A reminder from our friends at the Coalition on Human Needs:

Dear Friend,

Next Week, the Senate will vote on the Graham-Cassidy health care bill. It will be devastating to the people in California. The Graham-Cassidy bill:

• Provides no real assurance for preexisting conditions.
• Provides no minimum standard of coverage for insurance plans.
• Will cut $333,600 in federal funding for healthcare to California
• And while, outrageously, they want to take this vote without a full CBO score is it estimated that 4,552,000 people will lose coverage in California

We need you to help ensure that legislation never becomes law.​

You have a powerful voice and we need you to use it. Please contact the below listed Representatives and ask them to come out against Graham-Cassidy BEFORE the Senate takes a vote on it next week.

• Ken Calvert
• Duncan D. Hunter
• Darrell Issa
• Steve Knight
• Doug LaMalfa
• Kevin McCarthy
• Tom McClintock
• Devin Nunes
• Dana Rohrabacher
• Edward R. Royce
• Mimi Walters

Attached is a fact sheet which lists the impact that the bill will have on Californians.

Dear Friends,
 
SB 54, the California Values Act, will likely pass the Assembly.
 
This bill that we have been tracking all session, prohibits open-handed cooperation between CA governmental agencies, including law enforcement, and ICE, on rounding up and deporting people from our state. This is critical to assuring due process for all people and especially to protecting the role of immigrants, documented or not, as witnesses to crimes and their rights as victims of crimes. People cannot live in the shadows, powerless to engage with our police if they are living in fear of them.
 
This does not ban deportations. It simply means immigrants — the aliens among us God has directed we care about — be given strong rights before our laws. The Constitution of the United States requires this. SB 54 ratifies that process.
 
SB 54 does the following:

• Disentangle ICE and local law enforcement: No state or local resources will be used to investigate, detain, detect, report, or arrest persons for immigration enforcement purposes.
• Require a judicial warrant in order to detain any person for deportation purposes: Regardless of whether state or local resources are implicated, no state or local law enforcement agency will detain or transfer any person for deportation without a judicial warrant.
• Protect sensitive locations: California schools, health facilities, courthouses, and the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement will remain safe and accessible to all California residents, regardless of immigration status.

 
You may email the Governor directly via his site: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov39mail/
 The office phone and FAX numbers are also located on this page.
 
The Governor also has two field offices:
Los Angeles — phone: 213-897-0322 or FAX: 213-897-0319
San Francisco — phone: 415-703-2218 or FAX: 415-703-2803
 
The message is simple:
Hello, my name is______ and I am a member of California Church IMPACT (and/or your congregation or group). I am asking you to sign SB 54 to offer the immigrant populations of California due process in all potential deportation operations. This law protects people from unlawful and over-zealous actions by ICE and keeps our local state law enforcement people focused on their job of protecting us all, not abetting a horrible and abusive federal policy. SB 54 upholds the Constitutional directions to provide aliens with due process and assures that they receive full and fair hearings on their status. We need a strong, thoughtful law to keep people from harm, and SB 54 is it. Please pass this bill as it stands. Thank you.
 
Please begin your contacts with the Governor now. We are in the final month of this session, and time is of the essence. Justice for all people requires this of us.
 
Thank you!

​





​from our friends at Church World Service:

CALL YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES TODAY!
Background: Senators Cotton (R-AR) and Perdue (R-GA) introduced the “Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy” (RAISE) Act, which has garnered support from President Trump and white nativists. We urge all Members of Congress to reject this anti-family and anti-refugee legislation that would:

• Permanently cap refugee admissions at 50,000 per year, the lowest resettlement goal in U.S. history, during the largest global refugee crisis in world history.
• Eliminate the ability of U.S. citizens to sponsor their brothers and sisters, and create an impossible process for them to sponsor their parents for five-year visas, during which time the parents would not be able to work and the child would have to cover all expenses and health insurance costs.
• Stop green card holders from sponsoring their children over the age of 18.
• Make family-based visas for spouses and children harder to access by reducing the overall number of visas available based on the number of individuals who overstay their visas.
• Bar individuals from applying for U.S. citizenship if their family sponsor has not reimbursed the government for any expenses incurred.
• Delete individuals’ applications for eliminated visas, unless they have only one more year in the backlog, leaving approximately four million people, who have been promised a visa but are waiting in line for it to become available, without any opportunity to reunite with their family members
• Essentially only permit individuals who have certain education levels, work history, English-language ability, or high-paying job offers to enter the United States
• Reduce legal immigration channels by 50-70 percent, with an 85 percent cut to family-based immigration,
• Not increase skills-based immigration, or increase jobs or wages for the U.S.-born, as such policies have failed in the past since immigrants do not depress wages or reduce job growth

CALL YOUR SENATORS & REPRESENTATIVE TODAY: 202-224-3121
Sample Script: “I’m your constituent from [CITY/TOWN], and I am strongly OPPOSED to Senators Cotton and Perdue’s RAISE Act. Thi bill would permanently cut refugee resettlement numbers to historic lows, make family reunification inaccessible, and essentially only permit individuals who have certain education levels, employment history, and English-language ability to enter the United States. I urge you to reject this bill and do everything in your power to see that it does NOT become law.”
Feel free to share a personal story about standing in solidarity with refugees and immigrants.
You can also tweet at your Representatives & Senators:

• .@[REPRESENTATIVE] Welcome #refugees & #families & #immigrants. Say NO to the RAISE Act #RefugeesWelcome #NoBanNoWallNoRaids #GreaterAs1
• ..@[SENATOR] The RAISE Act would separate families, reject refugees & dishonor American values. Stop this anti-family, anti-refugee bill. #VoteNo

Please spread the word and send this alert to your networks! Please tell us if you take action!
Follow @CWS_global on Twitter and “like” CWS Immigration and Refugee Program on Facebook for up-to-date alerts.

Dear Friends:​

The U.S. Senate has failed to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act (ACA)  Three GOP Senators plus every Democrat and Independent refused to vote for a poorly crafted bill that would cost tens of millions their insurance and raise premium costs on everyone else.

The straw vote for "repeal and don't replace" is equally doomed by the same votes.  Were ACA - Obamacare - simply repealed, it would throw 32 million off health care immediately and would double the cost of premiums over the next several years. 

Your calls, emails, FAXes, and visits to your Senators - even friendly ones who already agreed not to harm ACA - were critical in this action today.  Americans, united in a single voice about the importance of health care, kept the focus on preserving what we had and not doing harm by repealing some or all of the plan.

Now we can see, as we did in the passage of ACA, that we have strength as citizens and as people of faith. 

We will keep watching the next issue - the federal budget - to keep up on cuts to ACA, to Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California) or any other budget cuts, transfers, omissions that might impact our health care.  This will include cuts to items that lie outside the operating budget including Medicare and Social Security that have their own accounts but that are targets for cuts nonetheless.

The importance of your advocacy cannot be overstated.  Without your voices and your presence, we would be at high risk of losing health care for middle income to very poor people. We won this dispute. We will help you stay on top of new developments.  This is not over. We will be called once again we're sure.

Thank you for all you do for justice!