Photo via Creative Commons
On December 21, Clive and Oneita Thompson, a married couple from Jamaica, walked free after more than two years of taking sanctuary in a Philadelphia church. The federal government had finally dropped its deportation case against them.
In the 2020 fiscal year, only around 3,000 people were granted asylum in the United States, an all-time low, according to the U.S. Department of State.
“When we got the letter from [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], I was just looking at it in shock,” Clive Thompson said in a statement. “It’s a big breakthrough—after working so long, this is a miracle. I feel like all the stress is drifting away, and everything is lighting up with joy.”
Because this happened during Christmas week, it’s tempting to frame their story as a Christmas miracle. And it has many elements of the original Christmas story: travelers fleeing danger in their homeland, looking to strangers in a strange land for help; parents desperate for a better future for their children.
The Thompson family fled Jamaica in 2004 after gang members burned their farm and threatened to kill them. The U.S. government denied them asylum at that time but allowed them to stay.
This is not uncommon. Migrants with no criminal record, as well as strong community and family ties, were, at least in the past, regularly granted stays of deportation. There are conditions, like check-ins with ICE, but ultimately those stays allowed these migrants to live and work (and to pay taxes) in the United States as they awaited some path to citizenship, or for Congress to pass any long-awaited national immigration reform.
So the Thompsons, too afraid to return to Jamaica, waited. They stayed and made a home for themselves and their seven children, throughout their fourteen years in the small New Jersey town of Cedarville.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clive was a heavy-equipment operator at the Bridgeton-based Cumberland Dairy, while Oneita, a certified nursing assistant, worked at Friends Village retirement home in a nearby township.
The couple have always taken pains to prove their worthiness: the Inquirer also printed photos of Clive holding up IRS documents—which proved he’d paid tax throughout his years here—and three of their children hold U.S. citizenship. It was the Trump Administration that ordered them deported.
That is where the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia came into play. The sanctuary group works to “end injustices against immigrants regardless of immigration status” by expressing radical welcome for all and ensuring that “values of dignity, justice, and hospitality are lived out in practice and upheld in policy.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has said it generally avoids making arrests at “sensitive locations,” including places of worship. But seeking sanctuary in a place of worship is a last resort, reserved for the most desperate of cases. It’s a difficult and lonely path, the ending unknowable.
The New Sanctuary Movement placed the family in the safety of the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, Pennsylvania, until September of last year, when they moved to Tabernacle United Church in the University City neighborhood of Philadelphia. It is unclear why the administration relinquished and allowed the couple to walk free. That lack of clarity adds to the “Christmas miracle” narrative, but is that right?
Storytelling is how I frame experiences and make sense of events. We all do the same, ever since our prehistoric ancestors were drawing on the walls of their caves. “This happened,” we say in every art form and every language, then “look out for dangers” and “here is what to do.” Without stories, we don’t have meaning.
The story of how the Thompsons were banished and redeemed is a miracle, but it’s not enough to leave it at that. A miracle implies a long shot, a rarity, an exceptional event. That’s not what the Thompsons’ story should be.
In each of the last six years, the number of people refused asylum in this country has grown, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. In the 2020 fiscal year, only around 3,000 people were granted asylum in the United States, an all-time low, according to the U.S. Department of State.
The United States must extend sanctuary to all who need it. As a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United States reneged on Article 14, which states: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” Instead, our government actively punished those who did seek asylum here.