Jubilee’s 10th Anniversary Celebration on September 12th: Remarks by Amy Lee

Good evening. Thank you so much for joining us tonight to celebrate and mark this milestone of Jubilee’s decade of service and advocacy. Many of you have been traveling with Jubilee from the very beginning. Some of you are just getting to know us. Welcome to the Jubilee community of friends. I’m here to tell you our story. I find that especially during these uncertain times, it is grounding to remember our story, who we are and where we have come from.

Jubilee’s mission is to stand in solidarity with immigrants and their families by providing affordable, quality immigration legal services and advocating for just immigration policies. We envision and strive for a reconciled and restored community, one we believe to be God's intent for all of humanity.

One of our good friends once called Clare and me “two careful Chinese American women.” We had a good laugh about that because it really does describe us well. Clare and I are 1.5 generation immigrants, raised in our native lands and tongues, in Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively. Like so many of Jubilee’s clients and many of us in this room, our parents made the difficult decision decades ago to leave their homeland to migrate here so their children could thrive and pursue the “American Dream.” Yet, in the past 25+ years, Clare and I found ourselves captivated by a very different kind of dream. What one theologian calls the “prophetic imagination.” We were invigorated by ancient Hebrew prophets in the Bible like Isaiah and Jeremiah who spoke out boldly against the injustice of their time and dared to dream God’s dream of a world where justice, wholeness and restoration prevailed. They urged their communities, who were just as divided and corrupt as ours, to live into that reality because that is the true world order. For the prophets, this meant: Proclaim good news to the poor, liberate the captives, free the oppressed, give sight to the blind. Which is actually what jubilee means in the Hebrew Scriptures. Complete restoration, wholeness and shalom. Where those on the margins are enfolded into the community and cared for. This was our inspiration and the vision that still grounds our work.

As part of the congregation that gave birth to Jubilee for 2+ decades, Grace Fellowship Community Church, Clare and I were inspired and shaped by pastors who reminded us who and whose we are. Fellow parishioners who modeled for us what it meant to love our neighbors in our work and communities.

So Jubilee has really been an experiment of trying to practice what we believe to be true. We wanted our faith to be more than just pie-in-the-sky ideas left behind in the pews on Sundays. We wanted to take seriously Jesus’ invitation to align ourselves with those who stood on the outside. Those with little power. Who, according to the religious establishment and the Empire of Biblical times, were unworthy, contaminated and didn’t belong. We wanted to explore what integrating our worldview, with our legal training, looked like on the ground -- in practice. In the very real and broken world of shared humanity and shared vulnerability. Where all are invited to feast at the Table.

Ten years later, Jubilee has grown beyond our wildest dreams. We’re still small, as you saw earlier, yet beautiful and mighty. It has never been our intent to grow just for the sake of getting bigger, which there is huge pressure to do. We aren’t in the business of creating a product that we can replicate elsewhere. Rather, we grew because we were gifted with new funding or invited to join a new collaborative. And the community need kept escalating. Along the way, we added to our talented team of advocates, co-laborers with deep experience and roots in the immigrant communities we serve. Our goal has always been to use the legal resources we have been gifted with to serve immigrants on the margins. To be compassionate community lawyers for immigrants. Yet, recognize that we can’t do it all and we too need to pause and find sabbath along the way. We love our smallness because when you’re small, you get to experiment and try out new things. You have to learn to lean on each other and ask for help, from your team and community partners. We do our best work of justice, not alone, but in the company of others. Even when there’s drama and disagreements that you have to work out.

Today, we find ourselves living under a cruel regime, not too different from the Empires of the ancient Hebrew prophets or Jesus’ day. Today’s Empire demonizes our immigrant neighbors as “invaders, pollutants and sub-human.” It is a horrifying and distressing time for all immigrant communities and for those on the frontlines advocating for them. It is really hard, exhausting work. We wake up to a new punishing, warped policy each morning that further crushes our clients and makes our work as advocates for immigrants harder than ever. Yet, with your support and prayers and the grace of God, we want to keep going. Keep engaging in the movement of justice that God, the ancient Hebrew prophets and many, many people before us initiated long before we got here. We are still dreaming, learning, building.

Thank you for showing up tonight to mark Jubilee’s milestone. To courageously stand and walk with us and our clients as we keep advocating and resisting in the face of cruelty and evil. We, and all our immigrant communities, are invited to share in the wholeness, restoration and freedom that our name, Jubilee, represents. Thank you for joining us to proclaim jubilee.

By Amy Lee

Executive Director & Immigration Attorney