Members of the Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice aiding individuals in Portland and other cities around Oregon

The Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice began more than 20 years ago as an extension of the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition. Its shorthand is IMIrJ (pronounced “emerge”) with the r standing for refugee. IMIrJ has become an independent nonprofit, drawing “faith communities and people of conscience” into the effort to protect the civil rights and well-being of immigrant families.

Members and volunteers provide accompaniment for immigrants to appointments with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, financial support and other resources to immigrants. We talk with IMIrJ organizer and Methodist pastor Keren Rodriguez and IMIrJ board member Bob Brown, who is a long time member of Havurah Shalom, about how their work is going now as the Trump administration pursues mass deportation.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice, or IMIrJ, began more than 20 years ago as an extension of the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition. IMIrJ eventually became an independent nonprofit, drawing “faith communities and people of conscience” into the effort to protect the civil rights and well-being of immigrant families. Karen Rodriguez is a Methodist pastor and the program’s coordinator at IMIrJ. Bob Brown is an IMIrJ board member and a longtime member of the Jewish congregation Havurah Shalom. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Bob Brown: Great to be here. Thanks.

Karen Rodriguez: Thank you so much for having us.

Miller: Karen, first, what kind of help do you think that immigrant communities, families, individuals need the most right now?

Rodriguez: This is a question that I come through a lot and many people ask me on a day-to-day basis, and I think that what I like to say is really, to see people’s humanity. We are at a point right now in our time where we see that many migrant community members are just targeted as criminals and the lack of seeing people’s humanity really changes their lives. Some of the things that we work with is housing, food, there’s all sorts of insecurities that happen. But the lack of solidarity and the rhetoric that we’re experiencing for hate, it really increases lack of education and also lack of solidarity. I think that with what we’re seeing in this administration, that is a big gap that I hope we can all as Oregonians can work on.

Miller: Bob, how long have you been doing this work?

Brown: I started working with IMIrJ in about 2011 as a volunteer and I stuck with the organization because I really like their mission. I really like the people, and it spoke to me, so since about 2011, starting as a volunteer.

Miller: A volunteer doing what kinds of things back in 2011?

Brown: I was doing whatever was needed, basically. In 2011 we didn’t have any staff, we were just all volunteers working in the organization, so what I did was whatever was needed. And we did a lot of different things. We did analysis of immigration reform legislation, we did our first Mother’s Day event up in Tacoma, where we took people in a caravan up to the Northwest Detention Center, just to bear witness to what was going on behind those doors.

Miller: I should say, in case folks have forgotten, that was, going into the second Obama Administration, at a time when some of his supporters called him the “deporter in chief.”

Brown: For sure.

Miller: So it’s worth saying that you have done this work then through Democratic and Republican presidents. What has changed in terms of the work you’ve done over the last more than a dozen years?

Brown: I think the thing that’s changed the most started in 2017 when Trump was elected. We really felt that the immigrant community was in danger and we initiated a sanctuary effort, where in our minds, sanctuary was sanctuary everywhere.

Sanctuary is an old effort that many religious organizations did, but we really wanted to make sanctuary present, so we organized a lot of faith communities around this notion of sanctuary. Sanctuary just means being involved with the community and doing what was needed.

That was the biggest change that I saw in 2017 after the Trump election, and it really made the organization grow. We really increased our ability to provide staffing, and we got a lot of grants and we were very visible then after the 2017 election.

Miller: Karen, can you describe the sanctuary program right now?

Rodriguez: Due to the administration that we are seeing right now, and the increase of targets to migrant organizations like ours, most of our organizing efforts are actually different. With the removal of the sensitive locations, which was something that protected faith communities and schools and hospitals from detentions from ICE, we had to shift a little bit of strategy on not necessarily bringing people to houses of worship, because they are no longer safe.

It’s unfortunate, where we as an organization are trying to really extend that idea of sanctuary everywhere, how do we organize and educate faith communities to also go beyond their walls of their building and move into creating systems of mutual aid? I think that is some of the things that we are doing right now, we have consolidated a little bit.

Some of our programs, we accompany people to the Portland Immigration Court, and we also look for ways to host individuals. Many people that are migrants are also people that are unhoused, people that don’t qualify for certain public benefits because of their status, so with the work and the support of many faith communities we’re able to provide some of that support as well.

Miller: What does accompaniment mean? You said that one of the programs here is to accompany people to immigration court. I guess I’m wondering if that is as basic and pure as simply being there with somebody, or if there is more explicit help navigating the system or even explicit legal help?

Rodriguez: That’s a great question. We can think about accompaniment in different ways, and I think that when we are talking about accompaniment, I think that it’s important to also talk about mutual accompaniment. Part of the reason why I think that’s important is because, as we are pairing people from organizations that are from our faith-based – or people that don’t have a religion because we’re also working with people that are not religious as well – we accompany people to their immigration hearings, to their DMVs, to pretty much anything that they need.

We also understand that the people doing the accompaniment are also learning. I come from Latin America and there’s this theological perspective that I have which is based in liberation theology. We all are, when we are together, this idea of our community really standing in together, taking these people that are fearful of going to very basic things as their DMV appointments or their appointments at ISAP or the Macadam.

We’ve seen the increase of ICE in these buildings, which is unfortunate, so it’s in a way to keep our migrant community safe. We are also understanding that there’s a greater issue in our society, and it’s this profiling, this persecution that many migrant community members are actually experiencing.

