 Are we actually using it? Oh, we are. Yeah, they don't have to move during the evening. They're just picking it up. Yeah, don't they need one for the audience? Sure. So they could be heard? Yeah. Okay. So I am with the audience. Yeah. So then take them off. Hello everyone. Welcome back. Thank you so much for joining us for the panel. I'm Minta Ortiz and I work with Borderlands Theater. I also happen to be the playwright. And I'm just here to also let you know that we are live streaming the panel. So it could be, it might be being watched everywhere around the world, possibly. So we would love for you to participate and ask questions. And we have a microphone there that I'll be holding. And so if you want to ask a question, come up to the mic and ask your question. And so the mic is not actually live here. It's feeding into the live streaming. So for the panelists, we will pass the mic around so that everybody can be heard. And cool. So I'll hand it over to our wonderful moderator, Tina Cross. Thank you. Thank you very much. I just want to say good evening to all of you. And thank you so much for coming and sharing in this historical moment in our church. But before we get started, I have a very special request. I really don't want to have to talk to you way back in the back. So if you don't mind moving forward and let's be a community here together, that would be greatly appreciated. Come on over from the Banco. And there we go. That's better. I mean, I don't think folks are going to bite each other here. Okay. I was quite surprised when I was, well, I was asked to be, I thought, on the panel. And then I saw listed that I was the moderator and I'm saying, okay. And so I've been really thinking about, you know, how to present all of this to you. And I feel like that for you to best know how Eleazar and Reverend Allison Harrington have become a part of this community of faith is to have a little bit of a history. And so I'm going to just give you a capsule of where we've come from. What has brought us to this day that provides the backdrop, that provides the life, that provides the vision for them to be able to function here. Southside was started as a mission church for the Presbyterian church in approximately 1903. And they met in a tent. And in 1906, they built their first chapel. And if you had a chance to see the pictures out in the foyer, you will have seen those structures. The church burned down in 1937. And the Presbyterian thought, well, okay, we'll just leave it. But the church... Reverend Somerville was here until 1956. In 1956, we have Reverend Casper Black. He was a Black minister. And he was active in the Civil Rights Movement, brought us accommodation into the Civil Rights Movement. He was president of the NAACP here in Tucson. And we picketed and we marched for those areas of public accommodation that were segregated at that time. He was here until 1964. There was a period of time, definitely plus, we didn't have another minister for a couple of years and then we were... It was called to basically get us on our feet because it was at a point that the church was about to close its doors. And John presented himself to the session that still existed at that time and to the Presbyterian and asked for a period of time in which to get the congregation back into a functioning organization. And so he came in approximately 1969 and was here then for 35 years. I unfortunately did not have the pleasure and privilege to actually be here during the 80s and the Sanctuary Movement. I visited the church usually every six months. I was living in California at the time and my family still was here so therefore I came home and knew what was happening. Saw some of the refugees that were here in our Sanctuary. And then we had our major because we wanted to have showers for the refugees that were here. That was the idea for this kiva which finally came about. The showers are there but then we also ended up with a new kiva, a new worship center. And so that's kind of a capsule but as you can see there has always been from the very beginning that basis of social justice, that basis of taking care of your neighbor that has been a part of the life and the love and the faith of this congregation and has provided the foundation for the community organizations that still function or came out of working in this congregation. Eleazar Castellanos is one, he is the leader with the worker center that started 11 years ago here in order to provide individuals with a safe place where they could get work and be able to provide for their families. And I'm going to allow him to talk more about the program and his role and what they do with the worker center. And also it is my privilege to introduce our pastor, Reverend Allison Harrington. And she has now in 2019 will have 10 years with us. And so we're really very pleased and she comes with a long length of credentials which God has prepared her for this crazy congregation of Southside Presbyterium. And I'm not going to go through that litany. And then she will talk to you about her activities with the congregation here at Southside and then the current day sanctuary. So I'm going to turn the microphone over to Eleazar and he can talk to us about the work center. I'm nervous, I've always been nervous since the moment I came here. I've always been nervous when I started working on this place. I didn't know it was a sanctuary. I didn't know it was a safe place for the workers. But once I knew it, I just stick up. I said, this is a place. This is the place. Siempre tiene que existir un lugar como este. Disculpe mi inglés. Tengo más de 20 años en este país y no lo puedo hablar bien. But it was a pleasure for me to be a member of the Southside Worker Center. The Southside Worker Center started in 2006. When I came to this country in 1996, things were way better than 10 years ago. But suddenly everything started going bad for everyone here. 10 years ago, 2010, so many anti-immigrant laws became on this state. And many things changed. We started having so many problems finding jobs, people losing their jobs because of the status. We didn't have enough. A national leader in the immigrant rights movement, he was a participant in the Undocubus, which was