess I wanna also talk about the emotional ups and downs of this. It's very moving work. You know, it's very uplifting. You know, I notice when I talk to people, you know, around where I live and I'm sure it's true, you know, probably many of you listen to the news regularly, you know, and it's like, I don't do that because I find it just brings me down so much that it actually incapacitates me to some extent. And I'm glad that some of us listen to the news because it's important, but I'm glad that I don't. And I figure if something really critical happens, you'll let me know. But I also notice that when I share with people what we're doing, it's hopeful to people. You know, it's not more bad news, it's some good news. And that I think we need lots of uplifting. On the other hand, it's, you know, to, you know, what it's like to live with family members or a partner or your children or your parents or whatever and imagine inviting strangers to come share your home for, you know, one, two, three years, whatever it turns out to be. And these are strangers who did not choose easily to come here. You know, Rosa reminded me a number of times, you know, as she says, I never had a dream of coming to the United States, you know. I want to be home in Mexico, but it's like threatening. I can't be there, you know. So I have to be here, but I don't want to be here. This was not a happy choice. This was a save your life kind of choice as better than getting killed, but not where you really want to be. So somebody in that position who then comes to a place where, you know, the winters are freezing and the customs are all strange, you know. It's asking a lot of somebody. Virtually every asylum seeker that I know has left family members behind. You know, Rosa has two older children. Since she came here, she became a grandmother twice, you know, and she will probably never see those children other than by photographs. You know, it's a really difficult one-way decision for someone to come. And yet, you know, it's necessary. You know, it's better to escape how you can with whoever you can, you know, and leave behind what you love. So, you know, witnessing that is hard. The day-to-day differences in culture, you know, we think of culture shock as being something that, you know, you experience when you go for a week's vacation or something, but this stuff just keeps coming back and back and back, you know. It was months before Rosa reluctantly agreed to keep a calendar, because that's how gringos do it. And actually, her Mexican friends that she had made or other Latina friends here in Vermont started teasing her about becoming a gringot because now she was trying to write down her appointments and stuff. But she couldn't actually keep it up. It was just too, it was too foreign a concept to try and arrange your life like, you know, you're actually gonna email somebody or before you go visit them. I mean, that's not how the friendly world works in her world, you know, but that's how we do it here. And for her to try to adapt to that was a real challenge and continues to be a challenge. You know, just a little every day, you know, sharing the kitchen, sharing, you know, sharing rides. It's been hard to, she studied for her learners permit and went and took the test once and failed it and got so discouraged that it's been really hard to go back, so she's still just, every time she needs to go someplace that's can you give me a ride? Can we arrange for a ride? So there's just a lot, it's not an easy thing to do. And yet it's a really good thing to do, you know. So I want you to all consider ways that you can be part of the efforts like that in your own communities and not by yourself but together with a large group of dedicated people and figure out ways to support each other. We have one set of hosts that were really clear when they signed up, that's like, we don't have time to volunteer. Track, we're hardly ever home. We're actually glad to share our home. We have a spare room. Yes, can stay there and we'll be late with them. They can use our kitchen any time. They can use our house but don't call on us to drive to the doctor's office or anything else. We don't have time and we won't do it. And they're actually, I would say, one of our very most successful host homes and we know what they will do and we know what they won't do and there's a huge team of volunteers that does the other stuff. And that's been very successful. So it's not like you have to be able to do it all. You just have to be able to do a part of it. See what I'm forgetting here. Oh, just some of the, I was just gonna mention some of the highlights, the emotional highlights for me with Rosa and their children after they were here about six months during April vacation a year ago. We did go to New York City for a few days and she actually got to see the Statue of Liberty which was a really nice follow-up on the pamphlet. And last summer we went camping. We spent a few nights at a Vermont State Park and the first time they'd ever been in a tent and just great memories for all of us doing that. It's been really wonderful for me, my own children and my own. I don't live that close to my grandchildren and to have children in my life again is a wonderful thing. So there's a lot of benefits. I was gonna mention with Jessica and Novia, I've gone a couple times now to Boston with them for appointments at their attorney in Boston. And the first time we went, we had such a fun time. There was an incident. We drove down and parked at the old life station and then took the tea in. And I don't know if those of you who were parked on the top floor of Alewife, but the escalator there is the equivalent of maybe three or four stories. For some of those who's never been on an escalator before in their life, it was a sort of hesitation wall at the top that got us all laughing for many hours. And then an hour later we had this adventure which I don't even quite have to describe except we got lost in an elevator for about 20 minutes and we're still laughing about that. But yeah, I think the other thing I wanna just say about if you're tempted or enthused about the idea of trying to sponsor and host asylum seekers in your own community, our organization is really