Cheering crowds jammed a parade route as Francis made a leisurely loop around the streets near the White House after his first official activity Wednesday morning in the South Lawn.
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“My parents work hard in this country and they deserve to live with dignity, they deserve to live with respect”, Sophie stated to the AP cameras, while her father, Juan Cruz, said in Spanish that “today’s encounter of my daughter with the Pope was something absolutely extraordinary, it was a true miracle”. Cruz delivered a letter saying that she was fearful that her undocumented parents could be deported. It reads “My little friends and me love without caring about the color of our skin”. They deserve an immigration reform because that’s in America interest.
How did she work up the courage to reach the pope?
Although Pope Francis is a faith leader, politics and policy were never far during his visit to Washington this week, either in his own statements or in the form of protesters trying to get attention for their issues by tying them to the pope’s visit. If she had been unsuccessful in Washington, he said, she would try again in New York and Philadelphia.
“There are many people, children especially of undocumented immigrants, who suffer from asthma and diseases that are caused by the climate and the environment that we live in”, he said.
The pope’s embrace of young Sophie has flashed around the world, carried at the supersonic speed of social media.
Sophie’s father lowered her, and the little girl in an embroidered dress, her hair in braids, got beyond the fence-like barricade.
The same group, which includes members of the Hermandad Mexicana Transnacional, orchestrated an equally successful effort in Rome past year with 10-year-old Jersey Vargas, who pleaded with Francis to urge President Barack Obama to free her immigrant father from a Louisiana detention center.
At one point, his team handed him five-month-old Loukas Chavez, another son of immigrants from Virginia. Let us remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
And if you still doubt the degree to which immigrant activists are banking on the power of personal narrative to shape USA politics, consider this: The nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), hosts an annual convention complete with workshops aimed at training people around the country to be effective activists working toward a variety of causes.
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On Thursday, September 4, Pope Francis is expected to lecture Congress of the subject of immigration. “So, I think it was a wonderful thing and very poignant”, said U.S. Rep. Julia Brownley, a Democrat from California.
