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Sunday, June 20 is World Refugee Day

Sunday, June 20 is World Refugee Day
This year’s theme: Together we heal, learn and shine.
What is World Refugee Day?
World Refugee Day is an international day designated by the United Nations to honour refugees around the globe. It falls each year on June 20 and celebrates the strength and courage of people who have been forced to flee their home country to escape conflict or persecution. World Refugee Day is an occasion to build empathy and understanding for their plight and to recognize their resilience in rebuilding their lives.

Why is World Refugee Day important?
World Refugee Day shines a light on the rights, needs and dreams of refugees, helping to mobilize political will and resources so refugees can not only survive but also thrive. While it is important to protect and improve the lives of refugees every single day, international days like World Refugee Day help to focus global attention on the plight of those fleeing conflict or persecution. Many activities held on World Refugee Day create opportunities to support refugees.

When was World Refugee Day inaugurated?World Refugee Day was held globally for the first time on June 20, 2001, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. It was originally known as Africa Refugee Day, before the United Nations General Assembly officially designated it as an international day in December 2000.

What happens on World Refugee Day?
Each year, World Refugee Day is marked by a variety of events in many countries around the globe in support of refugees. These activities are led by or involve refugees themselves, government officials, host communities, companies, celebrities, school children and the general public, among others.
To learn more please click here

World Refugee Day

This year, the COVID-19 pandemic poses an additional threat to refugees and displaced people, who are among the most vulnerable. My recent Policy Brief on COVID-19 and People on the Move called on governments to ensure that they are included in all response and recovery efforts.

 

 

 

UN Secretary-General António Guterres
2020 Theme: Every Action Counts
The COVID-19 pandemic and the recent anti-racism protests have shown us how desperately we need to fight for a more inclusive and equal world: a world where no one is left behind. It has never been clearer that all of us have a role to play in order to bring about change. Everyone can make a difference. This is at the heart of UNHCR’s World Refugee Day campaign. This year, we aim to remind the world that everyone, including refugees, can contribute to society and Every Action Counts in the effort to create a more just, inclusive, and equal world.

Background
Every minute 20 people leave everything behind to escape war, persecution or terror. There are several types of forcibly displaced persons:

Refugees
A refugee is someone who fled his or her home and country owing to “a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion”, according to the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention. Many refugees are in exile to escape the effects of natural or human-made disasters.

Asylum Seekers
Asylum seekers say they are refugees and have fled their homes as refugees do, but their claim to refugee status is not yet definitively evaluated in the country to which they fled.

Internally Displaced Persons
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are people who have not crossed an international border but have moved to a different region than the one they call home within their own country.

Stateless Persons
Stateless persons do not have a recognized nationality and do not belong to any country.

Statelessness situations are usually caused by discrimination against certain groups. Their lack of identification — a citizenship certificate — can exclude them from access to important government services, including health care, education or employment.

Returnees
Returnees are former refugees who return to their own countries or regions of origin after time in exile. Returnees need continuous support and reintegration assistance to ensure that they can rebuild their lives at home.

UN Action

Welcoming Migrants, Refugees is Opportunity for Growth

~ By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY – As countries become more culturally and ethnically diverse, their Catholic communities become more “catholic” and their societies can increasingly reflect the fact that all people are brothers and sisters, Pope Francis said.

“In encountering the diversity of foreigners, migrants and refugees, and in the intercultural dialogue that emerge from this encounter, we have an opportunity to grow as church and to enrich one another,” the Pope wrote in his message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees which will be marked on September 26 in most countries.

The message called on all Catholics to build up the church by welcoming and getting to know Catholic migrants and refugees and reaching out with a witness of charity to members of other religious, and it called on all people to enrich the diversity of their countries by accepting newcomers and ensuring they are not left languishing in poverty.

The theme the Pope chose for the day is “Toward an ever side ‘we,’” and it builds on the teaching in his encyclical , “Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship.”

In the encyclical, his message said, “I expressed a concern and a hope that remain uppermost in my thoughts: ‘Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation.’ God willing, he said, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of ‘them’ and ‘those’ but only ‘us.’”

The global movement of people, he said, means “our societies will have a ‘colorful’ future, enriched by diversity and by cultural exchanges. Consequently, we must even now learn to live together in harmony and peace.” To read the full account please click here

President Biden Urged to Visit US-Mexico Border

~ by Kurt Jensen, Global Sisters Report/Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON, D.D. – The announcement that the Biden administration was raising the limit of annual refugee admissions from 15,000 to 62,5000 was cause for celebration at a Georgetown University online discussion of migrant issues last week.

