GOSHEN — A national effort to send messages of encouragement and love to immigrants has a presence in Goshen.
The To Immigrants With Love campaign began Wednesday on Valentine’s Day as a way people could post messages of support for immigrants on social media. The campaign will run through Saturday.
The National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago adopted the project this week and asked staff members, including the ones at the center’s Goshen office, to participate. The justice center provides legal services to immigrants and advocates for them on a national level. The Goshen’s center’s staff also joined the campaign against a proposal to build an immigrant detention center in Elkhart County. Private prison company CoreCivic of Nashville, Tennessee withdrew that plan last month.
The message from the center’s home office was “‘We are going to do this campaign on Valentine’s Day to show love and support for the people in our community and that we will continue to fight for them and work for them,’” said Maddie Birky, a paralegal at the Goshen office. “We wanted to bring that here, especially with our recent success in fighting off the detention center.”
Birky posted her own message to immigrants near the entrance to the center, which states, “You are strong. You are loved. You are more than your status. I promise to show up and fight for you.”
“It’s nice if our clients come in and see messages of local support on the wall here,” said Brittany Herschberger, who is also a paralegal at the Goshen office. “We thought it would be a nice way for our people to show support for immigrants.”
The center’s staff has placed a basket of note paper at The Electric Brew coffee shop a few doors down from their office along East Washington Street. On Thursday morning a few notes had been filled out, folded and stacked neatly in the woven basket, which was just fine with owner Myron Bontrager.
“They wanted to do that, so why not?” Bontrager said of the campaign.