glad to share whatever we've learned about that. I think we'll be glad to share our best practices with you and we're also, we won't be too embarrassed to share our worst practices with you. Everything we've done wrong and there's lots of that. There's lots of mistakes we've made. And also there's a lot to, the networking was, that took a while to kind of figure out but gradually, and I'm still learning more, like I didn't know about beyond and now I do and that's a new resource for us. But when we get to the point where we have a new host home that's available, part of my job is to reach out nationally to say that we now have an opening and where we have an opening for and to put the word out. And I've now figured out a way to do that networking that's been pretty successful and glad to share that with anybody else who's looking for asylum seekers. Cause there aren't many people out there but it's like, how do you find somebody who's perhaps in detention right now eligible for a release at this moment and find out enough about them, somebody that you can communicate with cause you can't just call the detention center and ask. So sharing that networking is something we can do. The other thing is, and I know this question sort of was raised and will come up is sort of what does sponsorship mean from a legal perspective? And maybe some of the attorneys could actually answer that more accurately than me but my impression is it doesn't actually mean a whole lot. There's no contract signed. It's actually sort of amazing the lack of oversight that the government has. Like it looks like virtually anybody could, if you could just connect with somebody in detention and virtually anybody could just become a sponsor. There's no contract, there's no document signed other than just a letter expressing the willingness to host this person and make sure to get into immigration hearings. Do you want to speak to that? Yeah, I mean it proves that you're here legally and that you have income, that's all you really need. Yeah, do people hear that answer? If you can prove that you're here legally in the US and that you have income, that's all you need to do. Yeah, so there's not much of a process. There's no oversight as far as I can see. So sponsorship is not a big deal. Yeah, okay, we'll come back to that and again I'm guessing that there are people here who can answer with better accuracy than I can about that aspect. So I think we're gonna get back to that because we can save questions until the end of the panel. So I kinda wanted to just end with another brief story about Rosa, which is that the office of the community asylum seekers project is just in a little alcove of my living room and one of my, or as part of my job, I'll often get emails or phone calls from someone else somewhere in the US who's trying to help an asylum seeker. You know, it might be Brea or somebody like that saying can the community asylum seekers project help this person? We have someone needs a place, do you have a spot? And 99.9% of the time the answer is no, we don't. If we did have a spot, we would be advertising it. So it almost always, it's a question of no. And those calls are useful because I've made more personal contact with someone doing related work somewhere else in the country. But they're always poignant as you can imagine. And I almost always get off the phone and cry for a while because I just learned about someone else that we can't help, you know. Someone else who's in desperate straits and we can't do anything for them. And so usually at that point when I'm done with that phone call, I put the phone down and I'll go out into the living room or kitchen and find my partner and tell her the details of the phone call that I just heard in Prague for a while. And so one day, actually I'm gonna back up, I'm gonna interrupt the story for a second to describe Rosa's space in our home. It's actually in an outbuilding that we've renovated a space, you might think of it like sort of a, like a mother-in-law's apartment or something like that except there's no kitchen, they share our kitchen with us and cook and eat with us. So it's a space, not much bigger than the stage which includes maybe two thirds of that is like a little living room and then this tiny kind of closet of a bedroom and an even smaller bathroom. So it's a minuscule space. So in this one day when I get one of these phone calls again and I'm finally done saying, no we can't help this person, but I've got the details. And I go out to the kitchen to see if my partner's there. And she is, but she's talking with Rosa, they're both just there at the kitchen table. And I explain how there's a family from Nigeria. The mom and the four children are actually not in detention but the husband is and he would be released and they could all be together if they had a place that could take a family, not of six but of seven because the mom is pregnant. And we don't have space for even one more person let alone a family that large. So I go out and I'm crying and I, through my tears, I say in Spanish, so Rosa can understand the call that I just got and she didn't hesitate a minute. She said, my children and I, we can stay in our bedroom and that family can have to live in the part of our space. And so that just begs the question, how much resource do each of us need to be able to share it with others? And I think of that. And I'm gonna start us off actually with a little bit of singing because as you were saying, this is really, really heartbreaking work and it's really hard and we've got to sing. We've got to have our spiritual and community practices to keep us going. So we are gonna sing this song. It is a song by a rabbi named Chertana Jedwab and it's based on a passage from the book of Ruth which you may be familiar with. And in that story, Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi are migrating across the border and they're returning to Ruth's homeland. And so I think it's a beautiful song and a really important message about how love crosses borders. So I'll teach you and you can sing back. Where you go, well, there's another verse. There's another verse and beyond we try to have multilingual meetings as best we can. So really grateful for the translation