My church, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder, has been hosting Ingrid Latorre in sanctuary at the church since last month [1]. Ingrid is an undocumented immigrant from Peru, and she has been fighting a deportation order at the behest of her adorable sons, ages 2 and 9, who don't wish to leave the only country they've ever known.

Today, Ingrid's partner and financial support of their family, Eliseo Jurado, was followed by six Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to a local grocery store, where he was buying food for the children, and detained him as he left the store. He is being held tonight in an ICE detention facility in Denver [2].

There was no warrant for his arrest, and there is no order of deportation. There is no objective reason for him to be a priority ICE target. So it is without doubt that he was targeted by ICE because his partner has very publicly taken sanctuary in my church. This is your government, our government, bending its priorities in order to terrorize the loudest voices speaking out against its (our) unjust practices.

I'm with you that we need immigration laws, and we need to enforce them, but immigration laws in this country have been broken for a long time. Immigrant labor fed the nation's economy, and we looked the other way because it was good for business, good for our houses and lawns, and good for our plates.

Immigrants understood the tacit rules in place: work hard, be good neighbors, contribute to society, and you will be allowed to stay.

You may not have realized this yet, but by your silence in recent decades, you too were party to this agreement. You can't break it now. We can't break it now. We need to find a path forward, a path where people we allowed into this country, people that agreed to our wink-wink immigration policies, people that have played by those rules -- we need to find a way to be compassionate, and to be good neighbors back, and to allow them to live without fear, with their families, in their communities.

Today, we need Eliseo Jurado to be allowed to return to his family and to his community. And tomorrow we need to work together to find compassionate legislative solutions to enable all such families to remain together in the communities and the nation of which they are now a part.

#free_eliseo