Women’s Faith Group Signs Amicus Brief for Ban on Indefinite Detention of Immigrant Children and Families

NEW YORK

United Methodist Women is a mission organization founded in 1869 to address the needs of women, children, and youth. Since that time, the organization has sustained ministries to assist immigrant women, children, and families. Much of this work is now conducted through our more than 90-plus community centers and residences around the country as well as through member engagement on behalf of migrating people and families. It is in the spirit of this historic and continued work for the welfare of women, children, and youth that we join this amicus brief in support of the district court decision rejecting proposed federal rules permitting the indefinite detention of immigrant children with their parents.

We believe the family to be the basic human community through which persons are nurtured and sustained in mutual love, responsibility, respect, and fidelity (UMC Social Principles, Paragraph 161 B). It is deeply disturbing that the federal government would seek to break up the family unit and do so in unlicensed facilities. Children belong with their families, and no family should be caged behind bars. Not only is this proposal unjust, it is dangerous. Children and adults are dying in U.S. immigrant detention centers, and scores more have had their civil rights violated. 

Putting families in immigrant detention centers would greatly and tragically contribute to mass incarceration. The only beneficiaries of such a system is the prison industrial complex, and the United States should not be subsidizing the expansion of this system.

Rather than criminalizing families and swelling the ranks of prisons, we should be doing as Jesus commanded in Matthew 25:35, “welcoming our neighbor.”

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Contact: Yvette Moore, ymoore@unitedmethodistwomen.org