that's happening and we're gonna do a little singing same song but in Spanish. This Spanish translation was written by myself with a lot of help from the woman who lives in my church in physical sanctuary, her name's Maria. Matt mentioned me. Yes, Chris. Don debayas tu voy querida Don debayas tu voy Debayas tu voy querida Debayas tu voy Pue te tu To share a little bit. And first I just wanna take a moment to express a little gratitude for one of the many, many people who helped me to learn how to love and learn how to fight for justice, which is an ongoing journey and thank you for all of us. And one of those people was my grandfather, Rafael Gonzales or Ralph Gonzalez as he was better known for most of his life. He was a Cuban American man born in the United States, grew up in New York City and he learned labor organizing and left his politics from his dad, Rafael Gonzales Sr. And he took those skills and did his work when he was a truck driver for Coca-Cola, he tried to unionize the workers who were doing that work. And Coca-Cola didn't appreciate that he was framed for theft and fired and blacklisted from many jobs. But he persisted and eventually he won a small lawsuit against Coca-Cola for impact actions. But he told me later, he said, you know Annie Kay, I won that lawsuit and I got some money, but really they won because they fermented the union. He taught me that real power is people power and he taught me that you gotta fight on the side of the folks who have the people power, not the money and coercive and exploitative power. So I'm grateful for him, he died a couple months ago and he's bringing his memory into this space. So Beyond is a network, it's an informal network, not a non-profit, not an official organization with an office. We started almost by accident and sometimes I tell people, I was recently actually in a leadership training for white social justice activists working on our anti-racism and I explained that I applied to the program because I had accidentally helped start a giant immigration support network and I didn't know what I was doing. And so how do you start something like this accidentally? Well, it's really not an accident because it started because of the amazing organizing happening inside the immigration detention, inside the jails, inside many, many detention centers and jails but the one that I was connected with is the Suffolk County House of Corrections which rents beds to ICE, rents space to ICE and I was working with the organization SIRD showing up for racial justice in Boston and through that work I ended up at a meeting with an organization called Jobs with Justice. You may be familiar with them and Jobs with Justice in Boston was doing a lot of immigration rights work and organizing. And so I was chatting after a meeting about their immigration rights street team with one of their organizers, Lily Wang who's another one of those people who helps me be in the work and she kind of casually mentioned, hey, you know, you're a pastor, right? I said, yeah, I am. And she said, you know, maybe you should go visit my friend who's in immigration jail because he mentioned that his pastor comes and visits him and so it might be nice if you went just, we're trying to figure out how we can get connected with folks in detention who don't have as many connections in the community who need our support. So maybe you could just ask him, like, does he know some folks, you know, as he's in detention. And I said, oh, yeah, I never would have thought of that. Didn't even know that was the thing pastors could do was access jail more easily than labels. So I went ahead and did that and sure enough, this man who was a labor organizer and an amazing community member had some ideas of some folks who might need some support. And at the same time, my colleague Elizabeth who's gonna speak and I were connected with some faith communities, Jewish and Christian and Unitarian Universalist faith communities who had kind of realized that offering physical sanctuary in their building was not quite the ask they thought it was gonna be. And they wanted to do something. They wanted to be in solidarity in a meaningful way and they weren't quite sure how and they were thinking that accompaniment in immigration court might make sense but didn't really have the connections to folks who needed that accompaniment. And so as through these organizers working inside immigration jail, working outside immigration jail and immigrant communities connected me with folks who did need that support, I was able to call on those faith communities and we were able to say, hey, we know the folks who need support and those were the first couple of folks that we accompanied through the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network before it had a name and it was just some folks showing up in immigration court, doing some GoFundMe fundraising for legal fees and trying to piece together what support looks like. And so as you can imagine, when you are able to connect folks who really need tangible resources like money with folks who have those tangible resources, that's a really good match and things really took off from there and it's because of being able to learn from the incredible existing organizing happening in the directly impacted communities both in and out of detention and we were able to bring in some folks who care so deeply and were not directly impacted and have a lot of resources as you mentioned so rightly. I think sometimes we have no idea the amount of resources we actually do have to share. And so that was the beginning of being able to do that. Thanks, Annie and thank you so much, Steve and everyone else who has shared. Just wanna take a moment to think about Accompaniment. Just think for a moment of a time that something hard was happening for you. Maybe you were sick or someone you love was sick, maybe something hard in your work life or in parenting or in relationships. And someone came along beside you and said, like it says in the book of Ruth, your people are my people and I'll go with you. I'll go along beside you. And just think for a moment about what people did that maybe felt good. Maybe think also if there were things people did that didn't feel so