Christian women are fighting immigrant family separations

Amanda Johnston and Kristi Burtner participated in national political activism for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic, lobbying their state’s senator to end a new immigration practice they say presents families with an impossible choice. Screenshot courtesy of Michelle Ferrigno Warren.

When Amanda Johnston saw a petition online that called for families in immigration detention to be released to avoid contracting COVID-19, she felt compelled to add her name.

A few weeks later she was on a Zoom call with 13 other Christian women. They were speaking to an aide in the Washington, D.C. office of Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who sits on the Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration. 

“There’s a pretty strong narrative or stereotype that among Christian women there’s an opposition to immigration, so we want to not let the loudest voices in the room be the only ones that are heard,” Johnston said.

The meeting was a first for Johnston, 40, of San Antonio, Texas. She had never participated in direct political action at the national level. Neither had Kristi Burtner, 44, of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. She has a 3-year-old daughter and said the idea of being separated from her is difficult to imagine. Having a child is like wearing your heart outside of your body, her husband says.

“It’s a connection that you can’t even quite describe, but you know you’d go to many lengths to protect it,” Burtner said.

Both women identify as non-denominational evangelical Christians. Each said that her faith called her to action on this issue, and the pandemic created an opportunity that wouldn’t have happened before interactions of every stripe were forced to adapt to digital forums.

President Donald Trump has made immigration a top policy priority, from building a border wall to ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and separating parents from children at the border meant to deter migrants’ arrivals. Citing an obligation to stop the spread of COVID-19, since March, the administration has halted several immigration programs in order to limit certain employment visas, limit asylum and limit family-based immigration with exceptions for children and spouses. 

Immigration across the Southern U.S. border hit an 11-year high in February, with more than 76,000 migrants crossing without authorization in that month alone, and a 13-year high in March for daily illegal border crossings. Most migrants come from Central America with family members, fleeing poverty and violence, and voluntarily submit to law enforcement to later file for asylum status. 

Johnston and Burtner are focused on ending child-family separation in immigrant detention. 

Cornyn’s representative was responsive to what the women on the call said, Johnston said. Their comments came from many different perspectives, but the central message was the same: children belong with their parents and not held in a jail setting. The aide said that Sen. Cornyn has been hearing that message consistently.

Groups of women in the home states of other members of the subcommittee have participated in online meetings with Senators Diane Feinstein of California, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Dick Durbin of Illinois. Organizers are still awaiting responses from Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Ted Cruz of Texas, Lyndsey Graham of South Carolina and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

Because petitioners are able to participate from their homes, there have been many first-timers in the meetings so far, said Michelle Ferrigno Warren, one of the six women who organized the campaign.

Called “For Every Child,” it was launched in mid-June to oppose two policies of the Trump administration that pertain to people seeking asylum in the U.S. Over the course of a week, 2,300 women of faith signed on to a letter calling for an end to the practice of “binary choice” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which gives parents in detention centers the option to sign their children out of the facility and into the custody of relatives in the U.S. to avoid contracting the virus. The other option is to remain together in detention. 

ICE can release families together at the agency’s discretion to await their asylum hearings. It was long-standing policy to release families from detention once their hearings were set until the Trump administration changed the way immigration cases are handled. 

There are about 300 parents and children being held in ICE’s three family detention centers that have not been offered the option to be released together. Critics accuse ICE of using the threat of infection to pressure parents into a painful choice: accept and be separated from their children and face deportation as a lone adult, or refuse and remain in detention indefinitely, risking their children’s health. 

To Hannah Vickner Hough, an immigration attorney in Rochester, N.Y., the choice represents an evolution of a strategy similar to the policy that resulted in children being separated from their parents in 2018. When the administration ordered its zero tolerance policy at the border, it triggered family separations. Binary choice is simply offered at the discretion of ICE.

“In this new framework that we’ve seen in the government’s response to COVID, it’s not an express policy and so it feels even more deceitful and sneaky,” Hough said.

