Federated Church Hosts Conversation On Immigration

ORLEANS – In Rabbi Susan Abramson’s home of Burlington, just a short five-minute walk from her synagogue, Temple Shalom Emeth, a nondescript building sits in an office park. There’s little calling attention to the building, she told residents gathered inside the Federated Church of Orleans Sunday, just an address.

“There’s no sign or anything,” he said. “It just says 1000 District Ave.”

But inside is the Boston field office for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. Abramson said she and others have witnessed and heard accounts of how detained immigrants are being treated. She spoke of overcrowded cells where detainees have to take turns sleeping on concrete floors. She spoke of how some people are being held for as long as a week at a time, despite conditions in the building’s lease that stipulate no one should be held overnight. 

She spoke of a facility that allows for no sunlight or fresh air. She recalled watching two young boys waiting on the building’s front steps in tears, wondering if they would see their mother again.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, and the lengths that ICE officials are going to detain immigrants, has dominated the national news cycle in recent months. But Abramson said what’s happening in Burlington is evidence of how closely the issue hits home in communities throughout Massachusetts and the rest of the country.

For those gathered at the Federated Church Sunday, the overarching question was what community members and groups can do to support their immigrant neighbors. Members of the local faith-based community joined immigration advocates for a community conversation on the pressures facing the local immigrant community, what is being done to advocate for them and how members of the community can get involved in the effort. 

The conversation was sponsored by the Interfaith Justice Committee of Am HaYam Havurah and the Federated Church, and the Refugee Support Team of Nauset Interfaith Association.

Rabbi Neal Gold of Am HaYam Cape Cod Havurah in Brewster said he felt called to respond to what he called the Trump administration’s “brutal and almost sadistic pledge” to deport immigrants, the lack of due process being given detained immigrants and stories that have come out about “Alligator Alcatraz,” the immigrant detention facility in Florida that opened its doors in July.

“I find that all of these things are unfolding dizzyingly in real time, and they terrify me in the depths of my soul,” he said.

But he said that in the Jewish faith, Hebrew scripture is clear about the need “to protect the rights and dignity of the stranger.”

“The stranger, meaning the resident minority that lives under your domain,” he said. “That is the recurring refrain in the Hebrew Bible.”

Panelists at Sunday’s conversation included Rabbi Abramson; Ken Amoriggi, legal director for Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Fall River; and Michael Mecenas, founder and director of the Brazilian Resource Center in Hyannis.

Mecenas said his center serves a community of more than 36,000 Brazilian people and those of other nationalities in a variety of ways, including by operating a food pantry, providing wellness and health services and operating afterschool programs for children. But in the months since Trump reassumed office in January, he said demand for the center’s services has grown. He said the center served more than 8,000 people through July, more than the center served in all of last year.

“This is very, very serious,” he said.

Mecenas, who has legal citizenship, said many in the Cape’s immigrant community are living in fear in light of the administration’s crackdown, from parents afraid to go to work to children afraid to go to school.

“The opportunity I had over 20 years ago is gone,” he said.

Given the uncertainties that exist for immigrant residents, Mecenas said more immigrants are taking steps to protect their families in the event they are detained. He said he has personally notarized more than 1,000 caregiver affidavits, documents that stipulate who should take custody of children or loved ones in the event someone is apprehended by ICE.

“Because the fear is, if something happens to me, what am I going to do about my kids,” he said. “And the truth is [ICE doesn’t] really care.”

 Amoriggi, who has been legal director at Catholic Charities in Fall River since November 2023, said he and his staff of 11 attorneys have been inundated with cases this year. 

 “Ever since mid-February, it’s been a nonstop onslaught of stories after stories,” he said.

 But there are ways for residents and local organizations to actively support their immigrant communities, he said. That includes becoming an accredited Department of Justice representative, which allows people to represent clients in court. That process involves pairing with a nonprofit or other organization to work on the behalf of them and undergoing the necessary training on immigration law. Amoriggi said the process in total takes between three and six months.

 Short of that, there’s power in people using their voice to support the immigrant community, said Abramson, who has in recent weeks been protesting weekly outside of the Burlington ICE center as part of the group Bearing Witness. The group’s last gathering attracted more than 400 people, she said.

 “Who is coming to join us? It’s people just like everybody that’s sitting in this room,” she said.

 Bearing Witness follows in the footsteps of another group, BAC (Burlington Area Clergy) For Justice, that Abramson was a part of during the first Trump administration. She said in just a few weeks, the size of the Bearing Witness protests have caught the attention of local police, whom Abramson said see the group as a “threat” to the ICE building.

 “We’re really, really annoying them, and it’s getting a lot of publicity,” she said.

 For Abramson, the parallels between the current plight of the immigrant community and those of the Jewish people during the Holocaust are hard to ignore. She recalled a recent incident in Waltham in which a man was forcibly removed from his vehicle after an ICE official smashed his car window. The sound of the breaking glass reminded her of first-hand accounts of Kristallnacht, which marked the beginning of the Holocaust, that were given to her from Holocaust survivors. 

 “It’s up to us to stand up for them,” she said. “And as a Jew in particular, it’s up to me to stand up for others when others did not stand up for me and my people and my family.”