good. You know, I have tried to accompany folks as a pastor when I thought I knew what they needed or when I was overwhelmed by what was happening for them. So I was like, I can't handle it. We try to hold that we come along side folks in the way that they want us to come along side. Knowing that so many people have come alongside us over our lives and in the limits of language we say things like us and them, but there really is only we. I am the daughter of a refugee from Vietnam who was incredibly privileged to come to this country in 1975 as were my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins. And they were sponsored by a family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There's a joke in my family that people said to my grandparents, do you wanna go to California or South Dakota? This is when they were in a refugee camp in Guam. And people said, oh, say South Dakota has the word South in it, it won't be Burma. So my grandparents ended up in South Dakota. My dad was in Wisconsin. And many, many years later, I asked the daughters of the family, the parents had passed who sponsored my dad, why did your family do what they did? And they said, in our family, some people came for dinner and some people like your family came and stayed for many months and they felt like it was the Christian thing to do. So I feel like I have a huge privilege of the accident of geopolitics that my family was able to come here on refugee visas and also that people did for my family something that changed their world. They said, your people are my people. So I'm gonna say a little bit about what is actually beyond look like, the shape of it. We are hundreds of volunteers, many connected with faith communities, many connected with neighborhoods or teachers or lawyers or students or people who have a couple months where they're not doing much or retired folks, immigrants who maybe like my father feel like people offered their hand, opened their hearts in their homes to me and now I wanna do the same. We're very decentralized. These are some values that arose from our work and Annie will talk a little more about them but basically if we are striving to live these values and follow the lead of people targeted for deportation and detention and particularly we try to support first people in ICE jails in Massachusetts then you're part of beyond if you wanna be. We have people who accompany in many different ways. They accompany an immigration court. They accompany in criminal court and all of this arose from the story Annie told where this organizer who was in ICE jail passed Annie some names and said, this person has court and he's scared and he doesn't know what's gonna happen. Maybe someone could go with him. We have a team of folks who offer home hospitality of many different kinds. We've hosted over 40 people for any amount of time from one night when someone has gotten out of ICE jail and they need a place to stay, to get a meal, a hot shower, call their family for the first time in months before they maybe get on a bus to Nebraska or their families to very similar situations to what Steve described where someone is sponsoring a family or an individual for many, many, many months over the course of their immigration process. We have a hotline that folks can call or are being targeted for detention and deportation. We have volunteers who answer that hotline for 12 hours a day, five days a week. We have a bond fund that again came from people saying, hey, there's this person, he could get out if someone has bond money. And as was mentioned earlier, bonds can raise from at a minimum $1,500 to as high as $250,000. But we just said, okay, let's try to match the organizing, the advocacy, the persistence, the fight for freedom is happening inside of these ICE jails with our own persistence and organizing and fight for freedom and power on the outside. So we started raising money. At this point, we've raised over $400,000 and paid over 80 immigration bonds for folks who now get to fight their case for legal relief outside of an ICE jail, which as you can imagine, hugely increases your ability to win your case. If you are trying to prove persecution, you're trying to communicate with a lawyer, like you can't do that. People do win their sound cases from jail, but it's incredibly difficult. We have at this point a chance at network of folks who offer rides to immigration court, to ICE check-ins, something that is really important to us is that we try to play our role in the ecosystem and not duplicate what other community groups or organizations are doing. So for our context, these things, going to court, transportation, bond, these were things where there were gaps. So I'm a visitor to this beautiful state and beautiful town, so I don't know what the landscape is here. I imagine some of the people in this room, some of the people you all know know. You know, or other people know, do people need rides to court? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Do people need childcare when they go to a court? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. These are all questions that we asked. What else? And I made a list, because I'm always forgetting. We have a donations team that collects stuff when people need it. We have a language justice group of people that thinks about interpretation, translation. We do do sponsorship of different kinds and try to support folks who are looking for that, both who are in ICE jails and who also may be thinking about arriving. We have, oh, we have a legal team. Oh my gosh, that's a thing. We have an incredible team of volunteers, some of whom have legal backgrounds, others of whom don't, including retired attorneys and paralegals. You may know that there is, in Boston, in the three ICE jails in Massachusetts, there is one nonprofit that takes detained cases. They're incredible, they're called PAIR. And there's no way, you can go to immigration court in Boston and you look at the docket and you can see the names of everyone who doesn't have an attorney. And it will be 75% of the names. So we do our best. We always say we can't make promises, but we're good at trying really hard. So sometimes legal support looks like some fundraising to help a family