Vanesa Suarez and Tina Colón Williams.

Hartford—For the second time in 14 months, lawyers submitted to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement an emergency stay of removal for New Haven father Nelson Pinos. This time, they got an entourage to help cheer them on, then pray for the success of their application.

Wednesday afternoon, close to 50 people gathered at the U.S. District Court in downtown Hartford to support lawyers Tina Colón Williams and Yazmin Rodriguez just hours after they filed a stay of removal request for Nelson Pinos, an immigrant who has been seeking sanctuary First and Summerfield United Methodist Church for almost 11 months. The rally was organized by Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), with representatives from Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance (CIRA), Common Ground High School, Center for Community Change, and several leaders from Connecticut’s faith community.

Attendees included U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and State Rep. William Tong, who is running for attorney general in the upcoming election. Gov. Dannel Malloy was not able to be in attendance, but sent a statement defending Pinos as a father of three and dedicated community member, noting that "I urge ICE to do the right thing and grant a stay of Mr. Pinos' deportation." The rally was followed by a 14-hour prayer vigil in front of the building, set to end at 8 a.m. Thursday morning. At its terminus, the group planned to bring donuts and hot coffee to ICE officials in the building.

“This is a family that has been separated by a broken immigration system,” said Kica Matos, lawyer and immigrant rights advocate turned emcee for the afternoon. She gave ICE a deadline of Thanksgiving "at the latest" to grant the stay.

The stay of removal, if granted, would allow Pinos to return to his home in New Haven’s Annex neighborhood, where he has not been since Nov. 30 of last year. Prior to seeking sanctuary, Pinos had lived in the U.S. for 26 years, checking in at regular ICE appointments while raising three kids, and serving as the sole breadwinner in his family. In the request, Williams and Rodriguez said they stressed the trauma that Pinos’ stay in sanctuary has had on his wife and three children, the youngest of whom is only six years old.

Around this time last year year, Wiliams told the crowd, she filed a similar request. That request was denied, setting in motion a long and solitary stay in sanctuary, in which “his family has had to bear the disproportionate burden of separation from their father.” This time, she said she is “hoping that ICE will do the right thing” and consider more seriously the psychological harm and stress the order of deportation has already caused his family.

“Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, by law, has the authority simply to grant this request on the basis of the harm that his kids have been going through for the past year,” she said. “Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has the power to do a lot more than just detain individuals or remove people from the country, or make sure that families stay separated. They have the authority, also, to let people free. To release Nelson into liberty by granting a stay of the removal order that is against him. And that is exactly what we are asking them to do.”

Arley and Kelly Pinos with Vanesa Suarez.

Pinos’ daughters Kelly and Arlly spoke about that trauma firsthand. A junior at Wilbur Cross High School, Kelly addressed the pain of going through her day knowing that her father is in sanctuary, and will not be at home when she returns after school and work for the night. She spoke about how difficult it has been to have him miss major life accomplishments—her first job, her driver’s exam and license, and her enrollment in a class at Yale University. She wondered aloud if ICE’s orders would keep him from watching her cross the stage at high school and college graduation year, or becoming a nurse-midwife in graduate school.

“You are traumatizing us, you are making us suffer, I am begging you to grant my dad [a stay]” she said, reading from a letter addressed to Hartford ICE Director Aldean R. Beaumont. “Can you imagine yourself not seeing your kids grow up, or seeing their achievements? I am begging you to let my dad stay in this country.”

Arley, an eighth grader at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School, added that her father’s stay in sanctuary has been “affecting me tremendously” since Nov. 30 of last year, when Pinos went into sanctuary at the church, defying deportation orders to return to his native Ecuador.

“I used to be the happiest child on earth, now I’m just sad and angry,” she said, noting that her grades have been slipping. “My father did not do anything wrong. He crossed an imaginary line—so that makes him a criminal? No, it does not … I cry in fear that my family will be ripped apart.”

“If my father is deported, he is leaving his 6-year-old son behind who still has so much to learn,” she continued. “I do not want my brother to think that my dad just left him. My brother always talks about how he’s sad that my father can’t be home and it just breaks my heart because he’s so little and he’s suffering.”

Speaking about the psychological toll of family separation, ULA member and activist Vanesa Suarez said that the case has gained national grassroots support, thanks in part to a letter-writing campaign to ICE officials that ULA has led over the last several weeks. All of the letters, of which Suarez said there were over 100, were addressed directly to Beaumont. Speaking briefly toward the end of the rally, she read excerpts and quotes from several of the letters, recalling words of support that came from as far as Denver.

She recalled receiving one letter from a Colorado fifth grader named Leila, whose grandmother attends a sanctuary congregation in Connecticut and had told her about the case. Leila sent back a better with big, beautiful flourishes, bright drawings, and a message for ICE officials: “Stop Hurting Them.”

“We [immigrants] have been conditioned into proving that we are these great people, and that we come here to do all these wonderful things, and be heroes, and be better than the average person that is born here,” she added. “And that is exhausting. Nelson, you know, has done good for many years. But Nelson is just a father. And at the end of the day, his freedom isn’t so he can go be some engineer or some great inventor in this world. His freedom is so that he can return to his family.”

A Long, Cold Night Ahead

As she prepared for a 14-hour prayer vigil with four other faith leaders, First and Summerfield Rev. Vicki Flippin spoke to the crowd about her own relationship with Pinos, whose sanctuary bedroom is located next to her pastoral office on the second floor of the church.

In the past months, Flippin has watched as her 4-year-old daughter bonds with the Pinos’ 6-year-old Brandon, the two of them playing with toy dinosaurs and watching silly videos. She has spent days talking to Pinos about how he is doing, watching his face fall as he talks about the possibility of having to leave his family.

She spoke about about the Judgement of Nations in the Gospel of Matthew, as Jesus separated “sheep people” from “goat people,” or the righteous from the evil. The deciding factor, she explained, is what people did when Jesus came to them hungry, dirty, sick or poor looking for help. The sheep people were those who helped him become whole. The goat people were those who left him to fend for himself.

“When Jesus talked about judgement and accountability, when he talked about sin, he didn’t talk about being transgender or queer, he didn’t talk about upholding some patriarchal order in the world,” she said. “When Jesus talked about sin, when he talked about judgement, he talked about how you treat ‘the least of these.’ How you treat people who are suffering in your midst.”

“What did you do when Jesus asked for asylum, or got beat up by his employer because he was undocumented?” she added as she got ready to sit outside in dropping temperatures for the night. “Or got caught up in the trap that is the U.S. immigration system?”

To watch the Arts Council's Facebook live coverage from the event and a moving account of the prayer vigil from local filmmaker Travis Carbonella, click on the video below: