Bishops Continue to Urge Action on Immigration
Rebekah Sharpe
May 1, 2008

In a Methodists for Social Action (MFSA) press conference, moderator and San Antonio episcopal area Bishop Joel Martinez said that he and others attended the conference to denounce government policies that that “criminalize” illegal immigrants as a matter of “national security.” Bishops Hee-Soo Jung of Northern Illinois, Mary Ann Swenson of California-Pacific Annual Conference, and retired bishop and interim General Board of Global Missions Director, Felton May, all spoke about the situation of immigrants.

Bishop Swenson analogized, “Today’s policies on immigration are the new slavery. . . . This new sanctuary movement is about helping people find freedom and hope from the slavery of our immigration laws.” “My commitment,” she concluded, “is to support this Sanctuary movement in any way I can” because “how God sees us . . . is like how astronauts see the Earth . . . you don’t see borders.”

Bishop Jung said that the sanctuary movement is about asking “When injustice happens, how are we going to be a neighbor?” He said that as Americans, “we cling to the idea that our country does not have enough jobs or resources to share,” and declared, “We must continue to work toward the reform of our laws and the extension of our hearts.”

Referencing “those political persons who like to remember Ronald Reagan . . . who for whatever reason” had the character to challenge, “‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’” May pondered, “I wonder what it would be like if we as United Methodists said, ‘Bushie [President Bush], tear down this wall [along the Mexican border]!’”

“The church doesn’t ask . . . whether a man, woman, or child is documented or undocumented. . . . Our concern is that our services are inclusive and just,” said May. Encouraging delegates to take action during the General Conference despite a packed agenda, he recalled when retired bishop Joe Sprague stopped the normal proceedings of the General Conference to discuss the Rodney King beating incident. “The same thing can happen if someone would take the floor.” Delegates should not be intimidated away from doing this, joked May, because “the only thing that could happen . . . is that the chair will gavel you off the floor, and you don’t have to go.”

Rev. Walter Coleman of Adalberto United Methodist Church in Illinois—the church where Elvira Arellaño took sanctuary last year—likened illegal immigrants to first century Jews, who were “made to feel like sinners by the hypocrites” who represented religious authority at that time.  Many immigrants, charged Coleman, “have not come here [to the United States] because of the American dream but because of what the American nightmare has done to their countries.” Asserting a litany of economic woes caused by NAFTA were the cause of illegal immigration, he contended, “the same people who caused this destruction call them [illegal immigrants] criminals” and that the enforcement of immigration laws in the United States is the “hypocrisy of persecuting those who seek to escape the greed.” Erin Hawkins, Chief Executive Officer, United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race, said that immigrants were being “denied the right to fully participate in this life.”

Rev. David Farley of Echo Park United Methodist Church in Los Angeles stated that “it is an affront to God to criminalize those who simply ask to provide for their families and live with their families at the same time.” Through the sanctuary movement, Farley said that United Methodists would seek to “surround these families with as much protection as a people of faith can offer. . . . They are our children.”