bridge the gap for a private attorney. Sometimes it looks like trying to connect someone with a low-boned attorney who can charge like a payment plan over time. Sometimes it looks like mailing a pro-sale packet so that someone who, their only option is to represent themselves at least has a description in the language they prefer of what the asylum process looks like and what the court process will look like. And we have tried to be as pro-risk as possible in the shape of this, which might be a funny thing to say, but we know that the nonprofit system often has to limit the risks that people can take. And we're not clinicians, we're not social workers, we're not refugee resettlement specialists and we try to be very clear about that. We're people doing for our friends, our beloveds, what we hope someone would do for us if we were in our situation and we try to uphold that with humility. But it also means that we're not trying to prevent a board from being sued. We're not trying to keep a building. We're not trying to keep funders and so that allows us to try to live our values as much with as much boldness and clarity as we can. I think I'm gonna stop talking and I'm gonna hand it over to Annie who's gonna talk a little bit more about our values and then we'll tell a few stories and go through. I have four values in Beyond and as Elizabeth said, they came from the work. It's not like we sat down and wrote down the values and then did the work. We were like doing the work and the next few months in we were like, okay, maybe we should articulate what is, what are the things that are shaping this work? What are we learning from the work? And so these are what we came up with. We honor dignity and choice in a system that denies dignity and choice. We expect messiness, confusion and discomfort and we choose courage and trust. We judge the system, not the people and we fight for one another like family because we are. These values again come from the people who are living this system most directly, the people who are living in the most violent part of it. People who have shown us what it means to choose courage and trust in the messiness and confusion. People who have shown us what it looks like to fight for their families, their biological families and their families of the people they met in immigration jail who they're fighting for. So one example I'm gonna tell a brief story and Elizabeth has a couple too, just to illustrate what do these values look like when we live them right? So there was a young man who arrived, I think last summer as part of, sometimes they would send folks from the border to all over the place as you may know and as people mentioned. So sometimes bus loads of folks would come up from different parts of the border to the immigration deals in Massachusetts depending on where there's free beds or whatever. And so folks would like literally not even know where they were, like what is Massachusetts, what is Boston? There were some young men who had come from Central America seeking asylum and one of them, I'm gonna call him Eduardo, we were able to find someone to sponsor him. And in our network, because we have a whole network, sponsorship can be a relatively light lift. Someone was sort of questioning that maybe with you. And when you have a whole network backing you up, yeah, you can say I am gonna support this person and you know, you don't have to do it alone. So with Eduardo, he lived with some hosts for a while, but he was able to get some stability. We do not insist that people shape their lives around the laws of the United States because we don't think those are just laws that make sense and we are kind of people making a living however they need to. And so he was able to earn some money and get housing and be stable without meeting a host. And so sometimes that happens. And this young man, you know, just like a couple weeks after he got out of immigration jail and has just arrived in this country, he went to a training, an organizing training with Monumento Cosecha who is fighting for driver's licenses in Massachusetts and fighting for permanent protection, dignity and respect all over the United States. And I don't know how much longer later it was, but at some point, Jeff Sessions, who was at that time still our attorney general, came to town, to Boston to do a presentation to some legal group and we didn't love that idea so we decided we might forecast that and disrupt that. And Eduardo was one of the folks outside telling his story on the street taking that risk, right? To make himself his face, his voice and his story known in a public way because he was already so invested in fighting for his community, even as recently as he had arrived. And so that's the kind of organizing and the we're following when we're trying to choose courage and trust. It's just amazing to see the level of courage and trust folks are able to call upon who are at a great, much higher level of risk. Another beautiful part of this story is that Eduardo was someone who definitely fought for people like family. And that included some folks who came up in a caravan, a woman with three children who came up and he was texting me late one night like, I've got this friend and they're out, they're at a shelter but the shelter's too full, like what can we do? And so what we did was buy bus tickets to bring her and her three kids across the country from the shelter they were in in San Diego, California to the east coast where Eduardo had found through the Cosetra network, a Cosetra organizer who was willing to sponsor and house this family. And so we were able to make that happen because of his organizing. And I'm really happy to say that to literally right now as we speak, Eduardo's mother and sister are on a bus from Texas to Boston. They're going to be able to be reunited. They're also serving asylums. And one of the things that I was able to do because he asked me and organized me was buy bus tickets for the mom and the daughter, which since it was kind of like tight turnaround to person cross country bus tickets, it's not nothing, I think it was like $580. And sometimes in our network, folks who do have a fair amount of resources and money will say things like, oh, just buy bus tickets