POCATELLO — Members of the United Methodist Church are among myriad denominations responding to a $1 million emergency appeal issued by Church World Service following President Donald Trump’s January executive order that placed a 120-day suspension on the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

Through discussion and action, church advocates Nan McCurdy and her husband, Miguel Mairena, recently traveled the Northwest, stopping in Pocatello and locations elsewhere in Idaho, Utah and Oregon to raise awareness about refuges and migration during a global crisis.

“We worked in Nicaragua for 30 years as missionaries,” McCurdy said. “We worked primarily with women, youth and children in prevention of violence and promotion of gender equity and promotion of reproductive health and rights. Currently we are doing a lot of education in the 12 most western states.”

McCurdy, who moved to Nicaragua with her first husband during the Contra War in the 1980s, witnessed how global crises can led to an increase in refugees and migration to the United States.

She observed a Christian revolution overthrow the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua and the subsequent agrarian reform.

“This included health programs,” McCurdy said. “Almost 100 percent of kids were vaccinated.”

In education, McCurdy said the literacy rates changed from 57 percent illiteracy to 12 percent.

While Nicaragua citizens benefited from the revolution, countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras suffered. To provide a better life for their families, many people from these countries fled to the United States.

This signaled the first wave of migration. Second and third waves migrated following the American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and, later expansion, the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

Because the United States had highly mechanized and subsidized production processes, NAFTA and CAFTA put millions of middle-class farmers and small business owners out of work.

Fast-forward to 2017, more than 65 million people are displaced outside of their home countries — of whom 21.4 million are recognized as refugees by the United Nations.

And McCurdy and Mairena are traveling the western United States to raise awareness and draw support to help find solutions to a new wave of migration from unaccompanied minors from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to the United States.

“A lot of people don’t realize that refugees are not just looking for a better life,” McCurdy said. “They are looking for survival.”

Mairena said that many of these children, between the ages of 13 and 17, attempt to migrate to the United States.

“We have been doing education about this in the Methodist churches,” Mairena said. “In a number of those churches and conferences they have started a program to help unaccompanied minors migrating to the United States and it’s called, ‘You Are Not Alone.’”

McCurdy said that Methodist churches across the United States are declaring themselves as sanctuary churches to raise awareness but also to protect families who from deportation.

“Most of the adults here have been here a long time and have children who are born here,” McCurdy said. “If they get deported, the children will be left alone.”