America doesn't have an immigration policy. It has a human rights catastrophe | Will Bunch
Updated: January 28, 2018 — 3:32 PM EST
by Will Bunch, STAFF COLUMNIST @will_bunch | bunchw@phillynews.com
In the moral sense of the word, you’d be hard pressed to find a better American citizen than Harry Pangemanan. After Superstorm Sandy ravaged North Jersey in 2012, Pangemanan — a 46-year-old father of two who heads a church-based nonprofit in Highland Park, N.J. — organized other foreign-born refugees like himself to rebuild some 200 homes, while cooking meals for his army of volunteers and learning to hang drywall.
There’s just one problem: Pangemanan — a Christian who came to America undocumented about 25 years ago, fleeing persecution in Muslim-majority Indonesia — is not a citizen in the legal sense of the word. After dodging deportation in 2009 by seeking church sanctuary, and then risking arrest as he traveled to work on storm-ravaged homes, he had reached an uneasy but seemingly humane truce with U.S. immigration officials. They asked Pangemanan to regularly check in with them while allowing him to continue his good works in Highland Park.
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/trump-immigration-policies-violate-human-rights-20180128.html