or just buy meals for people before they get on their bus to go wherever they're going after they've been bonded out or whatever. And we're like, we pay bonds and legal fees, but please use your money. Please be generous. Please be hospitable. Please fight for one another like family because we are. And those of us who have the privilege of having disposable income, it's a privilege to be able to use some of that to bring mom and her daughter to be reunited with a son and brother. And so that's just a couple ways those values can look when we live them and follow the lead of the folks who are getting such extraordinary organizing. So we just want to share a few things that we've learned. We are learning so much all the time. And as Steve and others have shared, like making a million mistakes and learning all the time. One of the things I'm always learning and relearning is the power of white supremacy to creep into every part of our relationships even as we are trying so hard to have equitable and just relationships. I think of someone who came out of ICE jail with a very bad eye injury and needed immediate medical attention. We were able to pay his bond and a volunteer went with him to the doctor. And she called me while they were waiting after getting some news about his eye. And she had a million questions about what he should do. Should he have surgery? Should he try to stay in Massachusetts? With better healthcare? Should he go where he had family? And I said, it's his body. It's his eye. It's his life. He's sitting next to you. What does he want? I know nothing about what he wants and the decisions he wants to make. And she was a very thoughtful person and she was someone who knew about racism. And still it's the air we breathe. It's the water we drink. And so it had crept in. And so she had this idea that somehow I would know better than he. Messiness, confusion. We support folks who are deported. I think of a person, I'll call Martin, who called me from Ice Gel and he said, I think I'm gonna be deported. And I'm owed money from fishing. And the captain isn't paying me. And so it's like $8,000. It's a lot of money and it was a lot of my life. And he would call over and over and over and he would say, what can we do about this money? And I was like, I don't know. I don't know anything about this. Okay, let's start. Let's Google workers centers. Let's ask Lillie at Jobs with Justice. What can we do? Then someone saw it on a listserv and connected me to someone in the Massachusetts Attorney General's office. And then I cold called more of Healy's office and said like, I'm talking to this guy in Ice Gel who's gonna be deported and is owed a lot of money. What can we do? I called the captain and got cussed out. And eventually, Martin was deported. But after the Attorney General's office called this captain, he agreed to pay $7,000 in lost wages with the Attorney General's office helped to wire to Martin and Guatemala. So even though he was deported because he fought for himself and his rights and we fought alongside each other, there was this one piece that we were able to win. We tried to offer some small amount of financial to support to people who asked who are being deported. We know that winning looks like a lot of different things for a lot of different people. Winning doesn't always mean winning asylum. That may not be possible. But winning could be restarting your life in Guatemala with $7,000 in your pocket. I know we need to go to questions, but Annie's gonna share a few more takeaways on that wall. Make space in them. Maybe we can sing again after. But we can do questions first. Okay, yeah, some quick, some quick big journey to ways. That's the things that I am learning over and over. I offer that helpful framing and I am also always relearning with same lessons is that these systems, they're not, sometimes people talk about the system as broken or it's not working or now that Trump's here, it's not doing what it's supposed to. And there is some real truth to how egregiously cruel this administration is. And at the same time, it's so important for me to keep remembering that this system is everywhere and it's doing exactly what it was designed to do. And that a lot of, this was mentioned earlier, but a lot of the conditions that folks are fleeing all around the world, particularly from Central America, but many places and now certainly in Venezuela in this moment is our problems that the United States and other powerful countries created for profit gains. And that this system of exploiting land, exploiting labor, of colonizing lands and of white people claiming the rights to lands and for people's labor is something that has been going on for so long on this continent and around the world. And just as long as that has been happening, folks have been resisting it and folks have been fighting back and folks have been loving their people and fighting for liberation. And so that helps me, even though the extent of the system of violence and exploitation is horrifying, it helps me to remember the resistance that has always been and always is so that we can keep going and keep moving with it. Because that system is so ingrained in our culture that there is that aspect that Elizabeth mentioned where everyone in our network is always having to unlearn these stories. Those of us who have more privilege like myself being a white citizen, I always have to unlearn that impulse to think that someone else is an expert about someone's life who's living their life. And a lot of folks who come into the network from another position, from a position of having been exploited at Interpress, also have unlearning to do around what people may think of them and what power they have and what rights and dignity they have. And so we're unlearning together in this work and it's messy, the messyness. Because these systems are so violent, right? We don't just want to accompany people through them and reduce the harm, although that is beautiful and powerful. We also want to change the systems. And one struggle we have is that we have not done a great job yet of figuring out how we've leveraged the power we're building with folks who are becoming more aware of the systems, who are caring more, who are