Amid rain and a climate of fear, advocates gather in LOVE Park to celebrate World Refugee Day

They gathered in a steady rain to share American stories. Stories of escaping war and death for the promise of safety. Of toiling in menial jobs for the chance of more prosperous futures. Of securing those futures in Philadelphia.

“Philadelphia has welcomed immigrants and refugees fleeing war and prosecution since before our country was even founded,” said U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D., Pa.) at a World Refugee Day commemoration in LOVE Park on Sunday. “And still today, people have come here in search of a better life for themselves and their families, ready to contribute to our culture, our innovation, our vibrancy — and to all our success.”

A small but passionate crowd attended the event, which featured speakers, music, and performances including Chinese Lion Dance and Afro-Brazilian Capoeira. It was not the gray skies and summer showers that kept more people away, said Cathryn Miller-Wilson, executive director of HIAS-Pennsylvania, which provides legal and social services to low-income and at-risk immigrants and refugees.

Rather, she said, it was fear of the deportation pipeline and other radical anti-immigration policies of the second Trump administration that kept crowds thin.

“Traditionally, World Refugee Day has been a day to celebrate refugees and their resilience and what they bring us,” Miller-Wilson said. “But we knew refugees wouldn’t come out because of fear, so we turned it into an advocacy event.”

In January, Trump used an executive order to suspend the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program, threatening the fates of 12,000 refugees approved and awaiting resettlement. On Sunday, in LOVE Park, speakers celebrated Philadelphia as a city of immigrants, where nearly 20% of employed residents were born in another country.

Sarun Chan, 40, executive director of Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia, told of being just 3 months old when his family fled to America, leaving behind genocide and a civil war. And how he worked as a child in South Jersey blueberry fields to help support his family in South Philadelphia.

His story, he said, was not unique.

“My colleagues who worked child labor under the table are now working in the medical fields and offices across the city,” he said, waving at the skyline. “We invest in our children, the refugee children, they will grow prosperous and contribute even more than before.”

And more than before, and under the unrelenting anti-immigration enforcement, Scanlon said, it is necessary “to recognize the fundamental humanity of everyone, when it is so often overlooked in these dark times.”

“The long and impactful history of immigration is at the heart of our American story — at the heart of our Philadelphia story,” she said. “While we’re here to celebrate that, we have to acknowledge that we’re doing so against a current backdrop of misguided, destructive efforts to destroy this proud tradition. It’s a backdrop that I think is un-American, plain and simple.”