WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CANNOT REST....UNTIL IT COMES

   Ella's song was created by Bernice Johnson REagan, Sweet Honey in the Rock.  We sang out this morning in church to remember that Black Lives Matter and also, Brown Lives and all those who are persecuted because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status.  Today's sermon was powerful and prophetic based on the parable from Luke 8 of the "importuning woman" who demanded justice from an unjust judge.  As our preacher, Rev. Susan Shaw, reminded us, "faith looks like demands, not just forgiveness."   And she added, the "call of the gospel is to disrupt the status quo!"  

DISRUPTING THE STATUS QUO:

Example #1:  In October 2013 about a dozen activists with No More Deaths and the Samaritans, Tucson based organizations, chained themselves to the buses that take detainees after Operation Streamline court hearing to Detention Centers.  They refused to move and were arrested.  

A release from Stop Operation Streamline before their sentence:
  
"We expect strong statements condemning Operation Streamline from the eleven defendants and their counsel, Margo Cowan. Right here in Tucson since 2008 over 75,000 people have been sentenced to THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF PRISON TIME for entering the U.S. without inspection, a civil offense. It happens to 70 more people in less than two hours most every working day at the DeConcini Federal Court House in Tucson. A QUARTER OF A MILLION OR MORE have suffered the same fate at similar courts throughout the Southwest." http://forms.nomoredeaths.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/nmd_fact_sheet_operation_streamline.pdf

At their sentencing they received "time served" since their original arrest.  FRIENDS, THEIR ACTION DISRUPTED THE STATUS QUO!   They were accused of resisting arrest passively!

Example #2 - Disrupting the Status Quo.

     Detention Center detainees went on hunger strikes to protest inhumane conditions in private corporation run detention centers.  The photo at a recent rally protesting family detentions reads:  Prison Profiteers Love Immigration Enforcement.  Why?   We, the people, pay $343 a day to incarcerate a families in detention centers.  I learned this fact on a telephone conference call among religious, humanitarian and legal immigration activists who are demanding that ICE implement alternatives to detention - either release into a monitored program such as ankle bracelets - cost $5.15 a day or better yet, into community-based alternative programs to detention.   

In late June, 2015 Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson under pressure from high-level U.S. Congressional visits to the Texas family detention centers announced a change in detention policy.  The first people to benefit from this change were released this past week in Texas.  BUT THE BEST NEWS was in today's New York Times - a U.S. federal district court judge in California, Judge Dolly M. Gee, ruled that the Obama administration's detention of children and their mothers who were caught crossing the border illegally is a serious violation of a long-standing court settlement (the Flores decision) and that the families should be released as quickly as possible. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/us/detained-immigrant-children-judge-dolly-gee-ruling.html?_r=0

Another case  - this time - of a judge disrupting the status quo.  I do not know Judge Gee but thanks to her, the detained women who went on hunger strikes and all the groups who have filed law suits and written their Members of Congress to demand justice.  Thank you.

Example #3:  Sister Joanne, a Sister of Mercy, shared how the Interfaith Movement for Detained Immigrants, in Chicago, Illinois is both disrupting the status quo and living a new way of being with immigrants.  They offer long-term services to people post-detention and operate nine houses for unaccompanied minors.  And the immigrants do not have to wear ankle bracelets and bail bond is waived.

There is another way, a better way to welcome people to our country.  Let's disrupt the status quo of business as usual with ICE, Homeland Security as well as the private corporations that operate both detention centers and private prisons where the majority of people are overwhelmingly people of color.