being politicized when they arrive in the US like Eduardo I mentioned. How do we take the power of all these people and better leverage it to follow the organizing that is actually trying to change systems, the organizing led by undocumented folks and other folks who are experiencing the front of the system. So that's something we're always struggling towards. How to do both the reduce the harm of the system and change the system at the same time. And I think those are some of the big picture takeaways from being involved in this work. So I think if folks have questions? Yeah. Great, thank you so much Elizabeth, Annie and Steve and are there questions from folks in the back? Yes. This is the organizations that are working on fighting the separation of children from their families and working specifically on reuniting and any pathways for success on those issues that you could let us know about. So the question is whether any of our panelists know about organizations that are working on ending family separation and reuniting families. Feel free to jump in, but I know El Fulado is part of doing that work. Many other folks are trying to end detention of children and minors and I will also say like families are separated in this state and families are separated in immigration court every day in Boston. So there is the particular child separation policy at the border and also we need to remember that child separation happens here when a parent is deported and that is, there are many organizations that are working on that. I don't know, other folks have. Yep, American Friends Service Committee, the UU Service Committee, many of those organizations are particularly focused on shutting down homestead. Another way that the system is, another way that home is created by the U.S. is not only through U.S. interventionism abroad, but also as was mentioned earlier, the huge for-profit prison industry that includes both the prisons themselves and all of the connected quote services as was mentioned earlier, like a phone call that costs $14 to even connect the phone. So, $14 to connect the phone if you don't have an account. The UU is the project. Yes, Rhea, I mean, Rhea wasn't the Texas Civil Rights Project, one of the groups still working on trying to reunite. The Texas Civil Rights Project, the ACLU, several branches, I don't know it, I think kind as well, again, and what we, American Friends Service Committee, I looked at a lot of a handful of attorneys like walked by themselves into Guatemala and other countries with about 29 parents and brought them back to the border to insist they were reunited. That was like a very specific project. And there are absolutely reunification efforts that are happening from home countries. So I know I spent a week in Honduras and there are groups on the ground, on local organizations in Honduras who are working on reunification from there and things. Other questions? Jan, then I see Tori, go ahead, Jan. Oh, another organization to offer. Right, I think it's providing for keeping families together, for keeping families together. Thank you, Tori. I'm just gonna add on, I know that there are different denominations that are doing that, we're doing Church Friday of tomorrow and they have different actions and sugar lots and all of them as well, so again, that's what I'm saying. Different denominational bodies, thank you. And another question, Jan. I just wanna say, I didn't know, I didn't want the afternoon to go before we had the opportunity to speak with the guests to say any more that they were wanting to also. I don't think there are two at all, or even could all of us, but we just wanted to be with them. Thanks, Jan. And it's just inviting an opportunity for any further from Steve or our guests. Okay, other questions? Okay, I'll go one, two, three. Let's go ahead. Steve, do the children get enrolled in school? Do the children get enrolled in schools? Yeah, I believe that's true across the country, but certainly in Vermont, all resident children have the right to go to public school. God, we do not have a citizenship. I think the other, you had a question? Yeah. What major organization decide that people should work to follow strictly the current law? I think it was just the idea that we really wanted to be above board and to some extent it's also thinking about protecting them, our guests, from doing something that could then lead to deportation. Also, unlike in a large city here in rural Vermont, it's much more obvious, everybody knows everybody in town and if someone disgruntled with our organization will be very easy for someone to denounce a coworker. So kind of for those reasons, but I share here the Keller argument that we're presuming to know better than someone else how they should live their lives. That's a pretty valuable argument as well. Peter? Steve, that has a national network of possible people who do these sponsorships. Is that what you mentioned? Maybe you could know that what that is. Yeah, I could just share that. Yeah, I mean actually a number of contacts, we have different shelters around the country and other specific organizations, many of whom have been mentioned, but the name one I'm thinking of is Freedom for Immigrants and it's an organization that's dedicated to ending detention of immigrants. But, and mostly what they do is have sort of organized and sort of, I think of it as a coalition of visitation groups and many detention centers around the country where there's groups that go in and visit people in detention and certainly at the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, prison, whatever it's called, that's one of the groups that's under the umbrella of freedom for immigrants. But there's a listserv there and I can have one email to them and I know that 50 people across the country at least are gonna see it and some one of those people might have just visited someone in detention who could then say, yeah, this person is eligible. Can we get this evening? Okay. Do you think I touched on that? Was it Brea? Did you have your hand up? Yeah, I just wanted to throw out that working without authorization is technically not a part of asylum, but it can be a part of getting a green card if you are granted asylum. So it can