Immigration ministry undaunted by political climate

Key points:

• Justice for Our Neighbors was established in 1999 by the United Methodist Committee on Relief, and in 2023, it adopted its new name: Immigration Law & Justice Network.
• The ministry provides free or low-cost expert legal counsel to immigrants as they seek legal status in the United States, as well as advocacy and support services.
• Alba Jaramillo and Melissa Bowe, co-executive directors, discuss how their work has changed and challenges they face as immigration becomes more politicized.

Justice for Our Neighbors was established in 1999 by the United Methodist Committee on Relief, an extension of its decades-long commitment to refugee ministry.

Through affiliated sites across the country, the organization provide free or low-cost expert legal counsel to immigrants as they seek legal status in the United States, as well as advocacy and support services.

Alba Jaramillo and Melissa Bowe were named co-executive directors of the network in 2022, and in 2023 the organization adopted its new name: Immigration Law & Justice Network.

Jaramillo and Bowe discussed with United Methodist News how their work has changed and the challenges they face as immigration becomes more politicized. This interview has been edited for length.

How did you get involved with Justice for Our Neighbors?

Alba Jaramillo: I’m in Tucson, Arizona, and I used to be the executive director of our Arizona site. This whole area is just very personal to me. I wasn’t documented, so I’ve lived through the whole experience, and my family couldn’t afford a lawyer. It just took a long time — over 20 years. I was almost done with college before I got a Social Security number. That is actually what motivated me to fight for my immigrant community.

Melissa Bowe: I’ve actually been with JFON for 11 years. I joined in 2013 after a year or two as an immigration lawyer at a community nonprofit doing very similar work. A difference there was that I was completely alone. When I came across JFON … I remember the most exciting part to me was, wow, there are these tiny sites or bigger sites, but they’re connected across the country.

What prompted the name change?

Bowe: This process started under Rob (Rutland-Brown, former executive director). We’d had a problem with the name Justice for Our Neighbors for a while, just in terms of confusion. Stakeholders, funders, even client communities weren’t sure what we did. Is it social services? Am I getting resettled? It’s not directly clear that we are doing immigration legal services for low-income immigrants, specifically. Alba was one of the first who pointed out a big blind spot for us: It isn’t just justice for my neighbors, it’s justice for me and my family.

Jaramillo: I was doing “know your rights” presentations for the local undocumented community. It felt very strange to go to my own undocumented community and to say, “Let us fight for justice for our neighbors.” I felt that just by saying that, I was taking myself out of my own community. From the migrant perspective, this is not a name that reflects their experience. And so that led us to a very intentional remarketing and rebranding process.

Bowe: We don’t mandate all our sites to have the same name, but we are bound by our affiliation. Some have chosen not to change their name because each community is different and what works in Chicago may not work in, say, rural Iowa or Hawaii.

Is there any difference to your work or policies since the name change?

Bowe: We have really started to focus on trauma-informed care for our workers. We provide an employee assistance program that provides six free therapy sessions for anyone in our network. We also have collective care circles online with a mindfulness expert. … They can come and share what’s on their heart: “I had a really hard outcome today. I’m heartbroken about what’s happened to my clients. I’m having a hard time putting down all the violence that I heard about in this intake.” Just a place to come actually acknowledge and speak with peers around some of the things that have been going on in their lives. We want to care for our practitioners and be a great place to work.

Jaramillo: We’re also looking at our work in a way that centers and uplifts migrants themselves so that we’re not speaking on behalf of migrants or just sharing their experience as advocates, but we are actually centering them.

Could you talk about the “Migrants Speak” series?

Jaramillo: We do these national webinars where we invite migrants to share their testimony on various issues.

Right now, asylum access is practically nonexistent. When Congress was debating (the border bill earlier this year), we did a webinar where migrants spoke to the proposed asylum rule. They shared their experience, the consequence this bill would have on their lives, speaking directly to congressional representatives. That webinar actually had 20 members of Congress or their staff members participate, which is huge.

We did another one on the CBP One app (a mobile application that provides access to a variety of U.S. Customs and Border Protection services) and how impossible it is to secure an appointment.

On Sept. 18, we’ll have one on climate and forced displacement. Migrants who’ve been displaced and fighting for environmental justice will be featured. On Oct. 29, we will do another on migrants who have been incarcerated and have them speak to the harm of placing migrants in detention and what it’s like, the lack of fundamental rights and human rights.

In addition to legal services, what other resources are available at the clinics?