She first heard about it in May, when the government began to make determinations about how to prevent the virus’ spread in facilities. Other attorneys told Hough that their clients were reporting being given new documents to sign their children out. The Trump administration has denied having a binary choice policy and described it as part of the regular parole request process. The documents parents are being asked to sign aren’t part of that process, Hough said.

She contacted Marlena Graves, a writer in Ohio who was involved in a Christian women’s campaign known as #NotWithoutMyChild that culminated in protests in Washington, D.C. two years ago. The protests made headlines amid a national outcry over family separations. The administration reversed its zero tolerance policy soon after.

Hough thought that campaign was powerful because it featured the voices of people who weren’t normally involved in immigration advocacy. She was looking for that collective voice again.

“I think the religious communities kind of have the most to say about the humanity of our neighbors and the people who are joining us here,” Hough said.

Graves calls herself a historical evangelical -- Christ is central but she doesn’t consider herself part of the evangelical subculture. She attends a Methodist church outside Toledo. She believes a lot of women voted for President Trump because of his stance on abortion, she said, but on moral grounds would oppose policies that harm children at the border.

The first campaign and this one sought to sidestep the bitter political divide and stick to the issue, Graves said. 

“I think we’re just going to kind of keep pushing to make them stop doing this,” she said.

Ferrigno Warren, who is the advocacy and strategic engagement director for the Christian Community Development Association in Denver and a member of the national Evangelical Immigration Table, said the task is more challenging with so much else going on in the news. Family separation isn’t at the forefront of the national conversation like it was two years ago.

“We need women to remember and recall that this is a season to stand up,” she said. 

Women don’t have to sign on to any political party or platform to have their voices heard on this subject, Ferrigno Warren said.

“We aren’t any of that. We were girls who had friends that were like, ‘This isn’t ok. We’re gonna write this letter together,’” she said.

She called ICE’s premise for its stance on immigrant detention “a sham,” saying that the government pushes a narrative about safety and legality when its policies target virtually every path to immigration. ICE incarcerates people who are not a threat to anyone, she said, from grandmothers to infants.

“It’s not just about this moment,” Ferrigno Warren said. “It goes all the way back to why are we incarcerating asylum seekers.”

Her sentiment is echoed in the Netflix documentary series about ICE, “Immigration Nation,” by John Amaya, who was ICE’s former deputy chief of staff for ICE from 2015-2017. He questions a common refrain that immigrants should simply enter the country “the right way” to avoid harsh treatment.

“What they should be clear about is what they mean by doing it the right way. There’s the lawful way, and then there’s this -- I don’t even know how to describe it -- this indescribable phrase of doing it the right way,” Amaya tells the filmmakers. “Whatever the hell that means, because anyone who understands asylum law knows that when people present themselves at the port of entry and request asylum, that is doing it the lawful way. Now it may not be the right way in this White House’s view, but I’d like to know what the hell they mean by ‘doing it the right way,’ because it’s the lawful way.”

For Johnston and Burtner, that represents a national crisis of conscience that is driving their participation in the For Every Child campaign. Johnston said that she grew up thinking that the U.S. welcomed the vulnerable, but she’s been dismayed at how many are being turned away.

“I guess when I was younger I was just really naive and kind of thought, well that’s America, we’re a place of refuge. That was something I grew up thinking was good about this place, so it’s something that’s really been hard for me to witness,” she said.

Burtner’s grandfather and brother served in the military, and she was raised with a patriotic view of her nation. Its recent treatment of immigrants and refugees is at odds with that view and with the convictions of her faith, she said.

“From my experience, from what I read in scripture, from how the Holy Spirit speaks to me, this is what I believe and because I believe this, I have to continue contending for it,” she said.

Micah Danney is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Brooklyn and a 2019-2020 Poynter-Koch reporting fellow and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area, interned at The Times of Israel and covered religion in Israel for the GroundTruth Project.