Teens End 'Immigration' Mission

The Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Larsen provided this information and photos.

Twenty-two high school students and seven adults from the Barrington Congregational Church and Temple Habonim returned home on Friday from an “amazingly powerful experience” in Arizona.

The experience was an "interfaith youth service trip to Tucson to learn about the issues of immigration and to work in soup kitchens, food pantries and on farms to aid the plight of the hungry and homeless,” said the Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Larsen of the White Church.

The youth learned, Larsen said, “that while there are very serious issues related to making entry into this country legal and safe, there are also many serious issues of humanitarian aid to people dying."

“We met with a number of social service agencies, visited the wall on the border at Nogales, attended court sessions, met with a public defender, walked the desert route many undocumented workers do,” he said.

Larsen added: “Some youth picked grapefruit and oranges from trees in yards of ‘snow birds’ who have returned north for the season leaving fruit to rot in their yards"

This fruit was distributed by volunteers to homeless with any extra fruit prepared into jams and salad dressings that are then sold to raise money to feed the hungry.

“We spent part of one day walking a route in the desert traversed, usually at night, by undocumented workers coming from Mexico across the border,” he said.

The group sometimes stumbled across “pieces of clothing dropped along their route because those fleeing needed to lighten their load,” he said. “Many of the found articles belonged to children.”

The group also read letters from prisoners in the Arizona prison system requesting books, found the books in a library, and packaged and shipped them along with a personal note, Larsen said.

“A huge percentage of these prisoners are undocumented workers from Mexico,” the pastor said.