Mississippi bishops encourage aid for families affected by ICE raids

August 12, 2019 CNA Daily News News Briefs 0 Print

Jackson, Miss., Aug 12, 2019 / 06:01 pm (CNA).- Mississippi’s Catholic bishops are speaking out against last week’s extensive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that targeted workers at food processing plants, rounding up and detaining nearly 700 undocumented immigrants.

Nearly 400 of those detained — some of whom left children behind on the first day of the new school year— have not yet been released.

“We can stand in solidarity to provide solace, material assistance and strength for the separated and traumatized children, parents and families. Of course, we are committed to a just and compassionate reform to our nation’s immigration system, but there is an urgent and critical need at this time to avoid a worsening crisis,” Bishops Joseph Kopacz of Jackson and Louis Kihneman of Biloxi said in an Aug. 9 joint statement together with representatives of the state’s Episcopal, Methodist, and Evangelical Lutheran Church of America communities.

ICE agents carried out raids on seven sites in Mississippi Aug. 7, rounding up as many as 700 undocumented workers. Officials have announced that around 300 of those detained have been released on humanitarian grounds, many of them parents who are now reunited with their children, CNN reports.

Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Jackson is asking for donations— both monetary and also items such as diapers, baby formula, household and school supplies, and hygiene kits— to help families affected by the raids.

“To say that immigration reform is a contentious and complex topic would be an understatement. As Christians, within any disagreement we should all be held together by our baptismal promises. Our baptism, regardless of denomination calls us to unity in Jesus Christ. We are his body and, therefore, called to act in love as a unified community for our churches and for the common good of our local communities and nation,” the Christian leaders said in their joint statement.

They echoed USCCB president Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, who wrote a letter to President Trump last month saying that ICE raids “cause the unacceptable suffering of thousands of children and their parents, and create widespread panic in our communities.”

“We can stand in solidarity to provide solace, material assistance and strength for the separated and traumatized children, parents and families. Of course, we are committed to a just and compassionate reform to our nation’s immigration system, but there is an urgent and critical need at this time to avoid a worsening crisis,” the Christian leaders said.

CNN spoke to Father Odel Medina at St. Anne Catholic Church in Carthage, about 50 miles northeast of Jackson, who said around 50 members of his congregation were detained in the raids. He called the raids a “disaster” for his parish, CNN reports.

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Palm supplier sees business halved by coronavirus cancelations

April 3, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Denver, Colo., Apr 3, 2020 / 11:55 pm (CNA).- Thomas Sowell and his wife own Southeast Palm and Foliage in Astor, Florida, in the middle of the state, about 40 miles west of Daytona Beach.

“It’s in the middle of nowhere, actually,” Sowell told CNA in January.

Sowell isn’t Catholic, but his business supplies palms to hundreds of Catholic parishes across the country— in every state, as well as in Canada— not to mention the many Episcopal, Eastern Orthodox, and Lutheran communities that also use palms.

Last year, the Sowells’ farm shipped over four million palm leaves.

“There’s not many of us that do this. There’s not many people, not many companies do what we do,” Sowell told CNA.

“I know that there have been, over the past, say, 50 years, quite a few other companies embark upon this, but for whatever reason they couldn’t hang in there with it. It’s really difficult.”

Sowell never imagined how difficult this year’s harvest would turn out to be.

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, and with Mass suspended through Holy Week in every Catholic diocese in the United States, the Sowell’s business is taking a hit.

“We had an incredible number of cancellations up until two weeks ago,” he told CNA April 2.

Most of his orders for Palm Sunday come in during January, he said. This gives the palm suppliers the chance to harvest the palms, package them, and refrigerate them so they stay fresh before they’re shipped.

Normally, some of the biggest challenges to Tom’s business are natural, such as hurricanes and flooding. In terms of the weather, this was a great harvest year, he said, and they were able to gather all the necessary palms to fulfil the Palm Sunday orders they originally had. The process of cutting, cleaning and preparing the strips of palm is incredibly labor intensive.

But then, as the coronavirus pandemic took a hold in the US, parishes started canceling those orders.

“So here we are with an incredible amount of palms left over that were scheduled to be prepared and shipped…we just lost that,” Sowell said.

Altogether, Sowell said his family will likely ship fewer than half the palms they did last year.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s hard to grasp what’s going on globally,” he said.

Though Sowell also uses leftover palms to create ashes for Ash Wednesday, he has such a large enough stockpile of ash— eight to ten years worth, in fact— that he said it doesn’t make sense to burn any more palms, especially since ash doesn’t go bad.

All the extra palms are currently in a dumpster on his property. The only thing he can really do with them, he said, is use them as fertilizer for next year’s crop.

“So we’ll just take them out, spend a few days to drive through the areas where they came from and just scatter them back out again,” he said.

Kate Olivera contributed to this report.

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