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SALT LAKE CITY — On the heels of conflicting federal court rulings on challenges to a Trump administration policy intended to bar Central Americans and other migrants, including Africans, seeking asylum at the southern border, Utahns called for compassion Thursday.
Salt Lake attorney Jim McConkie, co-founder of the Refugee Justice League, predicted "a race to the appellate level courthouse" after a federal judge in San Francisco blocked the asylum ban on Wednesday. Earlier this week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., rejected a request for a temporary restraining order.
"The crisis is largely of our own making because of a lack of what we would consider to be humane, compassionate policymaking on the part of our government," McConkie said.
While many people are familiar with the plight of asylum seekers from Central America, a growing number of asylees are fleeing African countries, many of whom travel to Brazil and then head north through Central America and into Mexico on an "arduous journey," McConkie said.
Along the way, they encounter robbers drug traffickers, swamps and many places without roads.
"People are dying of exhaustion. They are being beaten and raped," he said.
Aden Batar, director of immigration and refugee resettlement for Catholic Community Services of Utah, said many young refugees elect to leave Africa on their own.
Catholic Community Services of Utah, one of the two largest refugee resettlement agencies in the state, is presently assisting an 18-year-old young woman who fled Somalia to escape internal conflict and intense poverty, he said.
She traveled though several African countries and then to Brazil and finally made her way to the U.S. southern border.
"Imagine a child goes through all of those countries and came to the United States. If we don't give them asylum what would happen to that child? In fact, those are the kind of people we want in our country, people that struggle, that survive, are resilient," said Batar, who, along with his family, was the first Somali refugee resettled in Utah in the mid-1990s.
"Imagine what their life can do if we give them the opportunity," he said.
Batar said Utahns are known nationally for their compassion and willingness to help displaced people. More than 60,000 refugees have been resettled in Utah since the end of the Vietnam War.
Thousands of children are in federal detention at the border "basically in cages like animals. That is not where children belong. Children belong with families in a loving and caring home," he said.
Many of the people Catholic Community Services serves are unaccompanied minors. He issued a plea for more Utahns to serve as refugee foster parents. For more information, email rfcrecruiting@ccsutah.org or call 801-977-9119.
Batar said the numbers of refugees resettled in Utah continues to plummet as the federal government clamps down on numbers of refugees allowed for admission, he said.
There are rumblings that new refugee admissions could be zeroed out in the next fiscal year, he said.
"There are policies that make it impossible to help those who need our help," he said. He called on Utahns to reach out to their congressional representatives and advocate for refugees and asylum seekers.
Refugee Justice League co-founder Brad Parker, who is McConkie's law partner, said many Utahns just observed Pioneer Day, which lifts up the contributions of early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who came to Utah in search of religious liberty and "freedom from unjust incarceration and discrimination."
When he saw television reports of people held at the United States southern border, "I actually saw the image of my ancestors and it just made me ill. There is still a place in this country, I'm convinced, for the downtrodden," Parker said.
Hundreds of Utah attorneys are volunteering as part of the Refugee Justice League, assisting asylum seekers, refugees and migrants with legal issues, he said.
"When we see an injustice in our country, we need to be active and we need to speak out. Each time we witness in silence, the degrading treatment of others, we surrender a part of our morality. Utah is a state where that should not occur," Parker said.