Miller: Bob, have you been an accompanier?

Brown: Yeah, the accompaniment program, it’s a really interesting and very important program. We started the accompaniment program probably 10 years ago, and I think one of the things that is so important about the accompaniment program is that it requires people to be culturally sensitive. You mentioned legal help. The accompaniers, they’re there just to be a person for support. They’re not lawyers, so they can’t do any legal help. They’re just really there to help people out in situations where there are unknown situations or people are afraid.

An unknown situation would be like going to the DMV. Where people come from, oftentimes they don’t have that experience. A situation where people are afraid is an ICE check-in, or going to the ISAP where people get their ankle bracelets, because they’re afraid. In my experience, having somebody with them is a big relief and is very, very important work.

Miller: You talked about providing culturally-specific services. Do you have enough people who speak all the necessary languages?

Brown: Mostly we’re looking for Spanish-speaking people. We have had some other language requirements. We probably don’t have enough people to do the work in general, so I think language is definitely an important aspect of what we need to do. If anybody’s interested in becoming an accompanier, there’s a training that you go through. Spanish-speaking people are always needed. Oftentimes we’ll pair a Spanish speaker with a non-Spanish speaker to do accompaniment in pairs. So that’s how it works.

Miller: Bob, Karen mentioned the connection to her spiritual tradition to Christianity for her. What about you? What’s the connection for you between this work and Judaism?

Brown: In Judaism there is a very important concept called “welcome the stranger.” It’s the most mentioned attribute in our Torah, which is the Old Testament. It’s mentioned the most of any other kind of requirements or things that people should be doing. Passover is all about the people who left Egypt during their slavery. Every year we celebrate the fact that they’re not there anymore, that they’re free. The notion of being a stranger and welcoming the stranger is very, very important to me.

That’s one aspect. The other aspect is my specific heritage. My relatives come from Eastern Europe and they came during the Pogrom times in Eastern Europe, they left because they weren’t safe.

Miller: Attacks by Cossacks and people against Jews.

Brown: Yes, against everybody, but it was mostly Jews at the time. My relatives, my great-grandparents, were able to come and settle in the United States. If they had tried to come after 1924, when the U.S. laws changed, they wouldn’t have been allowed to come. You think about, in the 1930’s, if our laws hadn’t changed, how many people would have been saved during the Holocaust, that were not allowed into this country because of nativist thinking.

Miller: Karen, my understanding is that you, too, see the work you’re doing now as part of a family tradition. Can you tell us about what you learned from your father?

Rodriguez: My father was from Honduras, and there was a war in Central America, and he was actually one of the pastors hiding people from El Salvador to Honduras. He had women and children and people that actually needed to be protected, and many of his other colleague pastors that were doing the same were also killed by just keeping people safe.

For me, this speaks a little bit about the tradition of sanctuary. It goes beyond what we think of, the Sanctuary Promise Act, which is a beautiful name, but it’s also for me, a generational work that I see myself doing, and it’s sad to see that we’re having to do similar things perhaps here in the United States now, like we wouldn’t think of it.

So that’s some of the work that he has been involved and also, I got connected through IMIrJ because he was also involved in Oregon, here in Washington County, doing a lot of the work for immigration where they were thinking about passing the license. IMIrJ has been an opportunity for my family and myself to continue to follow our traditions that are rooted. Our style of being faith leaders and also just humans on earth, where we practice what we preach and we practice what we do. From my Christian perspective, I can tell you from understanding Christ, Jesus was always with the marginalized. That goes pretty much in line with this idea of liberation theology, God is always gonna be with the people that need it the most.

Miller: How much do you fear retribution for the work you’re doing right now?

Rodriguez: That is very real, and I have experienced some situations in the past because of the work that I’m doing here in Oregon, in the past for a homeless shelter that we were able to do at our church. At that time people were walking around with guns around the church property and we got many hateful comments about the situation. So for me, as a person living here in Oregon, having this tradition, doing this type of work, I can understand that the scare is real.

We are hearing about other partner organizations who have been attacked, trying to get information from them, and so this is real. I think part of a lot of the work that we’re doing also as IMIrJ, perhaps it’s not as visible as it was in 2017. Most of the work is actually keeping my community members safe, people safe, and really trying to focus on the small little tasks, and maybe not be as visual for me.

Miller: In other words, the work continues, maybe more so than ever, but you have to be quieter about it.

Rodriguez: Yes, exactly. I cannot fully say everything that we’re doing because I don’t want to put people at risk, and it’s sad to say that because we’re just working on basic human decency. There’s the international letter of human rights, and those things include housing, those things include food, those things include health. To be able to not share as much of what we’re doing just because we fear the ramifications of the work that we’re doing, it’s sad. I know I’m not the only staff at IMIrJ who feels tired and burned out, right now.

Brown: I think your question of retribution is really important. This is a different world that we live in. It’s very different than in the past. I think all of our organizations that work on immigration have to be very, very careful because it’s just a crazy time out there now and retribution is definitely possible for anybody, no matter what your nationality or what your skin color is. I think it’s something that’s very, very, real and very different than in the past.

Miller: Bob and Karen, thanks very much.

Brown: Thank you so much.

Miller: Bob Brown is a longtime member and the treasurer of the IMIrJ Board. He’s a member of Havura Shalom. Karen Rodriguez is a Methodist pastor and congregational organizer and programs coordinator for IMIrJ.

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