| U.S. News

In Tennessee a Colombian immigrant who has long served as an interpreter for Spanish speakers in Nashville's courts has self-published a guidebook for immigrants about adjusting to their new home. In another part of the state, churches have been trying to support families affected by immigration raids of trailer parks in the spring.

Elsewhere, church agencies help people legalize their status; religious brothers and sisters pray weekly outside immigrant detention centers; parish activists lobby their members of Congress; and groups across the country are scheduling education programs, rallies and prayer events for immigrants and immigration issues.

Sister Jane Burke, a School Sister of Notre Dame who heads the Justice for Immigrants program of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the underlying point of many immigration-related efforts in parishes and dioceses is "getting to the people in the pews" and helping them understand the basic principles of Catholic social teaching and how they apply to the treatment of immigrants.

The mission is a lot like peace-building, she said.

"We don't have to debate the issue to talk to one another," she said. "But we do need to talk to one another."

In fact, Sister Burke said peace-building techniques are being taught to people who work through dioceses and other religious groups to help Catholics understand church teaching as it relates to immigrants.

Along those lines, the New York-based National Pastoral Life Center, through the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, has prepared a program that parishes and other groups can use to hold a dialogue about immigration. A 22-page booklet outlines how to hold a three-session discussion on immigration. It recommends using specific materials including the video "The Line in the Sand," produced by Catholic Relief Services.

In Tennessee, local efforts to aid immigrants have taken a couple of different tracks.

Paul Van Cottehm, a parishioner at Our Lady of the Lake Church in Hendersonville and a native of Colombia, wrote a bilingual booklet that explains some basics of adjusting to life in the United States.

"The Immigrant's Manual/El Manual del Inmigrante" includes information about basic governmental functions, how to access medical care, suggestions for where to get other types of information and an introduction to U.S. history and geography, among other topics.

Van Cottehm said he saw the need for such a booklet after he began working as a translator for Nashville's courts 12 years ago.

"I could see in their eyes that they (immigrants) were more afraid of what was going on than paying attention to what they had to learn in that moment," he told the Tennessee Register, newspaper of the Nashville Diocese, "because they are very afraid in the court that they could be deported or sent to jail."

In Clarksville, Tenn., Catholics are working with other religious groups through the Hispanic Organization for Progress and Education, or HOPE, to help people affected by the arrest and detention of more than 60 immigrants after enforcement sweeps in May.

Muriel Attkisson, a parishioner at St. Catherine Church in Columbia, Tenn., said even if immigrants broke a law to live in the United States, she believes it's a human rights violation to break up their families by searches of homes and arrests.

Some immigrants arrested in the May sweep have sued the Maury County Sheriff's Department, charging their homes were illegally searched and that they were targeted based on ethnicity.

Attkisson has helped organize a food and clothing drive for affected immigrants' families.

Miguel Gonzalez, who works in Hispanic ministry at St. William Church in Shelbyville, Tenn., said the local backlash against immigrants "has never been as bad as right now." A U.S. citizen who has lived in the community for 36 years, Gonzalez said attendance at the Sunday Spanish-language Mass at St. William has dropped off.

Many come to church in groups of four or five people in the same car and they fear that makes them a target for arrest, he explained.

Similar fears have prompted the staff of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Rochester, N.Y., to consider organizing escort services for the immigrants who work in the region's farms and dairies.

Mercy Sister Janet Korn, social justice awareness coordinator for Catholic Charities, said some area farmers now escort their workers when they go into town for shopping or other business. The workers – and their employers – fear that they'll be targeted for questioning and potential arrest by virtue of their appearance.

She said most immigrants in the region are Mexican or Central American, and some are from Haiti; they came to work in the apple orchards, vineyards and produce fields of the Finger Lakes area.

"People are picked up off the street," she said. The farmers escort them in hopes authorities would be less likely to approach someone who looks like an immigrant if he's accompanied by someone from the area, she explained.

The Catholic Charities staff has discussed formalizing a program to offer such escorts, modeled after services provided to natives of El Salvador who returned to the still-volatile country to reclaim their homes and property when the civil war ended in the early 1990s.

Sister Korn said there are fears that escorts might be charged with crimes for transporting illegal immigrants, so discussions are proceeding cautiously.