[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5250]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           IMMIGRATION REFORM

  (Mr. VARGAS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Mr. VARGAS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of immigration 
reform. I wanted to take a moment to read an excerpt from a letter I 
received from Father Sean Carroll, a Jesuit priest who's with the Kino 
Border Initiative in Arizona.
  He writes:

       I have been working with deported migrant men, women, and 
     children along the U.S. border with Mexico. These past 4 
     years I have witnessed their brokenness in body and spirit.
       I have held the hand of a mother separated from her 
     children in Chicago and listened to a father deported away 
     from his children in North Dakota. I have been present with 
     the son seeking to be reunited with his mother in Central 
     California.
       I know God calls us not to oppress the widow, the orphan, 
     and the stranger--Exodus 22 and Deuteronomy 27--and yet I 
     have witnessed how we make widows out of women migrants when 
     we deport them away from their husbands. And I'm aware of how 
     we turn U.S. children into orphans by repatriating their 
     parents to Mexico and placing them in foster care.
       I see the ways we reject the stranger, the person seeking a 
     better life for their families, the one who, in the Gospel of 
     Matthew, reflects the presence of Jesus Himself.
       What would happen if we accepted God's invitation to 
     remember the moments that we were in exile, in Exodus, the 
     times when we felt like strangers, and to recall how God had 
     led us through those experiences to new life?

                          ____________________