a version of the Freedom Rides that went through the southern part of the United States to the Democratic National Convention to protest the deportations happening under the Obama administration. He was arrested then, which is very courageous for undocumented people to be arrested. He runs OSHA trainings. Our men have OSHA trainings, which is so good to keep them safe on the job. I just want to say just a few words about what we do today. And then we can have a few minutes for questions. But I'm just so privileged. And every time I see this play, at the end, I always cry, Miltha. I'm always like, oh my goodness, because this congregation is just an amazing congregation. And it's who they are, and it has nothing to do with me. I'm just happy to occupy that office right over there. But it's a deeply hospitable congregation. And it's not just about refugees, but it's about the homeless that come here twice a week to get fed. It's about providing a sanctuary space for day laborers to gather. It's about the multitude of ways in which we allow community groups to use our space. I think having Borderlands here is an example of that spirit of hospitality. Because the thing I want to say about hospitality is it's not easy, ever. You know that just entertaining people in your home during Thanksgiving, you have maybe folks come over and it's nice for like a day and then it's hard. And so having a whole stage set up here is hard. It like makes life just a lot more complicated. But the blessings are so amazing when we're able to really open up spaces to allow other people to dwell with us. And so the blessings always far. And so the congregation, even when I was like, well, we're going to have this whole setup, like nobody ever, I feel like other congregations would be like, no, we can't do that. Everybody I spoke to knew it was going to be hard, and it was going to be awesome at the same time. And it has been. So Sanctuary is still very much part of our ethos here. In 2014, we were part of reigniting the Sanctuary movement as the deportation rate soared under the Obama administration. We opened our doors to Daniel Neue Ruiz and then to Rosa Robles Doreto. And we were part of building a national network of churches that were responding to those deportation rates. And we were largely successful both here locally and nationally in getting people's cases closed and finding relief for a variety of people. And we were doing great and the network was growing and there was about 400 congregations involved. And then like this really weird thing happened and we elected a fascist dictator to be president, which is not a laughing matter at all. But a funny thing happened. When the president, the Trump was elected, Sanctuary grew like that. By the time of his inauguration, we had almost 1,000 congregations who were pledging to do the work of Sanctuary. And we currently have 1,100 congregations across the nation who are engaged in the work of Sanctuary. And we have 50 people living publicly in Sanctuary. There are a lot of people today living across the United States living privately in Sanctuary. But we realized this time that Sanctuary is a concept needed to expand because it wasn't enough for a congregation to say, we're Sanctuary, come find us if you need us and just kind of wait for someone to show up. We needed to go outside the walls of the church to make sure communities were Sanctuary spaces, that schools were Sanctuary spaces, that homes were Sanctuary spaces so that nobody had to enter into Sanctuary because Sanctuary is a horribly hard thing in terms of how it's being practiced these days. It's different than the 80s in terms of how it's being practiced. And so we found that we were really encouraging churches to get more engaged with their local day labor center, make sure your day laborers you know where they are, they're protected, work with your local legal clinic, work with your local immigrant rights organization and do whatever you can to support directly affected leadership and whatever that means. And one of the things that we've been talking to, you know, a lot of times pastors, especially white pastors, they want to rush in and be the hero and be like, I'm here to save you. And one of the things we've been telling people is that you don't really need that because people are saving themselves. But what people needed and one of the things that we learned was that when we asked people, the thing that they needed was childcare because mamas and daddies were coming together at these meetings and they needed childcare. And when we offered, when we started offering that, people were like, really? They weren't like impressed with like sanctuary. They were like, oh, you'll do childcare for us. That would be amazing. And it was a powerful way to kind of subvert power dynamics that have long existed, especially between women of color and white women, women of color mostly historically taking care of the children of white women. And so we're able to subvert that paradigm and take a back seat and support the leadership of others. And so the work has continued and deepened and kind of, again, following the leadership of directly affected folks who were also saying, it's not enough for a city to say they're sanctuary and then keep doing police enforcement in the same way that they've been doing it. And it was the movement for Black Lives that really was helping us understand this as we were once again aware of the way in which police patrol certain neighborhoods in different ways. And so that call to expand and deepen sanctuary has been something that has been felt, I think, across the nation and especially here. And so today we continue the work, trying to find ways to work alongside those who are directly affected following their leadership, doing things like making sure the board of supervisors here in Tucson refuses funding for Operation Stone Garden, which gives Sheriff's Department more money to aid in immigration enforcement. So doing things like this to make it so that every community is a sanctuary community. Jim Corbett wrote a book called, oh I'm not gonna remember it, because I've never read it and I actually looked forward on Amazon and it's like $200 because it's out of print