Mobilizing Quakers for Immigration Justice with AFSC

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1. Brian Blackmore discusses the tension Quakers feel between wanting to stay small and relational, while also expecting AFSC to make a global impact. How can we manage global impact and local work?
2. Marcia describes a Sunday meeting where she realized that kindness and generosity are literally contagious. Have you ever witnessed a moment where one single act of compassion inspired a whole community to get involved?
3. Marcia Aguiluz’s guiding mantra is “small is beautiful”. She suggests that even if we cannot change the whole world, we can change the life of the person right next to us. What is a small, beautiful act of justice you can commit to in your own neighborhood?

Zack Jackson  

February 25th, 2025, a fully loaded Airbus A320 touched down in Alajuela, Costa Rica. It was 86 degrees, sunny, and humid with a slight breeze blowing across the tarmac. The heavy cabin doors swung open, and a blast of tropical heat rushed into the overcrowded airplane. Two hundred passengers shuffled down the metal stairs and into the doors of idling buses that had been waiting for them. The passengers wore handcuffs. They were completely disoriented. None of them were from Central America, and none of them had come here by their own volition.

Marcia Aguiluz  

They were deported from China, from Azerbaijan, from Russia, from Turkey, from Armenia. And I was just thinking, how are they feeling, you know, to be somehow left in a place that they don’t know anything about.

Zack Jackson  

That’s Marcia Aguiluz. She serves as the regional director for Latin America at the American Friends Service Committee. She watched the news in disbelief. Her government had just accepted a plane full of frightened, displaced people from US detention centers. They had committed no crimes in her country, but were being held in detention nonetheless.

One of those passengers was a man named German Smirnov. And the story of how a Russian fitness coach ended up in handcuffs on a Costa Rican runway is a journey through the very heart of our cruel and inhumane immigration system.

Zack Jackson

I’m Zack Jackson, and this is Thee Quaker Podcast.

Two hundred people, handcuffed and thousands of miles from home.This is the reality of a dehumanizing system working exactly as it was built to. The American Friends Service Committee, or AFSC, approaches that reality differently. For more than a hundred years, they have put Quaker values into practice across the globe—advocating for just migration, equality, and peace. They work to ensure that movement across borders is met with compassion, rather than violence. Yet, at the heart of all that policy work is the core belief that every single individual matters. Which brings us back to the man in the handcuffs.

A few years ago, German lived a quiet life as a fitness coach in St. Petersburg, Russia. He volunteered as an election worker. He paid attention. Then he saw something he shouldn’t have seen.

German Smirnov  

So I was working on elections for many years, since 2018 and no one just brought me here and told me, “Look, how we fraud votes, how we fraud these papers, how we add some numbers”. No one told me this. I found it out by myself, working for many years, and I decided to show it, but anonymously. I knew that it wouldn’t change a lot of things in my country, but it was more for me, for my personal like I did what I could and live and continue to live normally. Or if it could shake the system a little bit, it would be better.

Zack Jackson  

German loved his country, and wanted to make a difference, so he filmed the election fraud that he found, but before he could even leave the polling place, a Russian officer stopped him, unlocked his phone, and, discovering the video, held him there until police could arrive. He knew that if he was arrested, he would either spend his life in prison, or be shipped to the front lines of Ukraine, so he ran. When he got home, he told his wife what he had done.

German Smirnov  

It wasn’t like a conversation, really. When I told her I was 100% sure that she would support me, and it happened actually. So I told her that we need to leave the country, that I’m in big trouble, and it’s the best time to start traveling.

Zack Jackson  

He took his wife, his young son, and their life savings. They fled to Mexico.

They waited in the desert for nearly a year for a legal asylum appointment through a US government app. Six days after they finally got an appointment, the Trump administration took over, and overnight, threw the whole system into chaos. They were out of options. They walked to the border.

German Smirnov  

Then we crossed the border by car, because it was the only one option left, and we asked for a political asylum, because in order to ask for a political asylum, you need to be on territory of the United States. So we gave up to officers and asked for asylum and they ignored our request. Hold us. Hold us for 31 days in a border facility and then send us to Costa Rica.

Zack Jackson  

Officers put his family in chains at 3am, and loaded them onto an airplane to Costa Rica.