Sr. Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville, Texas, said more visibility would help the cause, so she invited President Joe Biden to visit the U.S. – Mexican border.

“Sometimes I always say the best way to understand what is happening at the border is to come and see, you know?” said the Sister of the Missionaries of Jesus, adding that it makes a difference when you “actually see the face of a child, a mother hurting and suffering for their babies.”

She said seeing this pain and the suffering up close “you then understand that your policies and your leadership will directly affect that life.”

Pimentel urged the president and other national leaders to “please come and see” with open hearts what is happening at the border.

“At some point, I will,” Biden said, when asked on March 21st if he’d visit the border, but no plans have been announced. Vice President Kamala Harris, who met virtually with Alejandro Giammatei, the President of Guatemala, on May 3, likewise has not made a border visit.

Dylan Corbett, Executive Director of the Hope Border Institute, said he thinks there have been positive, significant changes under the Biden administration.

“You saw, for example, in the lifting of the refugee cap a real strong commitment to building or rebuilding our capacity to resettle refugees around the world,” he said.

We’ve been talking about immigrants in really bad ways for the last four years, as people we ought to fear,” Corbett added.

“We’ve been vilifying and criminalizing and demonizing our migrant brothers and sisters for too long,” he said, noting that now the President has “changed the tone around immigration and recognized that this is an opportunity for compassion and to treat people with dignity.”

To read the complete article please click

Cabrini High School Fights Human Trafficking with “Sun’s Up, Dress Up” Day

Cabrini High School
Fights Human Trafficking
with “Sun’s Up, Dress Up” Day

NEW ORLEANS – Cabrini High School helped fight human trafficking on Friday, April 16, 2021 by participating in “Sun’s Up, Dress Up.” In place of the school’s annual Dressember promotion against human trafficking, Cabrini was inspired with the spring weather for “Sun’s Up, Dress Up,” a collaboration among all students leveraging fashion and creativity to promote the dignity of all women and stand in solidarity against the modern injustice of human trafficking.
Founded by Mother Cabrini, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus support two corporate stances, “To support the rights and dignity of all immigrants” and “To stop human trafficking.” This is the driving force behind Cabrini High School’s efforts to fight human trafficking. In keeping with Mother Cabrini’s own service to immigrants and migrants, today’s Missionary Sisters have prioritized work against human trafficking in their mission, in part, because studies show that migrants and immigrants are one of the more significant demographics to be victims of human trafficking.

“Sun’s Up, Dress Up” is a day to dress and advocate by keeping four important points in mind: dignity, fashion, modesty, and femininity. Students could pay two dollars to dress up with dignity, modesty, femininity, and their own fashion. These words guide the Cabrini dress guidelines for every occasion.

Throughout the school, Cabrini raised $307.72 for “Sun’s Up, Dress Up.” All money collected will be donated to the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart’s anti-human trafficking initiatives.

According to Campus Minister, John Smestad, “In keeping with this mission a priority of the Cabrini family, Cabrini High School takes a week each year to educate, pray, and take a stand against the crime and sin of human trafficking. One of the concrete efforts is to raise funds for the anti-human trafficking initiatives of the Sisters. ‘Sun’s Up, Dress Up’ provides an opportunity for students to dress up, make a donation and make a difference.”

Prior to “Sun’s Up, Dress Up,” Cabrini High School has been participating in anti-human trafficking efforts through Dressember since 2014. Dressember is a national collaborative movement leveraging fashion and creativity to restore dignity to all women. Before Dressember, students were educated on facts about human trafficking and slavery, and prayed as a community to end this horrible crime against humanity.

Cabrini High School continues to pray for victims of human trafficking.

Lack of U.S. Plan for Asylum Seekers Tempers Hope among Migrants and Advocates

~ by Soli Salgado, Global Sisters Report

For advocates for migrants and refugees, the response to incoming migrants at the border between the United States and Mexico is a source of emotional tension.

There is a sense of victory for the migrants and refugees who made it into the United States after months or years of uncertainty. However, there are also rising frustrations from potential asylees and activists spurred by the new U.S. presidential administration’s lack of preparation and clarity regarding the ongoing expulsion of asylum seekers.

Joe Biden fulfilled a campaign promise once lauded among immigration activists when he ended the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. The 2019 policy under former President Donald Trump forced more than 70,000 asylum seekers to wait for their U.S. court dates in Mexican border cities.