so I'm probably never gonna read it. But they had this, they had this, back in the 1980s they wrote this letter to the judge at the time of indictments and they said basically we'll continue this work until all of the earth is a sanctuary. And so we try to hold true to that and continue the work until no one has to live inside a church out of fear for being torn from their family. Thank you. Thank you very much. So we only have a few minutes left and so does anyone have a question of either Eliasar or Reverend Allison Harrington? I have a question, a couple of questions. What is Akiva? We're inside Akiva, but what is it? You want me to explain it? Okay, Akiva is a Hopi worship center in the earth and the design was something that Reverend Pfeiffer wanted to maintain the foundation of our church for the peoples that it was originally planned for which was our Native Americans, our Indian population, and originally they were called Papakos in this area. Although this is Hopi, this came from the New Mexico area and as you can see there is the opening at the top and we basically, you would have to climb down that into the ground for their worship and meditation and since we all can't do that, we just have that, you know, Fox opening up there and we have the design that takes us down from the level earth outside in order to do that. We have the natural pines, we have the saguaro ribs in these, so we wanted to use all of the natural kinds of building materials that is used for the Native peoples in this area. Thank you. Question about, you mentioned that you had people in sanctuary here, Alison. Rosa, how long was she in sanctuary and what was the outcome of that? She was in sanctuary for 461 days, not that we were counting the days. The outcome, so she was, we reached an agreement with the government that she would be safe to leave so it was, yeah, it was a long 461 days. Sarah Launius is here, who is an amazing community leader who was part of, was, we wouldn't have been able to do that work without her brilliance and so it was a long 461 days but I think it, for me, it was a day, it was a time when I learned what true solidarity means because there was times when it was like we had tons of press and congressmen would come and visit us, Linda Ronset would come visit, all these people would come visit and the prayer vigil would be huge and then there was days when nobody seemed to care and in those days when everything seemed hopeless and you decide not to quit and you decide to stick with it and to stand with somebody, that's when solidarity is not when it's easy and that's what we forget, we think it's going to be when it's easy but it's really true solidarity comes when it's really, really hard. To break down what it means to have somebody in sanctuary, can you explain that? Yeah, so it's interesting that the first practice of sanctuary in the United States articulated as sanctuary was actually during the Vietnam War when conscious objectors would take sanctuary in a congregation and church to avoid the draft. They were then actually, police came in and dragged them out of the churches which caused this huge public outcry, this image. So it was around that time that the government decided that churches and congregations would be considered sensitive locations and so that's one of the protections that a church has that law enforcement is going to be limited in terms of how it's going to operate but really it harkens back to biblical kind of mandates and continuing on through the middle ages as they said in the play, we don't want to go back to that time but the idea is when someone enters into sanctuary they enter into the protection of a church, of a sensitive location. That being said, if the memo around sensitive locations went away tomorrow, we would still do the work. It doesn't depend on the permission of Trump, obviously. And so you stay here and people do not leave the church so people call it a golden prison a lot of times because it is a beautiful thing and a heartbreaking thing at the same time but they don't just enter into the protection of a church where they live their life until their case can be resolved but also they enter into the protection of an organized community that is advocating for their deportation case to be resolved in a way that allows them to stay within the country. Thank you. And I think this is the last question and this one for Elisabeth. Does that law that you or that the thing that makes churches a safe space, what is it? A sensitive location. Does that help the worker center? That the worker center is here? Con esa ley le ayuda? Absolutely. That was the reason I stay here because it's a sanctuary for me. I'm not from Central America but I was someone who was dreaming to have a better life with his family. And I'm here. And who say things are easy? It wasn't easy. I was going to say about that and I completely forgot. But yeah, you know, day laborers are probably the most vulnerable in terms of this administration. They are the ones who are like the most persecuted and the ones who are most scapegoated and they're kind of the idea that Trump tries to invoke when he's trying to really just be particularly anti-immigrant. And so it's an honor for us to be able to stand with the day laborers and hopefully provide them a safer place to be. I will just mention one other thing. A big part of the hospitality, a big part of who we are as a church is we want to consider ourselves and I think people do consider us a hub of social justice work that happens here in Tucson and that's something that we have a lot of, there's people always here, half of Tucson has keys to this place. And we're about to, we're renovating, we're about to, we're not, Mark said at the beginning, we're not demolishing, thank you, the old sanctuary, we're renovating it and demolishing the Fellowship Hall Wing which is dreadful, beloved but dreadful. And so we're still in the midst of fundraising and we want to support the work of sanctuary, the work of Southside, you can donate online, especially to those who are streaming. I was going to ask if people want to support Southside Presbyterian Church, want to find out more about it, where would they go? Southsidepresbyterian.org