Photo: Greg Huffman.
Newton, NC – The Catawba Valley Interfaith Council (CVIC) welcomes the public to attend their annual Human Rights Day commemoration at 7 PM on Tuesday, December 9 at First United Methodist Church in Newton (300 N Main Ave). The guest speaker for this year’s event is Greg Huffman, a partner at Patrick, Harper & Dixon, LLP (since 2021) who has served as the Chancellor of The Western North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church since 2016, providing legal counsel to the presiding bishop and conference board of trustees.
Stretching roughly from the City of Burlington west to the Tennessee line with 622 local churches, 158,264 parishioners and 1,445 clergy, the Western NC Conference has been at the forefront of immigration issues since January 2025. The Conference is one of the plaintiff religious organizations suing DHS over their rescission of the “sensitive locations” enforcement policy which prohibited immigration enforcement at houses of faith, schools, and hospitals. Recently, in one week, the Conference helped train more the 2000 volunteer community responders in Charlotte during CBP’s “Charlotte’s Web” operation, in addition to creating an immigration court monitoring program.
Greg occasionally writes about Confederate heritage organizations and Neo-Nazi groups for publications like Facing South, the online journal of the Institute for Southern Studies. His writing has been featured on Heather Cox Richardson’s podcast “Here and Now”, on PBS’s American Journey, as well as in Salon, The Daily Beast, Bloomberg, the National Institute of Health and a variety of law reviews and scholarly journals.
On December 10, 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the aftermath of the Second World War. CVIC, a local not-for-profit organization of faith-based and secular communities in the Catawba Valley, commemorates Human Rights Day each year in December.
