UIDN is delighted to introduce Liz Estes, pastor of Old Dutch Church, as our new clergy spokesperson. UIDN co-founder Father Frank Alagna has asked her to take on this important role.
Liz is eminently qualified for this new responsibility. As a former member of the leadership team at the reformed church in Highland Park, NJ, she advocated for hundreds of undocumented immigrants.
In her New Jersey neighborhood, trouble started in 2006, when the George W. Bush administration conducted a nationwide campaign of ICE raids called, “Operation Return to Sender.”
On May 24 of that year, the federal government conducted a pre-dawn raid on a garden apartment complex in Highland Park, removing 35 parents—mostly fathers—from their homes. All were detained in a county jail. Within six weeks, everyone was deported. As many as 70 children lost a parent.
The repercussions of that raid took Liz years to understand. When wage-earners were deported, families lost leases. A mom with no English language skills earned no more than $7.25 an hour in a back-alley factory. She had to share a single bed with all her children in someone’s spare room.
To protect immigrants in New Jersey, the first step was to listen to their stories. Liz and her fellow volunteers heard about the refugees’ persecution as Chinese Indonesian Christians in a predominantly Muslim country. You can read a bit about this ethnic group’s history here.
Pastor Liz and other volunteers began helping lawyers and politicians understand why the refugees couldn’t return home. They held countless press conferences and visited U.S. senators and representatives. When community members were detained, they visited them nightly at Elizabeth Detention Center.
Then, with the help of Liz and her volunteer cohort, the young pastor of Highland Park Reformed Church worked out a unique deal with ICE to release the refugees to the Church’s care. Read about their success in this 2009 article in The New York Times.
Two years later, the Obama administration prioritized Chinese Indonesian Christians for deportation. Seventy-two of the congregants received “bag and baggage” letters and were told to report to ICE with tickets for deportation. But Liz and the other volunteers closed ranks. They held an all-night vigil that attracted national media attention. ICE backed off and reinstated the stays of deportation for everyone except seven people. Those seven lived mostly in the church for some 340 days.
All went well until 2017, when the Trump administration began detaining and deporting the same people who had been freed. This time the good trouble that Liz and her church stirred up did not help. It was not until the ACLU won a case on behalf of the refugees that they were issued temporary stays of deportation. Twenty years later, the project continues.
Working with UIDN, Liz plans to focus on helping leaders in faith communities to attend Know Your Rights training so they can lead this training wherever people need it. UIDN will help supply interpreters. She believes this is a great way for people to support undocumented people — especially if they want to make sure everyone adheres to our country’s laws.
Liz encourages everyone who supports, donates to, and volunteers with UIDN to take Know Your Rights training, to help make sure that the coming deportation efforts follow the U.S. Constitutional guarantees to privacy, due process, and equal protection under the law.
Liz’s experience in Highland Park, New Jersey led her to write GLOBAL GRACE CAFÉ: A Love Story about Battles Lost and Won to Keep Families Together in America’s War on Immigrants. If you’d like to learn more about providing sanctuary, organizing rapid response, and how immigration policies have played out since 2001, Pastor Liz Estes will be leading a Zoom book discussion and a Refugee Shabbat this winter, and she would love UIDN friends to join her. Find more info on her web site: pastorliz.com