bite you later, which is why a decision is to not take it. Yes, Joanne. Yeah, well, very great. I just talked with the chief of saying that immigration is, I don't know, who might know some more about this one. There are people coming to the civic center with a Portland name and they're on their way and I'm wondering. Or Joanne is sharing the news up there. Some folks headed to Portland, Maine, that are being dropped off really and that the civic center in Portland and wondering what kind of what is happening. What happens next? What happens next for folks there? I happen to know that there are local organizations in Portland that are definitely localizing to offer support. I don't know a lot of the details, but maybe others around do. I said about 24 hours ago, the United Way in Portland had taken over the coordinated services and support for the people who arrived. I think it was 150 or 160 people from a variety of countries. And they were actively trying to find people who speak French and a variety of African languages, including without limited discrimination to come and help with translation. And I think a lot of the mayor and the city government are also very strongly involved in supporting them. It's been, the only reason I know this is it's been all over the news. So I think that recently reliable information is very easy to find right now. But there was, I think, a different nonprofit coordinating the support in the United Way and then taking it over so they would leave the content. And they definitely need all the support that they can get. That's great. Are there questions for Steve, Annie, or Elizabeth? Yeah, go ahead, Elizabeth. I just wanna say if you are deeply involved in this work in some way and I'm looking for, if you're not sure if you're connected to all of the different resources, I'm happy to chat. There's like, at a company that's directory that includes the free of, for immigration representation network that also includes the national bond fund network. There are immigration bond funds in many, many states, including here, and we also coordinate across those bond funds. Doesn't mean we can pay every bond, but I'm happy to try to connect. And then I do, it's on my heart to say, absolutely no child should ever be separated from their parent and no child should be in cages. And I also wanna offer that in the history of immigration justice work in the United States, we have sometimes tried to win by saying some people should not be in cages or some people should not have status, but other people, it's okay if they're in ice jail, it's okay if they don't have status. So we have used this logic of dreamers, it's not their fault, they didn't choose to come. And many of the undocumented organizers that I most trust are very clear that we cannot hedge who is human and who is not, and no one should be in a cage and no one should not be able to move across the land and migrate as so many of our people, unless we are indigenous to this land, have done. And so absolutely child separation has to end. And also we can't fall for this idea that it might be okay for a 23-year-old Honduran man to be in jail, but it's not okay for a child to be in jail. It's actually not okay for any person to be in a cage. Thank you. I did wanna invite Sylvia Knight to share a word about the Vermont Freedom Bail Fund, and then since I think there weren't any other questions, so Sylvia will share just for a couple minutes. And I think Annie and Elizabeth have a song that we're gonna, we're gonna reprise the song that we started with, Sylvia. Well, thank you for this invitation to speak. I heard Bob and my husband and I have been allies of migrant justice for, let's see, six and a half years now. Last year, about this time, migrant justice came to me and some of their people had been, some of the farm workers had been arrested and put in detention and they always had to scurry together to try to pull together some bail funds if there was any chance of them getting out. And the Will Landrick approached me and he said, we're having this problem and would you be willing to help us to start our bail fund? Okay. And then I pulled together a steering committee because there was a really new experience. So it's a way of people like us being able to express solidarity with the undocumented immigrants who are increasingly vulnerable in our state. There's no priorities for who they pick up, except there has been a priority. ICE has been going after migrant justice's activists, their staff members or the farmers themselves who have been participating in their coordinated committee. They have become a focus and we know that because ICE said to one of the men who was arrested, okay, it's next. So, you know, so we're, unfortunately, our bail fund was not able to help any of them, but I have a picture here of AE Calvo Cruz who was released last November. We were honored to be able to release him. So we see our bail fund is a form of solidarity and resistance to one form of resistance to a parole machine. And we do, we are a tax deductible fund because we have a sponsor, a 501C3 sponsor in Arizona. Do you have any questions? Thank you, Sylvia. So we'll get to sing one more time. Yes? And can I ask the box around? Feel free to pass the box. You can also visit the table to learn more. We will sing one more time and then just a few closing words from Charles Simpson from the Burlington meeting and then we'll be free to just connect with one another at the close of our hour. Most of you speak English and Spanish verses, so if one of those languages is not the most comfortable for you, just hang in there and we'll move back and forth. All right. Where you go, I will go, we'll be love, we'll be love, don't they buy us a whole, we'll be love, don't they buy us a whole. This is my very great pleasure to thank, first of all, Melvia and Jessica for their courage, our panelists for their wonderful engage and creative expertise, our organizers, the Interfaith Coalition for the Sanctuary and Vermont and our sponsors who are listed at the bottom of the flyer and in particular our hosts that will be joining the Unitarian Church of Romania and finally you are our audience for your interest and humanitarian concern. Thank you.