Sandra McAnany isn’t one to sit on the sidelines. A 58-year-old grandmother from Wisconsin, McAnany spends her days teaching soft skills classes to adults and spending time with her family. Outside the classroom, however, she’s taken on a role that’s helping people in a big way: serving as a humanitarian parole sponsor and personally taking on the financial responsibility of supporting families fleeing from persecution, violence, and instability.Since 2023, McAnany has welcomed 17 migrants—11 adults and six children through the CHNV humanitarian parole program, which allows individuals and families from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to live and work temporarily in the United States with the support of an approved sponsor. “Everyone has their own views and perspectives, but every person I sponsored is thriving and doing well here,” McAnany said.McAnany didn’t know any of the parolees before sponsoring them, but she had a commitment to helping families from Venezuela specifically, hoping to reunite them with their families who were already living in the United States. After “praying a lot along the way” and communicating with the applicants through WhatsApp, she decided to apply as a sponsor and help them settle into the United States.“I have a bedroom and a bathroom in my basement,” McAnany says. “My door is open and will always be open for any of the people I sponsored, if they ever have a need for housing.” Sandra’s granddaughter, E’s daughter, and another friend at an indoor park (July 2025) At the time, McAnany decided to volunteer as a sponsor to make friends and help other people through hardship. Now, her mission has grown: Seeing how humanitarian parole programs have changed her parole beneficiaries’ lives—as well as her own—for the better.Humanitarian parole: A long history Humanitarian parole programs are nothing new. Since 1952, both Democratic and Republican administrations have used humanitarian parole to provide a safer, lawful pathway for noncitizens to enter and live temporarily in the United States. In recent years, through different programs, people from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Cuba, Haiti, and other countries have been able to come to the U.S. to escape urgent crises in their own countries, such as political instability or war. Coming to the United States through humanitarian parole is no easy feat. The process has its own strict criteria and involves extensive applications and vetting for both beneficiaries and their sponsors. Parolees don’t need to qualify for any other immigration benefit like asylum, but they need to meet the standard for humanitarian parole and successfully pass vetting requirements.According to Refugees International, 532,000 people have been granted parole through the CHNV program.A life-changing experienceFrom the moment she met her first parole beneficiaries at the airport—two families —McAnany already knew it would be a life-changing experience. “It immediately felt like family, like we were lifelong friends,” she said. But she could also sense that it was a culture shock for the parolees. On the way home from the airport, McAnany pulled into a nearby McDonald's and encouraged them to order dinner. Hearing the word “Big Mac,” the families smiled in recognition. Despite the culture shock, McAnany’s parole beneficiaries had to adapt quickly to life in the United States. Once they were settled, McAnany worked “nonstop” to help the families acclimate to their new lives, answering questions about school and vaccinations while also helping them create resumes, search for jobs, and find English classes online.It was through this process that McAnany realized just how resilient people could be, and was amazed “not only how hard it was for individuals to leave their loved ones behind, but the amount of work they did to come to the country and remain here.” McAnany also realized how fortunate she was to have her own family living nearby. “I can’t imagine any one of us leaving a country and being apart for an unknown length of time,” she said.Eventually, and as circumstances changed—one of the parolees found a new job in another city, for example, and was able to move out. But no matter the length of time they spent with each other, McAnany says that with every parolee they formed a bond built for life. One woman, who she refers to as ‘E,’ has even become “like an adopted daughter.” McAnany has traveled to Georgia, where E now lives, three times to visit her. Uncertain ground: What’s next for humanitarian parole programs Despite being a critical part of immigration policy in the United States for the last 73 years, humanitarian parole programs are under threat. Immigrant justice nonprofits Justice Action Center and Human Rights First are currently suing the federal government to protect humanitarian parole programs and allow parole beneficiaries to remain in the country for the duration of their parole. McAnany is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. One of the ladies Sandra sponsored from Venezuela and her partner during Sandra’s first visit to meet her (December 2023)Participating in the lawsuit has only further bolstered McAnany’s belief in and support for humanitarian parole programs. She hopes the lawsuit will be successful, she says, so that parole beneficiaries and their families can finally have some stability.“We don’t know what the future is,” she says, “but I want to be optimistic and hopeful that every person I sponsored will be able to stay here safely in the U.S. and continue to thrive.” This article is part of Upworthy’s “The Threads Between U.S.” series that highlights what we have in common thanks to the generous support from the Levi Strauss Foundation, whose grantmaking is committed to creating a culture of belonging.

