By Rachel McGrath
Ventura County Star
Thursday, December 10, 2009
About three dozen people paraded Thursday outside the Westlake Village office of Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Simi Valley, in an interfaith rally calling for immigration reform.
Singing “Feliz Navidad” and carrying signs saying “Legalazacion si, deportacion no” and “We demand the light of hope,” the group — led by dignitaries from several religious faiths — gathered near the building on Townsgate Road.
“This is not really just about Gallegly, but simply to say that he is a visible symbol of our government, and so it seemed like a good location to be here just to raise the issue for our entire government,” said the Rev. Dr. Betty Stapleford, minister of the Conejo Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. “We just feel very strongly that the immigration laws in this country are broken and, in particular, in relation to the separation of families.”
Stapleford chairs the board of Ventura County Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, or CLUE, which organized the event. Leaders said it was part of a series of nationwide actions by the Shine A Light From Coast to Coast movement, which will culminate on International Migrants Day on Dec. 18.
Alicia Flores, executive director of La Hermandad, attended the rally and had strong words for President Barack Obama, who was in Europe on Thursday to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I believe he should be ashamed to receive it and talk about human rights because our children are being terrorized,” Flores said. “With the Obama administration, we’ve been seeing more deportations and more separation of the families. It’s a shame because Obama promised a change that we haven’t seen.”
Gallegly issued a written statement responding to the group’s demands.
“My first duty as an elected official is to be compassionate to those who have a legal right to live and work in the United States,” Gallegly said in the statement. “With unemployment at a 26-year high and hard-working Americans losing their homes, Congress must concentrate on ensuring every person with a legal right to work in the United States has the opportunity for a job and does not have to compete against illegal immigrants to provide for their families. We must put American families first.”
Organizers said Thursday’s interfaith vigil was an adaptation of the Posada, a traditional Latin American Advent celebration that commemorates the Christian story of Mary and Joseph searching for an inn in Bethlehem.
The Rev. Sandy Liddell, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Santa Paula, opened the event with a prayer in which she described the current immigration laws as “a blight casting a shadow on our nation.”
Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller of Temple Beth Torah in Ventura lit the candles on a Menorah, saying it represented the need to “illumine our world to the need to respond humanely to the issue of immigration reform.”
http://www.vcstar.com/news/2009/dec/10/protesters-target-immigration-reform-with-rally/
