After Immigration Raid, a Pastor Tries to Calm the Chaos
By Marcelo Ballvé
New America Media
October 30, 2008
LAUREL, Miss. -- After four years building up a bilingual Pentecostal ministry in this diverse, working-class town, Pastor Roberto Velez thought he might rest on his accomplishments.
But Velez's real trial by fire began Aug. 25. That morning, in a raid on a local transformer plant owned by local manufacturer Howard Industries, federal agents arrested 595 immigrants. Perhaps a dozen of them were members of Velez's Peniel
Christian Church.
"It was terrible," he recalls. "I received calls starting at 8:10 a.m. I was having breakfast. They said, 'Pastor! Pastor! Immigration got into Howard.' I rushed over there."
Velez, a relative newcomer to Laurel, was suddenly thrust into a role he never expected to have: crisis management.
Outside the plant's perimeter, Velez waited with anxious immigrant families in a steady rain, comforting workers' children and wives. As blue-jacketed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents milled around, Velez buttonholed them, demanding information on detainees' fates.
From that day forward, he would tend non-stop to his panic-stricken flock-- and to any other families who walked through Peniel's doors, in want after their breadwinners ended up imprisoned.
Velez's role is reminiscent of those assumed by other clergy in towns upended by large-scale ICE raids this year.
In Postville, Iowa, an elderly Catholic nun and retired priest stepped up to the front-lines, after the May arrest of nearly 400 illegal immigrants at a local meatpacking plant created what they described as "a man-made" disaster. In Greenville, South Carolina, Episcopal and Catholic clergy teamed up to create a safety-net for hundreds of affected families, after a raid Oct. 7 at a poultry plant.
http://www.alternet.org/story/105272/
