Dear Friend,

Starting on Sunday, Christians around the world will celebrate the resurrection — the root of the Christian faith in the triumph of life over death, love over hatred and violence.

As we enter Holy Week, our hearts are burdened by the challenges facing immigrants — with processing delays, upcoming fee increases, the uncertainty surrounding the end of Title 42, the proposed asylum ban, and other obstacles to justice for our immigrant brothers and sisters.

Throughout Lent, we have invited our social media audiences to reflect on and pray with some of these challenges facing the immigrant community through our Praying With the Headlines series. During this Holy Week we invite you to continue this practice of prayer and reflection.

As we begin the Easter season, we turn our eyes to look for the seeds of God’s kingdom taking root through our network’s critical work of welcome. We see our network’s work as demonstrating the love of God by extending a hand of welcome and support to vulnerable immigrant families, whenever possible, and accompanying them on their journeys.

At Easter we particularly witness the ways religious workers are essential for our communities, helping us celebrate this holy time and walking with us in our joys and struggles. We thank our skilled religious immigration law experts for helping make it possible for religious workers born overseas to come serve in the United States. To our foreign-born religious worker clients — thank you for your service. To our wider community: we invite you to use this toolkit to help advocate for our religious workers, who are facing serious immigration processing delays. Speaking out on their behalf can make such a difference.

For a story of hope, resilience, and human dignity, we invite you to explore our storytelling platform, Neighbors, Not Strangers, where we have recently begun sharing the story of Jessica, a teenage asylum seeker and client of our border team who bravely traveled through Central America and Mexico to seek safety with her family in the United States.

Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, CLINIC board vice president, recently wrote, “[During] our Eastertide eucharistic celebrations, we might reflect with more intention on how our sharing of the transformed gifts of bread and wine…can generate a culture of renewed solidarity and hospitality. And on how the real liturgy of welcoming the flesh of Christ in the poor and migrant… [can be] a creative counterexample that uproots fear and shows that humanity and compassion are possible.”

May our upcoming Easter celebrations bring us renewed hope and resolve to be part of that “creative counterexample,” building a culture of solidarity and hospitality.

With hope,

Anna Gallagher, CLINIC Executive Director