The Costa Rican government drove them eight hours away to the middle of nowhere where they locked them inside an abandoned pencil factory.

German Smirnov  

So imagine a big rusty hanger. Inside this rusty hanger, you got the modules from 5 to 11 people in which in one module in. Very hot. They didn’t give enough water. First time. Later, they gave enough water, and you don’t know what to do. No one tells you. They only tell me to go home, but I cannot go home. No go home. So you can imagine.

Zack Jackson  

German sat in that rusty hangar for six months without his passport, his glasses, or hope. He was trapped in a massive, unfeeling machine. The US immigration system is cruel in its inefficiency. It processes raw human material. It strips away names. It erases individual stories.

Amy Gottlieb  

Even though I’ve been in this work for 30 years, I continue to be shocked and astonished at how dehumanizing the language coming out of our government agencies is.

Zack Jackson  

That’s Amy Gottlieb. She is the US migration director at AFSC, and she told me that no matter how the government justifies their violence through dehumanizing language, there is power in the individual story. 

Amy Gottlieb  

The people who have had the courage to migrate, to come to a new place, to try to start their lives over because they’re not able to have their basic needs met. The courage that that person has to cross the Darien Gap, to face what they might face in detention. That’s courage that I will never know or understand because I have not had that personal experience. But when somebody has that courage, that story needs to be told in a way that that power that that person has is shown, is demonstrated, and that we are learning and take guidance from them in how we talk about migration, how we talk about borders, how we talk about detention, how we talk about what immigration policy should be.

Zack Jackson  

But that courage is being tested in entirely new ways during this administration. The landscape of immigration detention is shifting, replacing any illusion of justice with a punitive, privatized machine.

Amy Gottlieb  

We say immigration detention is fundamentally immoral right, and that is across the board. So that is for somebody who enters the US seeking asylum, who is afraid for their lives and their home country, and who risked everything they had to come here. By law, those people can be detained immediately. They can also be paroled out, released into the community, to live in the community while their asylum cases are being heard. Now, there is a massive backlog. So a lot of those people, as they’re waiting for their asylum cases to be heard, develop roots, you know, create ties, etc. Right, the Trump administration is coming in and arresting those people as they go into their interviews, right, locking themselves up far away from those ties they created, far away from any community, often without access to a lawyer, often without access to their families. 

So Right? They’re locked up in extremely punitive conditions, and they have removed all of the oversight offices that existed within the Department of Homeland Security, within ICE, within the federal government, that at least made there be like, at least the illusion of some kind of accountability. So now we’re looking at detention centers that are run by private companies that are strictly for profit. All of the tentacles that are in the immigration detention system are strictly for profit. It’s all private companies making millions or stocks or soaring and they are profiting off the backs of people suffering. 

Zack Jackson  

AFSC resists this violence. They push back against an entire federal apparatus. They have local programs working to shut down detention centers across the country.

But they are not just a secular non-profit. They do not do this work simply to be good citizens. They are driven by a deep spiritual mandate. Here’s Ainsley Bruton. She is the Quaker Engagement Coordinator at AFSC.

Ainsley Bruton  

I think it really comes down to the fact that at the heart of our work is the belief that there is that of God within each and every person. And that is the belief that is at the heart of Quakerism as well. This belief, this core value, animates every element of our work, every other value that AFSC stands for, that sense of the inner light of the inherent worth and dignity of each and every person is really at the core of what AFSC is and our identity as an organization.

Zack Jackson  

Quakers call this the testimony of equality. It is not just a polite metaphor. It is a radical claim. If you truly believe the divine light resides inside a terrified Russian fitness coach, everything changes. You cannot lock that light in a rusty hangar. You cannot put God in handcuffs.

Amy Gottlieb  

And so, you know, I would say, if you went through all the Quaker testimonies, all of us who work here would be able to identify how each of the testimonies shows up in our work, on a day to day basis. And you know, we often make mistakes, and you know we want to acknowledge those, but we really do our best to do all of our work from a place of integrity, of humanizing, of doing our work from a place of love and not from a place of anger and hate.

