By Steve Woodward
A nondescript building along Highway 1 near Southern Pines, N.C., that is home to Sandhills Assembly Church is also the operational headquarters of a little known entity, Immigration Hope Sandhills.
While it is aligned with a recognized protestant religious organization, Immigration Hope Sandhills (IHS) is a nonprofit outreach seeking to assist people who reside in the United States illegally. According to its web site, IHS offers illegal aliens advice on paths to U.S. citizenship, English language and citizenship courses, and mental health counseling. Through a program coordinated by the U.S. Department of Justice, IHS trains volunteers who do not hold law degrees to provide low-cost legal advice and services toward navigation of the U.S. immigration process.
Under executive director Sarah J. Cortesio, IHS has operated under the radar since 2018 during a time when Americans have grown increasingly weary of illegal invaders. Undocumented and unscreened, they are overwhelming hospitals and emergency rooms, and arriving with children who generally do not speak English, vying for seats in already crowded public school classrooms. Americans are leery of the threat to public safety posed by adult illegal migrants. In a February poll by Monmouth University, 61% of those surveyed describe illegal immigration as “a very serious problem”.
IHS is one of 11 immigration service centers operated by the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) nationwide, and one of the few located in a rural location. Immigration Hope, according to its web site, has locations in Atlanta; Bloomington, Minn. (a Minneapolis suburb); Brooklyn, N.Y., where IHS launched in 2011; Gainesville, Fla.; and Santa Barbara, Calif.
The founding organization, EFCA, came into existence in 1950 after a merger of two U.S.-based EFC denominations with Swedish and Norwegian origins. As has been the case across numerous long standing religious denominations, EFCA has moved gradually down a path toward “woke” relativism and a so-called social justice gospel.
A professor on the faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Jarvis Williams, attracted the attention of Baptist pastor Seth Brickley, who was raised and baptized in the Evangelical Free Church. Knowing that Williams has emerged in recent years as a social justice evangelist (some say he actually is part of a post-evangelical movement), Brickley was surprised when EFCA invited Williams to speak at a leadership conference. At the same conference, a member of the EFCA board of directors “encouraged pastors to promote political diversity, giving legitimacy to the harmful agenda of the Left,” wrote Brickley in a June 2023 article for TruthScript.com. The piece by Brickley, who left EFCA to pastor a traditional Baptist church seven years ago, was entitled, “Injustice In The Evangelical Free Church of America”.
A founder of the EFCA’s first Immigrant Hope ministry center, Roy Larsen, in a piece posted on an EFCA web site in 2011, did not attempt to veil its intent: “to give all immigrants among us — including the undocumented — the hope of the gospel, (and) help in finding a pathway to legal residency if possible (emphasis added).” In 2011, few Americans could have imagined that a sitting U.S. President and Democrat surrogates would willfully oversee an open border policy and permit the illegal crossing of tens of thousands per day, some encountered by border patrol, others not.
Even fewer could have foreseen the emergence of organizations deliberately setting up their own migrant processing centers near prime border entry points.
“Many of the country’s best-known (taxpayer funded) nonprofits, including Catholic Charities (photo nearby), the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the Red Cross, and United Way … and scores of lesser-known charities have instead worked to increase the number of illegal border-crossers dramatically,” wrote Lewis M. Andrews for The American Conservative on April 28, 2024.
“There is no special exemption (in U.S. law) which allows an employee of an American tax-exempt organization willfully to ignore his own country’s laws, as increasing numbers have been doing since Biden’s election. This is true no matter how well-intentioned that nonprofit staffer might imagine himself to be.”
The New York Post reported as long ago as 2022 that the federal government launders money through contracts with nonprofit charities to keep the illegal immigration pipeline flowing.
“Even before crossing the border, migrants still in Mexico are being handed debit cards loaded with $800 a month to enable them to pay for necessities,” reported former New York Lt. Governor Betsy McCaughey in a July 2022 op-ed in the Post. “The gift cards are distributed by the non-profit Organization for Migration, thanks to money provided by the U.S. State Department.
“CARECEN, a far left group funded almost entirely by government contracts, and Catholic Charities … (provides) gift cards and food packages, direct migrants to shelters or hotel rooms, or helps them buy (air) tickets to other destinations. Who pays for all this? FEMA — the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a government agency that funnels money through the nonprofits.”
Immigration Hope Sandhills poses a threat to the security of Moore County by attracting migrants who will take all of the help they can get but typically have no inclination to assimilate or seek legal citizenship. A recent, tragic example is provided by the murder on June 17, 2024, of a Houston girl, age 12, who was strangled by two Venezuelan adult males who entered the U.S. through Eagle Pass near El Paso, Texas, earlier this year. After kidnapping Jocelyn Nungaray (photo nearby) in a convenience store, the men murdered her and hurled her body into a creek.