But no concrete plan for asylum-seekers emerged in its place, so while thousands of migrants were able to enter the United States in triumph since Biden rescinded the MPPs, others who have arrived at the border seeking asylum but who were not affected by the program are being expelled to Mexico.

“We do celebrate the progress that has been made,” said Sr. Tracey Horan, a Sister of Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods and Assistant Director of Education and Advocacy for the Kino Border Initiative in Nogoles, Arizona. “At the same time, it doesn’t feel like the response that we’re seeing is equal to the urgency that the people living it are feeling.”

The driving factors that make migrants flee their homes are only adding up, she said: the usual violence and corruption are now met with destruction from hurricanes and extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic.

Ambiguity over action

Immigration advocates bemoan the Biden’s administration’s lack of transparency and clear plans for those who continue their months-or years-long wait to present their cases for asylum, as well as the continuation of the Title 42 policy, a public health order from March 2020 that allows the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to expel migrants to prevent the coronavirus from spreading in holding facilities.

Dylan Corbett, Executive Director of the Hope Border Institute said the government is capable of handling the number of migrants currently crossing the border. But any instability along the border is largely due to the government’s “ambiguous response,” said Corbett, who lives in El Paso, Texas.

Missionary of Jesus Sr. Norma Pimentel agreed, noting that a “crisis” indicates a shortage of options. “But, I think the options are there – they’re just not being put forward,” said Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.

Biden’s Department of Homeland Security, unlike Trump’s, is not turning away unaccompanied minors at the border. Though the policy is intended to keep vulnerable children safe in the United States, it also tempts parents with the tough choice to send their children north without them.

“When I say ‘children,’ I’m not talking about 15 or 14 years old; I’m talking about 3, 5, 7 years old, completely by themselves,” said Chris Cabrera of the National Border Council, adding he would not have believed it if he had not talked to the children himself.

Joanne Williams, the Executive Director of the Kino Border Initiative remarks that the Biden administration underestimates the desperation of individuals who choose to embark on the dangerous journey north, she added. “People are making rational choices to try to protect their kids as best as they can.”

The best ways to respond 

Advocates agree that the United States should work to stabilize the Northern Triangle – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – so families don’t need to become migrants or refugees at all. They are also clear about how the government can respond to the border’s immediate needs.

As Sr. Horan put it: more health and human resources, fewer troops.

“What we don’t need are more Border Patrol agents,” she said. What we need are social workers and asylum officers and judges, people to accompany these families through the legal process they have a right to.” To read the complete article please click here 

Yearning Eyes: The Plight of Migrants in India

~ by Sr. Lavina D’Souza, Global Sisters Report; photo credit: Arturo Madrid-unsplas

The blank look on his face… a look of hopelessness…helplessness…perplexed…it wasn’t a silent face at all. The look on his wrinkled, aged face spoke aloud, as he stood passively before the vehicle that was about to leave the slum. He had remained absolutely silent all through our interactions with the people and now his look was disturbing. It yearned for something!

We had organized a food distribution for stranded migrants in one of the slums of Mumbai due to the lockdown. This slum area of migrants is not unlike other migrant living areas elsewhere in India. They live in subhuman, pathetic conditions, lacking decent housing facilities, potable water, sanitation facilities and other amenities, and are exposed to inclement weather and a hazardous atmosphere. They work for long hours, sometimes risking their health and lives, and yet, are paid less than they are entitled to. As they lack financial and health security and have little or no social support from a caste-and class-ridden society, they are unsure of what they can or cannot control in their lives. This leads to a certain passivity; resigned to their “fate”.

As I looked at the yearning eyes of the aged man, it seemed to me that he gazed not at the vehicle, but at the complacency of those who were more privileged than he. Are we so mired in our complacency that we have become blind to their reality?

The recent low point of this societal complacency has been the passivity of a few privileged people in India as they watch the unending trail of desperate migrants trying to reach home to be with their loved ones. The migrants take any means – even treacherous journeys on foot, sometimes walking hundreds of miles. In such foot journeys, a few of them lost their lives before reaching home, all due to exhaustion, because they wanted to escape dying of hunger as they tried to save themselves from the coronavirus. These are India’s nameless, faceless migrants who were denied time and transport to return home due to the sudden lockdown which was, ironically to save lives.

