Note: Since I couldn’t make it in person to the June 11, 2025, local city council meeting to support a resolution acknowledging World Refugee Day, I emailed the following message to the council instead.
Good afternoon, everyone! Since I won’t be able to make it in person to tonight’s council meeting, I’m sending this belated email to encourage city council to support tonight’s council agenda item 7F and its proposed Resolution 2025-93 locally recognizing June 20 as World Refugee Day.
Throughout U.S. history, refugees and other immigrants have routinely built infrastructure, paid taxes and worked hard to support their families and other newcomers. They are an integral part of our national identity, as Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, “The New Colossus,” attests, from an inscription inside the Statue of Liberty. Now, in this uncertain societal moment, it’s more important than ever to make room in our communities and in our hearts for people seeking asylum, temporary protected status, humanitarian parole and other entry visas. May we do all we can to ensure this is a safe haven for people escaping war, danger, conscription, famine and genocide, and a place where people can start over and build a life, just as members of both my sides of my family tree did in the late 1800s and early 1900s, respectively.
As a person of faith, I believe it’s important to point out that even the Holy Family itself — Joseph, Mary and Jesus — were forced to become refugees in Egypt (see the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 2). This makes our treatment of refugees, quite literally, a litmus test for how we would treat Jesus himself. And as a resident working toward conciliation with Native peoples, both locally and via a newly recognized Sister Cities partnership with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, it’s important to remember and to recognize that the Arapaho, the Cheyenne and other Native peoples were forcibly displaced from this area during and after the Pikes Peak Gold Rush. May we not lose sight of the fact that U.S. settlement here created thousands of Native refugees in the 1860s, even as we work in our own day to ensure refugees and immigrants to our community are not forced to follow in their steps.
That’s all I have for you today. Thank you for your consideration!
Peace,
