AMMPARO, “Accompanying Migrant Minors with Protection, Advocacy, Representation and Opportunities” (AMMPARO) was adopted by the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA) in America in 2016. The strategy was envisioned as an international, holistic, whole-church response to the increased arrival of Central American minors at the U.S.-Mexico border that began in 2011 and reached crisis proportions in 2014. In 2015 an ELCA delegation to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador made observations of how factors such as extreme violence and insecurity, poverty, lack of opportunities and environmental issues were driving scores of vulnerable people, especially youth, to become internally displaced and eventually migrate.

This experience led to the creation and adoption of AMMPARO. AMMPARO works to uphold and promote the basic rights and protection of migrants, address the underlying factors driving migration, and work towards humane policies around a set of three interdependent guiding principles that include accompaniment, awareness building, and advocacy. Ongoing challenges like climate change, political instability, and impunity, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated the complex and interrelated factors driving migration in this region, especially in Central America, triggering year-after-year displacement. Appropriately and effectively addressing migration requires a focus on long-term solutions for bettering the conditions that cause people to flee, inclusive of these ongoing and emerging challenges and taking the lead of local stakeholders. Moreover, absent safe and regular pathways to migrate, many vulnerable people from across the world transit through Central America corridors. We recognize that along the way restrictions and precarity deepen the vulnerabilities of people on the move.

The AMMPARO strategy includes over 200 welcoming and sanctuary congregations and ELCA synods in the U.S. and an expanding network of faith-based organizations, churches, and civil society partners in the southern hemisphere. Partners in the region especially play an important part in the implementation of programs to address extreme social and economic vulnerability. Partners are supported by grants from ELCA Lutheran Disaster Response – International and Domestic as well as ELCA World Hunger, global ministries of the ELCA. AMMPARO staff administer funding, engage relationships with key stakeholders and networks, and advance advocacy priorities.