Bowe: We launched the Lupita Alonso Language Access Fund last year, named in honor of a board member who passed away. This fund is intended for the most marginalized clients … folks who speak indigenous languages or they speak languages from different countries in Africa, languages that our sites might not have a tremendous amount of capacity (to support).

Then what happens is you’re asking folks to translate for family members just to get services. And that can really strip the dignity from people. It’s not fair to have your teenager interpret the most traumatic moment of your life on this migration journey. So we have a fund for any of our sites to access that will pay for an interpreter through a partner organization called Response Crisis Translation.

We also just launched the Mental Health Assessment Fund. We got a wonderful grant from a new partner to pay for the mental health assessment for our asylum-seeking clients across the country. This can be up to $1,000. We will pay for up to 33 asylum seekers this year to get those assessment funds, at no cost to them.

What kind of time commitment do you have with a client?

Jaramillo: I think it depends on the type of relief. An asylum case, the length of it will depend on which jurisdiction. Some courts, like California, it’ll be years before the first time you even see a judge to say you’re going to file asylum. And then that case can last 10 years. For U Visas for victims of crime, that backlog is 20 years.

Bowe: The reality is that because we are free or low cost, the largest number of our clients are those fleeing violence, and there’s a backlog in so many directions. It’s a big promise when we take our cases. We have attorneys hired at every single site. We’re seeing clients all the way through. We could be with them for 10, 15, 20 years working on different statuses or trying to reunite them with family.

What are the biggest challenges for your work?

Bowe: Certainly, challenges are these policies. It’s hard to do your job as a lawyer when the avenues of relief are getting cut off or are being challenged in court indefinitely. It’s hard to be able to tell your client the legal advice they need to hear because the law is constantly changing.

And, of course, funding. It’s been harder for us to find immigration attorneys and fill empty positions at our sites. It’s hard to fund our sites. It’s hard work, and in the nonprofit world, it’s hard to compete with the salaries of the private sector.

Jaramillo: The biggest challenge is that the law is not on your side. If you’re an immigrant, the law is not written to grant you access to relief. Actually, the law is pretty much designed to keep you from getting relief. At best, the success rate for asylum seekers winning their court hearings is 7%. I think it takes the best of humankind to defend these migrants. Being able to win an immigration case is not easy, but (the members of our network) are pouring their hearts into it because they believe in what we do in a system that is … not written for migrants to succeed.

How is your work affected by immigration being such a political issue?

Jaramillo: Everyone has an opinion … and so many politicians have very strong opinions without ever having been to a border community themselves. This issue is so politicized and Congress makes decisions, they make recommendations often without even having conversations with border communities. As a border resident, I find it really disappointing that our voices are not included in the solutions and the recommendations.

Elections have consequences and the executive branch has a huge say in what immigration policy looks like. So what legal needs are we going to need to prepare for depending on which party wins? What are going to be the fundraising needs? What is going to be the communication strategy for executive directors? We are looking ahead to see how we can best prepare our network to respond to whatever is coming our way, which is right now very uncertain.

We are not political; we don’t stand for any party and we don’t want to. We just prepare and we respond, and we advocate for our immigrant community, regardless of who is in office.

Bowe: We’re uniquely positioned in a few ways. We understand international human rights law, Constitutional law and the nature, especially, of immigration law. We are positioned to speak from a space of when we believe and know rights are being violated.

It is clear to us that immigrants are at the front lines … Their dignity, their humanness, their rights are being sacrificed. We’re seeing more and more rhetoric, invoking this feeling of being invaded or at war. And we know that can galvanize folks. Migrants make us a more rich, beautiful, unique nation. They always have.

What are ways that United Methodists can help?

Jaramillo: Participating in the webinars, to be able to hear from migrants themselves rather than learning about immigration through what’s presented in the media, which is often very biased. Identify an organization like ours — or in their own local communities — that welcomes immigrants and see how they can help. And financial contributions. I know people want to volunteer, but sometimes managing volunteers is actually more work for an organization than being able to have sufficient funding to provide aid.

Bowe: I’d say to raise their voice, to interrupt these moments where immigrants and migrants are framed as less than or a threat. It’s all our job now to speak up even when it feels scary or uncomfortable. To speak what our faith tells us, what our heart tells us, what we know to be true. Let’s take back this narrative together.

The United Methodist Church has been an amazing partner in all of this. I can’t tell you how many congregations have hosted clinics over the years, have been supporters who traveled just to drop off food for our clients. There are so many ways to plug in.

Butler is a multimedia producer/editor for UM News and Vasquez is director of Hispanic/Latino Communications, United Methodist Communications, in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact them at 615-742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Weekly Digests.