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That former congressman John Burton lived until 92 instead of dying at 45 came about through an act of political cowardice. His obituaries, unsurprisingly, omit this, the most important moment of not only his political career but his life. In 1978, his colleague in the House of Representatives and fellow California Democrat Leo Ryan invited him on a mission to check up on their Bay Area constituents living in the South American jungle. Indeed, Burton’s constituents begged him to act, too. Steven Loomis pleaded with him to investigate conditions at Jonestown, the jungle outpost of San Francisco-based Peoples Temple. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of the group, held his 18-year-old fiancée, Tina Grimm, prisoner, he explained to Burton. “I have good reason to believe that she is being forced to stay against her will,” he wrote his congressman. “It has been two months now, and this is my last resort.” Burton never went. Ryan never came back — nor did Tina Grimm. They died, along with more than 900 others, in Guyana. Burton not only did not help those people. He hurt them. Gunmen from the Peoples Temple murdered Ryan and four others on a grassy airstrip outside of Jonestown. Grimm, presumably, drank the cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid distributed by Jones’s flunkies that took the lives of nearly all of the 918 who died on November 18, 1978. Burton not only did not help those people. He hurt them. Along with his brother, Congressman Phil Burton, he spearheaded a political machine that used Peoples Temple for rent-a-rallies and campaign volunteers. In turn, Jim Jones won legitimacy from the San Francisco power brokers. I came across one piece of evidence for how this process worked during the crisis in 1978 while researching Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, a book I wrote years ago that Skyhorse just reissued in paperback. A list compiled by a Peoples Temple apparatchik detailed “support letters to the Burtons” written by members conscripted for that purpose. The 1978 document noted “comprehensive letters about the Project,” i.e., Jonestown, “asking that they not be influenced negatively towards us or aid to Guyana.” The recipients list Leo Ryan and the Burton brothers. Ryan responded one way to the propaganda; the Burtons, another. So much led to that. On September 25, 1976, the Burton brothers attended a testimonial dinner for Jim Jones as honored guests. “Congressman John Burton lobbied the governor to appoint Jones to the high-profile board of regents, which oversaw California’s sprawling public university system,” David Talbot wrote in Season of the Witch. Peoples Temple even gave him a codename in its radio communications from Jonestown: Mr. Bellino. Of course, others made fools of themselves in more public ways. Mayor George Moscone, Burton’s best friend dating back to their school days, appointed Jones to the city’s housing authority commission. Willie Brown dubbed Jones “a close personal friend and highly trusted brother in the struggle for liberation” in a letter imploring Fidel Castro to treat the cult leader’s travels in Cuba as a state visit. Harvey Milk wrote Guyanese President Forbes Burnham, “Such greatness I have found at Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple.” Carlton B. Goodlett infamously defended Jones after the massacre, saying he could see “no wrong” in him and depicting the mass murderer as “a man who really attempted to practice the dogmas of Christianity.” The city named its convention center for George Moscone. Willie Brown lends his name to a section of the Bay Bridge. Milk’s name appears on a terminal at San Francisco airport. Carlton B. Goodlett Way now gives city hall its address. In this spirit of obfuscation and the perpetual Opposite Day celebrated in San Francisco, California media outlets, such as SFGate.com, KPIX, and The Sacramento Bee, censored any mention of Jim Jones or Peoples Temple in obituaries of Burton when he died earlier this week. So did national ones, such as the Associated Press, When you managed Nancy Pelosi’s campaign, served as chairman of the California Democratic Party, and advanced progressive causes in one office or another since 1965, the media gods forget your sins — just not your name. READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: ‘SNL’ Hires the Next Eddie Murphy for Its New Cast A Lefty Reviews The Man Who Invented Conservatism Marc Maron, Chief of the Joke Police

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