Temporary Protection Status is an option under US immigration law to admit migrants who face life and death threats in their home country.
President Trump won a Supreme Court decsion saying he could reverse such status under his executive authority. Trump immediately used the ruling to revoke this legal status for hundred of thousands of Haitian and Syrian families living and working in the US legally.
The order went in effect approximately ten days ago. These immigrants are in legal limbo and uncertain fate. If any of these affected persons or any other immigrants taken by ICE are credit union members, what is your organization’s responsibility to them?
These individuals are now without protected status or, at best, an unknown future. Do you continue to serve? Take deposits? Make or collect loans? Transfer funds? Close their accounts? Act as trustee?
Do you wait and watch to see what happens as some members may have other legal options? Let events just play out and put a hold on activity?
What is the credit unions responsibility Legally? Practically? Morally?
A Temporary Immigrant’s Story from WW II
The following example is from another era of global immigration, This excerpt is from Martin Glbert’s In Search of Churchill. My connection is at the end.
In the summer of 1940 my father, who was then serving with an anti-aircraft gun battery on Hampstead Heath, took advantage of a British Government scheme to send children across the Atlantic to safety.
My parents were not well off, and it seemed to them that I would be better cared for there. That July, a month after the fall of France, when the German Army was on the cliffs between Calais and Boulogne, I sailed in the care of an aunt with several hundred other children, to Canada.Our boat, the Duchess of Bedford, was in a convoy of fifty ships. In mid-Atlantic, after the destroyer escort turned back, the convoy was attacked and five ships were sunk by the Germans.
The Duchess of Bedford sailed on safely, via the iceberg-dotted sea off Labrador, to Quebec. Those icebergs, marvellous for a child to behold, were among my first memories. Shortly afterwards another boat with child evacuees on board, the City of Benares, was sunk and seventy-seven children drowned. The scheme was then abandoned.
I was only three years old. Many years later I learned that at the time of the sailing of the Duchess of Bedford Churchill had been asked by the organisers of the scheme to give the oldest child a letter to Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, thanking him for receiving us. He was so opposed to any children being evacuated to Canada (he saw it as a “scuttle”) that he refused to write the letter telling the minister concerned: “I will not send any message through the eldest child, or through the youngest child either.” Thus I missed the chance to hold a Churchill letter in my hands, and to deliver it, though there were, I suppose, several children on board even younger than myself.
I hated Canada, not the country but the separation from my parents, and while the war was still being fought, I returned to Britain.It was Churchill himself, I later learned, who had noted, in his regular scrutiny of ships in transit and in port, that the ocean liner Mauretania, then a troopship, was sailing from New York in the summer of 1944 with several hundred empty berths. He at once suggested that several hundred children be rounded up and brought back.
As a result of his intervention I found myself all alone, with an identification tag round my neck, on the night train from Toronto to New York, arriving bewildered in the yawning cavern of Grand Central Station, clutching my brand new Canadian passport (“valid duration war”) and standing in a long, slow-moving line by the quayside on a sweltering New York summer afternoon. I did not know, as we later steamed across the Atlantic towards Liverpool, that Churchill had specifically asked the Admiral to make sure (amidst his many other cares in the immediate aftermath of the Normandy landings) that there were enough lifeboats on board for all the extra children.
My Interest in This Temporary Asylum Story
In the spring of 1968 I was the only student of a tutor reading for an exam on the topic of Britain’s foreign policy between the two world wars.
The tutor was a junior fellow at Merton College, Oxford who had just been asked to complete Randolph Churchill’s biography of his father as the author’s health deteriorated. He was given unrestricted access to Churchill’s private letters and personal notes.
That junior fellow was Martin Gilbert.