Zack Jackson  

This spiritual conviction creates a radically different approach to advocacy. It means refusing to put conditions on who gets to be treated like a human being. Rather than only standing up for people with simple, uncomplicated stories, AFSC actively challenges the “good immigrant, bad immigrant” dichotomy. They reject the narrative that human dignity is a prize you only get for having a clean criminal record.

Amy Gottlieb  

We do not believe that anyone should be detained and deported and ripped from their families, right? We’ve seen a narrative of, oh, but you know, so many people don’t have criminal convictions. We want to make sure that nobody is detained and we are not throwing those folks under the bus who might have had contact with the criminal legal system, they should also not be detained, they should not be deported. And we need to be looking at justice for all of our communities, not just that. And that’s what I was alluding to when I said this, good immigrant, bad immigrant dichotomy that is really perpetuated, not only in the media. Now, I mean, it’s like we’ve all been sort of forced into this conversation, and we want to be sure that we are uplifting the dignity of every single person. That’s something I feel really, really strongly about, and is a place where I think AFSC differs from some of the other immigrant justice organizations out there, because we do believe that all people should be treated with dignity and respect.

Zack Jackson  

This work requires a global footprint.

Ainsley Bruton  

I think like the kind of scope of our work, of being able to work in multiple places across the world and also in the US, gives us a really valuable perspective and how all of these injustices across the world are deeply connected, how the immigration detention system in the US is also tied to the for profit prison industrial complex, and how the genocide in Palestine is tied up with weapons manufacturers and this kind of exploitative global capitalist system throughout the world, we’re able to have this really global perspective and this kind of unique position working in all of these places, and having our staff be in communication with one another, so that we’re able to address violence and injustice from multiple angles all at the same time.

Zack Jackson  

They challenge the prison industrial complex, and they push back against global capitalist exploitation. They work across multiple continents at the exact same time. But this global scale can create an uncomfortable tension. 

Quakers value grassroots connection; they want to look their neighbors in the eye. An international organization can feel distant, or even like a secular NGO. Here is Brian Blackmore, the director of Quaker Engagement at AFSC.

Brian Blackmore  

I think, something that you’re hinting at is this like dissonance between Quakers really valuing something that feels grassroots, built and nurtured by relationships made through community and the grand and impressive work that AFSC has done over its history, and kind of an expectation Quakers have of AFSC to continue to go big.

And so there’s, there’s this is kind of both/and emotion that we detect of wanting things to stay small and local, and then wanting things that make a big splash and transform the world, we don’t want to go big, if that means losing that precious sense of being intimate and close, human to human, that wherever two or more are gathered, kind of a spirit of things.

Zack Jackson  

But AFSC does not set its agenda from a corporate boardroom. They are committed to connection. 

Ainsley Bruton  

And that’s because our priorities, the work that we are doing comes from the communities that we serve. So our work comes directly from those impacted communities and the partners that we work with on the ground, which informs how we do our work, how we decide what our program goals and objectives are going to be for the year.

Zack Jackson  

They listen to the communities. Then they use their institutional influence to protect them. And German desperately needed that protection. He was still trapped in that rusty pencil factory. His family was terrified. It would take the highest court in the land to set them free. 

But standing against a government system is one thing. True justice would require far smaller miracles. More on that, after the break. 

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This episode is sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee.

For over a century, AFSC has been working to bring the Quaker values of peace, equality, and justice to life around the globe. In this episode, we’re talking a lot about their work around just migration, but that is actually just one small part of their larger mission. AFSC focuses on three main strategic goals: Just migration, Just peace, and Just economies.

They believe that true, lasting change comes from the ground up, built by communities working together across all of these interconnected issues to create a more compassionate world. Whether you are passionate about protecting immigrant rights, supporting local peacemaking efforts, or standing in solidarity with marginalized communities, AFSC invites you to put your faith into action.

To learn more about their three strategic goals, or to find a way to get involved in your own community, visit A-F-S-C dot org. That’s A-F-S-C dot org.

And now, back to the show. 

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Zack Jackson

Before the break, we left German and his family locked in a rusty hangar. They were entirely alone in Costa Rica.

AFSC stepped in. Marcia and her team used their institutional power. They worked with their network of community partners and local organizations to take the Costa Rican government to the Constitutional Court. They argued that the 200 people in that hangar had their basic human rights violated.

