Heaven Help Immigration Attorneys

Nuns in religious communities help immigrants find housing, education, and employment. But nuns also have law degrees. They serve as immigration attorneys who work to prevent undocumented minors and adults from being returned to countries where they could be killed. Advocating for Central Americas seeking asylum is an especially difficult challenge, since threats which justified asylum in the past, such as gang violence, no longer do.

In San Diego, California, every unaccompanied, detained child has received free legal representation by the Casa Cornelia Law Center, a nonprofit organization founded by two nuns from the Society of the Holy Child congregation. In 2017, Casa Cornelia served a total of 2,441 adults and children.

Nuns with law degrees also put their teaching backgrounds to work delivering presentations to help groups overcome their fear of immigrants and to understand complex laws affecting immigration: visas, removal defense, amnesty, asylum, temporary status designations, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Sister Attracta Kelley sees similarities between current attitudes toward immigrants and the attitudes toward racial integration she experienced when she was principal of a Catholic school in Montgomery, Alabama, in the early 1970s.

Sister Kelley points out she can take risks advocating for unpopular positions, because she knows she won't be fired. Sister Bernadine Karge, an attorney in the Dominican Order of Sinsinawa in Wisconsin, bravely speaks out as someone "in the crazy girls category of life." As Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, Rita Levi-Montalcini said before she died at age 103 in 2012, "The last period of my life, perhaps is the best."

Hong Kong Update

 In January, 2016, protesters again took to Hong Kong's streets, when booksellers and publishers of books that often feature sex stories of Communist Party leaders disappeared. Under the Basic Law that has governed Hong Kong ever since the UK returned the island to Chinese control in 1997, Hong Kong has enjoyed freedoms of speech not granted on the Chinese mainland. The Basic Law governing Hong Kong as one of China's special administrative regions also barred Chinese legal authorities from exercising jurisdiction over Hong Kong's courts, a power that Chinese political pressure seems slowly to be undermining.

     Ten weeks of pro-democracy demonstrations ended in Hong Kong on December 11, 2014, when police cleared the streets and arrested activists in what came to be called the Umbrella Movement. Initially, young activist leaders, Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, and Alex Chow, were sentenced to community service. On August 17, 2017, an appeals court changed what was considered too light a sentence to up to eight-month prison terms that also bars them from running for office for five years. They were released on bail in October, 2017.
 
      As this 2005 photo shows, democracy protests in Hong Kong are not new, but there's been a
shift from violent confrontations with the police. Proponents of non-violent civil disobedience began calling for a new strategy to maintain the democratic measures they expected in 1997.

     Under the terms of the UK's accord with China, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong was to be elected by universal suffrage. John Tsang was the popular choice for Chief Executive in Hong Kong's April, 2017 election, but the electoral college chose Carrie Lam in order to accommodate China, which had announced it would select acceptable candidates to run in the 2017 election.

     During the peaceful 2014 protest demonstration, Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen was among the Occupy Central non-violence supporters who tried to turn themselves into Hong Kong's Central Police Station on December 3, 2014. They were neither charged nor arrested for an illegal protest. The police told them their protest was illegal and asked them to fill out forms providing personal information. The police did not want the Central Station to attract more protesters who wanted to be arrested and, therefore, to become another center for occupation.

      Given heavy censorship and spin on the news, Beijing controls how Hong Kong's protests are portrayed as illegal and influenced by foreigners. It has been said that the mainland Chinese are not sympathetic with Hong Kong protests, because they feel people in Hong Kong already enjoy more freedoms than they do. (For additional information about current affairs in China and Hong Kong, see the earlier blog post, "Let's Visit China.")