For greater than two hours on a Sunday afternoon, the Rev. Gustavo Castillo led the Pentecostal congregation he’s been growing on this Minneapolis suburb through prayer, Scriptures, rousing music and sometimes tearful testimonials.
But all of it may end soon. A sudden procedural change in how the federal government processes green cards for foreign-born religious staff, along with historic highs in numbers of illegal border crossers, implies that hundreds of clergy like him are losing the flexibility to stay on this country.
“We were right on the sting of becoming everlasting residents, and boom, this modified,” Colombia-born Castillo said as his wife rocked their 7-month-old boy, a U.S. citizen by birth. “We have done every little thing accurately, from here onward we imagine that God will work a miracle. We don’t have every other option.”
To turn into everlasting U.S. residents, which may eventually result in citizenship, immigrants apply for green cards, generally through U.S. relations or employers. A limited variety of green cards can be found annually, set by Congress and separated into categories depending on the closeness of the family relationship or the talents needed in a job.
Citizens of nations with disproportionately high numbers of migrants are put in separate, often longer green card queues. Currently, essentially the most backlogged category is for the married Mexican children of U.S. residents – only applications filed before March 1998 are being processed.
For faith leaders, the road historically has been short enough to get a green card before their temporary work visas expired, attorneys say.
That modified in March. The State Department announced that for nearly seven years it had been placing within the incorrect line tens of hundreds of applications for neglected or abused minors from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and would now start adding them to the clergy queue. Since the mid-2010s, a surging variety of youth from these countries have sought asylum after illegally crossing into the U.S.
This change implies that only applications filed before January 2019 are currently being processed, moving forward the Central American minors by a couple of months but giving clergy with expiring visas, like Castillo, no option but to go away their U.S. congregations behind.
“They’re doing every little thing they’re alleged to be doing and hastily, they’re totally steamrolled,” said Matthew Curtis, an immigration attorney in New York City whose clients, like an Israeli rabbi and a South African music minister, are running out of time. “It’s like a bombshell on the system.”
Attorneys estimate so many individuals at the moment are within the queue that the wait is a minimum of a decade long, because only 10,000 of those green cards will be granted annually.
Curtis’ firm advises potential clergy applicants that “there is no such thing as a indication when you possibly can receive a green card.”
That’s prone to dissuade religious organizations from hiring foreign staff precisely after they’re most needed due to the growing demand for leaders of immigrant congregations who can speak languages apart from English and understand other cultures.
“There’s a comfort to practice your religion in your native tongue, in someone near your culture celebrating Mass,” said Olga Rojas, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s senior counsel for immigration. The U.S. Catholic Church has also turned to foreign priests to ease a shortage of local vocations.
At one Chicago-area parish that’s been helping with this yr’s surge of recent arrivals from the border, two Mexican religious sisters have began ministries for ladies within the shelters in addition to English classes, Rojas said.
“These two sisters know they won’t get green cards,” she added, and so they expect to lose other religious sisters and brothers who’re teachers, principals and serve in other key roles. “That’s catastrophic.”
Those from religious orders with vows of poverty, like Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks, are especially hard hit, because most other employment visa categories require employers to point out they’re paying foreign staff prevailing wages. Since they’re getting no wages, they don’t qualify.
Across all faith traditions, there are few options for these staff to proceed their U.S.-based ministry, attorneys say. At a minimum, they would want to go abroad for a yr before being eligible for an additional temporary religious employee visa, and repeat that process, paying hundreds in fees, throughout the last decade – or for nevertheless long their green card application stays pending.
“A giant concern is that leaving just isn’t really viable. The church will replace the pastor or shut down, it’s an excessive amount of instability,” said Calleigh McRaith, Castillo’s attorney in Minnesota.
Being in limbo is difficult for the affected religious staff, including Stephanie Reimer, a Canadian serving a nondenominational Christian youth missionary organization in Kansas City. Her visa expires in January.
“I’ve done loads of praying,” she said. “There are days when it feels overwhelming.”
Martin Valko, an immigration attorney in Dallas whose clients include imams and Methodist pastors, said many depend on their faith to remain hopeful.
But realistic options are so few that the American Immigration Lawyers Association and faith leaders, like Chicago’s Catholic cardinal and coalitions of evangelical pastors, have lobbied the Biden administration and Congress to repair the issue.
Administrative solutions could include allowing religious staff to a minimum of file for his or her green cards, in order that they can get temporary work authorization like those in other queues awaiting everlasting residence.
The best and immediate fix could be for Congress to remove from this category the vulnerable minors’ applications, attorneys say. Despite being humanitarian, they make up the overwhelming majority of the queue they share with religious staff, said Lance Conklin, a Maryland attorney who co-chairs the lawyer association’s religious staff group.
“They shouldn’t be pitted against one another in competition for visas,” said Matthew Soerens, who leads the Evangelical Immigration Table, a national immigrant advocacy organization.
Back on the Iglesia Pentecostal Unida Latinoamericana, Castillo said he has ministered to a family with two young children who survived the Darien Gap, a jungle in Central America favored by smugglers that’s amongst essentially the most dangerous parts of migrants’ journeys, and a mother and daughter who said they got here “through the outlet” within the border wall.
“Some of them are in a greater migration situation” than himself and his wife Yarleny, Castillo said. But he added that his call to minister to them is undaunted. “I serve God. He will take charge of those affairs while I lead those he has entrusted to me.”
That’s why, whilst they face having to go away the country when their visas expire in February, the Castillos are fundraising to purchase the constructing where they now rent worship space. They also recurrently drive 10 hours to South Dakota, where they’re establishing one other church.
“In this work, one is consistently helping destroyed migrant families,” Yarleny Castillo said. “And they need an area like this.”
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