They won the case. The court ordered the government to return their passports and release the families.

Marcia Aguiluz  

One of our objectives as AFSC, of course, the first one was for them to be released because their freedom was being taken. But then the other one was, how can we improve their conditions if they are going to stay here for a while, and because we really thought that they needed to somehow, you know, pause and then decide with more information, what can we do to improve their living conditions? And this is where the partnership with the Quaker community suddenly arise, and it was just a blessing, absolutely,

Zack Jackson  

Policy does not cook dinner. A court victory does not make a bed.

German and his family were suddenly free, but they had no money. They did not speak Spanish. They had nowhere to sleep. For that, Marcia needed a community. She called the mountain town of Monteverde. It was founded by Quakers decades ago.

They did not hesitate.

Marcia Aguiluz  

They prepare drawings for the kids. And when the kids arrive, you know, they gave them this bag with drawings and candy, you know, so that the kids can also draw and then, like I was saying, Sarah was in charge of taking the food to the different places where they were going to stay. And then they also make this activity to buy sweaters, because where they were living at the detention center was really hot, but then Monteverde, it’s kind of cold, it’s a mountain, so they were going to need another set of clothing, so they had this bag full of different sweaters for kids, for so that they could choose, and they could actually be have more appropriate clothing for the from Monteverde, everybody did something, and what you’re saying is, right, it’s a different kind of giving. 

When I saw that, I remember that I wrote something and I took one of my children also with me, so that he could meet also the people and and I wrote something about, when you think about generosity, you know, when you think about kindness, sometimes it feels so abstract, you know, but then when do you actually see it? And I remember that day I saw it, you know, it wasn’t that I was only feeling it, or I know what it meant. I just saw it in every single act of these people.

Zack Jackson  

Local families gave up their rental cabins. They surrendered their primary sources of income. They opened their own spare bedrooms.

Marcia Aguiluz  

I think it’s Sarah. Her name. One of the Quakers. She’s about probably 80 years old, and she drives this golf car. And I remember that she was driving this golf, her golf cart, and taking this, you know, like some fruits and rice and juices and chocolates and take it to all of the different houses where they were going to stay. So the day that they arrive, they will have their freezer full with food so that they can cook. And you know the sense of these people of arriving to a house, to an apartment where they can see, okay, this is my food. I can actually cook, you know, like feeling that this is my place, that this is home, although it was going to be for a few months or whatever. It was just unbelievable. It was so beautiful.

Zack Jackson  

German had spent his entire life in a city of ten million people. It is easy to be anonymous in a crowd that size. Then he spent six months in a system designed to erase him. But when he stepped off the bus in Monteverde, that isolation ended. He was surrounded by strangers who owed him nothing. Yet, they were already treating him like family.

German Smirnov  

These people gave us sanctuary. They gave us money for food. They are taking care about us. They give us house, housing and all kinds of support that we need, all the questions that we got, all the everything. I mean this community that lives here is, I tell you, it’s some kind of shock for me, because it’s absolutely unusual for people, they don’t know you, and they give you everything in order to help you.

Zack Jackson  

They organized English and Spanish lessons. They offered sanctuary. They offered simple, radical hospitality. The very next morning, the Monteverde Quakers held their Sunday meeting for worship. Marcia attended,

Marcia Aguiluz  

and I remember, I went the next day, on Sunday, there was a meeting, and I went to the meeting. And we were a couple of people just sitting there and one of the Quakers actually stood up and said, “I saw the love and the light in these people that arrived yesterday”. And we were all crying, you know, because it was so powerful where you can actually see, and not only see it, but show it, you know, and feel it and sense it and and it was contagious, because I remember that when I saw that, I wrote something of my on my social media, and then people started writing to me, What can I do? You know, do they need glasses? Because I remember one of the kids had something in his eyes, and he needed a new pair of glasses. Can I support him with those glasses? What can I do? There was a photographer in Monteverde. I can take pictures, you know, of them, so we can then use them for something. And it was just beautiful. And my whole that remember that weekend I was like, yes, we need to make kindness and love and generosity to be contagious. 

