Thetford
With these words, the Rev. Robin Junker-Boyce, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Thetford, welcomed roughly 200 community members to a Wednesday night forum on recent actions by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, particularly along the U.S.’s border with Mexico.
The Rev. John Gregory-Davis of the Meriden Congregational Church cited the reported separations of thousands of immigrant children from their parents as a moral crisis.
“White supremacy has crippled us; it has numbed our hearts, iced our hearts,” he said. For Gregory-Davis, deporting undocumented immigrants smacks of hypocrisy. “Unless you have Native American blood, we’re all illegal invaders,” he said.
The forum came on the heels of President Donald Trump’s signing of an executive order earlier Wednesday articulating the administration’s policy “to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”
The executive order also reiterated the administration’s intent to “rigorously enforce our immigration laws.” It notes, “Under our laws, the only legal way for an alien to enter this country is at a designated port of entry at an appropriate time. When an alien enters or attempts to enter the country anywhere else, that alien has committed at least the crime of improper entry and is subject to a fine or imprisonment.”
The executive order did little to allay the concerns of those who attended Wednesday night’s packed forum.
Susan Sussman, a caseworker in the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the announcement “looks to me like a limited executive order.”
She noted Leahy was co-sponsoring S.3036, a bill titled the Keep Families Together Act, but that the executive order rendered its status uncertain.
Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., called into the meeting to thank attendees for their advocacy and to share details from his weekend trip to a detention facility on the southern border.
He described encountering a trio of young boys he presumed to be brothers. “They were holding on to each other for dear life,” Welch said. “They had absolutely no idea where their mom was, where their dad was.”
Welch sought to bridge the partisan divide by appealing to the Thetford crowd’s parental instincts.
“It’s not a Republican-Democratic thing,” he said. “It’s the safety and security at any cost of a child.”
In response to a question about the potentially violent fates awaiting those deported to their countries of origin, Welch stressed the need for comprehensive immigration reform. Vermont employers depend on immigrant labor, he added.
Sussman later sounded a similar note, predicting “the dairy industry in Vermont would collapse” if its immigrant labor pipeline dried up.
The second portion of the forum, which was moderated by Dartmouth history professor Annelise Orleck, centered on questions of how to respond to an emboldened ICE. One step she proposed was distributing informational leaflets near the White River Junction Greyhound station and other locales where Border Patrol agents have staged searches.
“The situation seems pretty hopeless to me,” Thetford resident Lynne O’Hara said.
She then asked, “Is this a time for civil disobedience?”
Gregory-Davis thought so. “Absolutely it’s time for civil disobedience,” he said.
The pastor said he was arrested two weeks ago at the New Hampshire Statehouse while taking part in a protest associated with the national Poor People’s Campaign. He noted the misdemeanor trespass charge levied against him would be enough to land him in jail were he an undocumented immigrant. But, he said, “I’m a prominent white man; that’s not gonna happen to me.”
To attendee Marianne Hirsch, the terminology used to discuss the plight of the undocumented is problematic.
“I think we need to change the language,” she said. “These are not migrants. These are refugees and asylum-seekers.”
Several protests are scheduled for the Upper Valley later this month. Today, the Woodstock group Women for a Change will meet at 11 a.m. at Tribou Park for a march against the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Another group plans to convene at the corner of Hanover’s Wheelock and Main Streets at noon on Saturday, June 30.
Gabe Brison-Trezise can be reached g.brisontrezise@gmail.com.