But who cares for the lives of the poor? To read the complete article click here

“Oh Mercy”

“Oh Mercy”- A Documentary on Migration
Highlighting the Refugees and Migrants Entangled in the Crisis at the U.S. – Mexico Border
~ by Soli Salgado, Global Sisters Report

A face familiar to most North American sisters takes center stage in the upcoming film “Oh Mercy,” a 10-minute documentary that highlights the refugees and migrants entangled in the crisis in the U.S. – Mexico border.

The filmmakers chose Missionary of Jesus Sr. Norma Pimentel to be the lens through which they view the issue of migration, focusing on the refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, where she regularly ministers.

With Pimentel as the film’s “heroine,” the audience can witness the realities on the border in a “highly compassionate, not preachy way,” Robert Bilheimer, the director of the documentary, said in an interview with Global Sisters Report. Bilheimer thought Pimentel was a “compelling figure” to tell the story at the border.
(Bilheimer’s previous films covered South African apartheid, human trafficking and the AIDs epidemic.)”Oh“If you can help people see and believe that basic goodness and humanity in people, and if they see, unvarnished, their suffering – our experience is that people respond to it,” he said.

Seeing [migration] as the “defining geopolitical, cultural, humanitarian issue of our time,” Bilheimer said the series was an effort to “deconstruct” the many forces behind the involuntary migration seen around the world, whether it is due to climate change, gang violence or government failure.

The documentary depicts just a few of the thousands of violent and desperate situations that have driven families to flee their homes in Central America. Bilheimer said it’s up to the viewers to determine what the film is about, but for him, it’s a demonstration of the capacity for “deliberate evil – and I use the word carefully and advisably” – in the form of exclusionary U.S. immigration policies. “It’s a scar on our nation’s history.”

“Oh Mercy” will premiere today, Thursday, February 25 at 5 p.m. EST, and a panel with Sr. Pimentel, Bilheimer and other speakers will follow the premier. To read the complete article, click here

To view a short promotional video on the documentary, click here

To register for the premier of the documentary and panel discussion, click here

Advocates: Central American Migrants Choose HOPE over Hunger and Violence


~ by David Agren, Catholic News Service

MEXICO CITY – Fr. Noel Ortiz listened to the frustration of his parishioners in northern Honduras as floods following the twin hurricanes that struck Central America last November wiped out their homes and livelihoods, and government officials provided little assistance for rebuilding.

Many in his parish of garment factory workers in the gang-ridden city of Choloma mused about migrating and jumped at the chance to join caravans leaving the country.

The twin hurricanes compounded the misery of the COVID-19 pandemic, which drove millions to economic despair and left many with a sense of hopelessness as government responses were plagued by ineptitude and corruption.

Two large caravans have departed since Hurricanes Eta and Iota soaked Central America. In January 2021 [the caravans] swelled in size to more that 7,500 travelers. Both caravans were broken up by security forces before reaching Mexico.

But the formation of caravans and the desperation to leave reflect the rough realities of life in the northern triangle countries of Central America: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

“[There’s] a mass exodus of people with [the] illusion of reaching the United States under this new president Biden – with the illusion that he will open the doors to the United States for Central American migrants,” said Franciscan Fr. Gabriel Romero Alamilla, director of Mexico’s southern Tabasco state.
“People are no longer scared of being infected [with COVID 19.] They’re not scared of dying in a pandemic. They’re choosing between dying of hunger or dying without work or dying without land or being massacred – or they’re choosing to search for a destination with a more hopeful future,” Romero said.

Rick Jones, a former migration adviser to Catholic Relief Services in El Salvador, told Catholic New Service, “people figure we’ll face the border and anything else when we get there,” adding, “COVID has led to major corruption in all three countries: El Salvador, Honduras and . People just get desperate at that point.”

President Biden has promised to overhaul U.S. Immigration policy. He has signed a series of executive orders on immigration and started to undo policies implemented by his predecessor. His office has also warned that now is not the time to come to the United States.

“There are positive signs. But it’s cautious optimism for us,” said Jesuit Fr. Ismael Moreno, director of Radio Progreso in Honduras. “We have a good opportunity with the new U.S. administration to open spaces for dialogue that we didn’t have before.”

The Trump administration “cut off foreign aid to Central America, they removed support for the anti-corruption effort…which was actually working, and that sent a message to people. Help is not on the way and your only option is to leave,” Jones said.

“We need to be thinking that development and migration go together. It’s not just about stopping the flow of people,” he said.

To read the complete article click here

 

 

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