Charlotte Jones Carroll, Immigration Action Team Convenor (cjonescarroll@aol.com)
Join the Immigration Action Group Wednesday, April 28 at 7:30 pm ET, for its Town Hall zoom meeting focusing on UUSJ’s national immigration advocacy priorities and strategies for educating and engaging UUSJ members. Register HERE.
UUSJ continues to urge its members to support the “US Citizenship Act of 2021,” groundbreaking immigration reform that includes pathways to citizenship for 11 million undocumented persons in the US, as well as the partial reform bills such as the Dream Act and SECURE (TPS) Act and the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, now in the Senate. See our Action Alert for more information and ways to urge members of Congress to support the Biden Administration’s comprehensive immigration legislation.
While the House passed the Dream and Promise Act on March 18 (providing legal pathways for both DACA and TPS holders, and the Farm Workforce Modernization Act on March 22, the corresponding bills face opposition from Senate Republicans
In addition, UUSJ is joining immigrant advocacy coalitions in calling on President Biden to sign increased refugee resettlement caps for next fiscal year and raise this year’s extremely low caps. The President has indicated he plans to do so but not followed up. UUSJ also supports calls to close the 10 detention centers known for egregiously poor treatment of detainees and insists ICE staff take their case-by-case review of detained immigrants more seriously. Anecdotal evidence suggests that ICE is doing only minimal case reviews, which have not resulted in the hoped-for release of more detainees.
Finally, UUSJ is monitoring the struggles at the border to introduce an orderly processing of the backlog of families seeking asylum who have been waiting in Mexico, as well as the most vulnerable new immigrants seeking asylum at the US southern border.
March Immigration Town Hall Resources
If you missed the Immigration Action Group’s Immigration policy webinar, or want to review it, here’s the slide Presentation and a more detailed Resource Guide including a list of immigration organizations and their websites. The Resource Guide includes UUSJ’s current 2021-22 immigration priorities.
More than 70 people attended UUSJ’s March webinar, which covered the history of US immigration policy, with special emphasis on the Trump and Biden Administrations. The webinar was aimed at helping “fill the information gaps” for UUs interested in immigration issues but who lack knowledge of our country’s legislative history or the time needed to follow fast-breaking developments.