We Provide Sanctuary: Standing Together with the Migrants of New York

Today across Manhattan, Episcopal churches are serving hot lunches, offering bag lunches, and sharing warm coats to wear in the cold. We’re gathering for church services and offering space for peace and respite.

Clergy and volunteers are opening doors to welcome neighbors from every background.

The joy of my ministry as the Episcopal Bishop of New York is to be out with our people in local communities. The Episcopal Diocese of New York is nearly two hundred congregations, chaplaincies, and schools stretching from Staten Island to Poughkeepsie. We’re proud of our open doors. What’s happening today in Manhattan is also happening in every neighborhood of our Diocese.

We welcome everyone from every part of the world without investigating their official immigration documentation status. We simply ask if they are hungry, or lonely, or cold.

This welcome and care now stands at risk. In the last week there have been sudden and jarring changes in federal immigration policy that affect all New Yorkers. The new Administration has removed “sensitive sites” protection from schools, libraries, health care institutions, and faith communities.

These changes curtail our religious freedom, disregard our long civic traditions, and jeopardize the future of New York.

We join with communities of all backgrounds to affirm human dignity as foundational to our shared civic tradition. This commitment is carried out daily in elementary school classrooms, hospital emergency rooms, and library read-alongs—alongside churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples in every New York neighborhood.

Together, we create communities of safe belonging that make our neighborhoods safer too.

The welcome of Episcopal Churches reflects our faith. We believe our care reflects God’s unconditional love. As Christians, we are called to build communities of deep belonging, connection, and care.

We provide sanctuary.

Now we’re joining together to protect our people and our communities. We’re standing up for our values and shared traditions.

We are forming a coalition of care and welcome for a stronger and safer New York.

Invading school classrooms or religious sanctuaries with federal immigration teams makes us all less safe. Separating any New Yorker from food, shelter, education, or health care makes no sense. New York has always grown and thrived because of new arrivals. We’re always stronger together.

Over the last two years asylum seekers have sought safety and a new home in New York from every part of the world. Our schools, libraries, health care agencies, and faith institutions have made this welcome possible.

The Episcopal Diocese of New York has declared itself to be a sanctuary diocese with a focus on welcoming asylum seekers and refugees and caring for those in our communities who are undocumented. This declaration means that we’re going to continue our daily practices of welcome and care that have guided us for so long.

We’re inviting all New Yorkers to join this coalition of care & welcome because all of us benefit from the strength of our neighborhood institutions. All of us benefit from the presence of our newest New Yorkers.

We’re calling on our local and state public officials to affirm our traditions and protect our people, too.

Together we can stand up for New York. Together we can care for New Yorkers.

We live our faith and values in small acts of care. We form communities of belonging through our daily activities. For us as Episcopalians, sanctuary makes real the peace of God that is our gift in grace.

As our neighbors are threatened, together we will respond with hope, justice, and love.

Heyd is the 17th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.