Zack Jackson  

That moment in Monteverde is the ideal. It is what happens when institutional power meets grassroots faith. AFSC wants to build that kind of bridge everywhere. 

Amy Gottlieb  

All of our local programs work quite closely with local Quaker meetings in different ways, in different capacities. Some of our programs are located in Quaker meetinghouses. Others have regular presentations with local meetings, others have regular volunteer opportunities with local Quaker meetings, and regular connecting Quakers with volunteer opportunities.

Zack Jackson  

They do not just share space. They share action. Recently, AFSC launched a campaign called “Love as Action.” They asked local meetings to hold silent worship services in public spaces to bear witness to justice and to stand with the oppressed. 

Ainsley Bruton  

We see this act of standing silently in public witness as a powerful way to break through the noise of the public discourse and to express our values and our resistance visibly and publicly.

Zack Jackson  

There are vigils planned for March and April, with more coming up this Summer. For Brian, this is the power of an organization like AFSC. It’s about showing up locally. It’s about closing the gap between the professional staff and the people in the meetinghouse.

Brian Blackmore  

For me, it goes back to relationships again, and I know this is something I can’t stop talking about, because I care about it so much. But for have our staff be able to name a dozen or more Friends that they are aware of who are doing important peace and justice work, and for Quakers themselves to be able to name about a dozen of AFSC staff that they admire and are impressed with, for there to be just a sense of belonging amongst friends in AFSC, the AFSC feels like an activist home for the Quaker world.

Zack Jackson  

This is where the macro meets the micro.

This is how a global organization maintains its soul. AFSC brings the lawyers. They bring the policy experts. They bring their cases to the highest courts.

But the local meeting brings the golf carts. They bring the sweaters. They clear out their guest rooms. They look a terrified family in the eye and say, “You are safe here.”

They put flesh and bone on the belief that there is that of God in everyone.

Marcia Aguiluz  

And I think one of my mantras last year, and I’m going to use it this year again, is “small is beautiful”. You know, no matter what we do, even if we think it’s so small, it’s beautiful, and we have to stick to that, like in AFSC, we want to transform the world. I mean, we want to transform inequalities. We want to transform these systems that are killing people. I don’t know if we are going to be able to do it very soon.

But whatever we can do for the people that we have around us, it’s beautiful. So my invitation is to to just think about that, that even though we can’t change the world at the moment, we can change the person that we have around, you know, and and with the small things, it hasn’t had to be big things, I hope that everybody can have that sense of doing whatever they can for whoever they can’t. It’s beautiful, and we have to keep doing it. So that will be my message, if possible.

Zack Jackson  

Thank you so much for walking alongside us today. A very special, heartfelt thank you to German and his family for their courage and vulnerability in sharing their story with us. As of today’s release date, they are still living in Monteverde and with the help of their Quaker allies, are figuring out what comes next. Thank you also to Marcia Aguiluz, Amy Gottlieb, Ainsley Bruton, and Brian Blackmore for their tireless work and for taking the time to speak with me.

If you’re feeling inspired to make a difference in your corner of the world, or if you just want to reflect a little deeper, head over to QuakerPodcast.com. There, you’ll find discussion questions, a full transcript of today’s episode, and links to more resources.

This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by me, Zack Jackson. Jon Watts wrote and produced the music.

Thee Quaker Podcast is a part of Thee Quaker Project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakerism a platform in the 21st century. If you believe in the power of these stories and the light they bring to the world, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. You can go to QuakerPodcast.com and click “Support” in the top right window. It takes less than five minutes, and it truly means the world to us.

And now, to close us out, our daily Quaker message, as read by Kent Laturno. 

Kent Laturno  

Thomas Kelly, 1941. There is a last rock for your souls, a resting place of absolute peace and joy and power and radiance and security, there is a divine center into which your life can slip a new and absolute orientation in God, a center where you live with him, and out of which you See all of life through new and radiant vision tinged with new sorrows and things, new joys, unspeakable and full of glory. The reality of presence has been very great at times recently, one knows at first hand what the old inquiry meant, has truth been advancing among you

Zack Jackson  

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox Every day, go to dailyquaker.com. That’s dailyquaker.com. 

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)