Costa Rican Friends help fund US migrants
‘This community was willing to step up and try to mitigate this suffering as best as possible.'
Quakers are part of a network in Costa Rica that has offered sanctuary to families expelled by the US government.
Around 200 people have arrived in the country in the last year, as part of the US crackdown on immigration.
According to the US Migration Policy Institute, roughly 15,000 migrants who cannot legally, or safely, return to their home countries have been sent to unfamiliar places by the Trump administration. These include countries such as Panama, Cameroon, and South Sudan.
One of the first to be offered sanctuary by the network include the Yusifov family, who were arrested while illegally crossing from Mexico into the US after their asylum appointments were cancelled. After months in a detention centre, they are now one of a small group of families being helped in Monteverde, where Quakers, local residents and expatriates have funded housing, school for their children, and sometimes offered work.
The project began last year when Monteverde Meeting heard about the struggles facing those deported and raised money to help six migrant families.
‘This community was willing to step up and try to mitigate this suffering as best as possible,’ Jennifer Walker Gates, a US immigration lawyer living in Monteverde, told the New York Times.
Katy VanDusen, a member of Monteverde Meeting, added: ‘We were not doing it as a political statement. We were doing it because these are people that need help.’
With one family moving away and requesting asylum, and others crossing into the US again, there are only two left in the area. However the Quakers told the New York Times that they expect the money to only last a few more months.
Monteverde Meeting started around 1951, when around forty US Quakers moved to the area after four of their men were imprisoned and told to emigrate for refusing to register for the peacetime draft. The Quakers chose Costa Rica as it had recently abolished its military.
