WE SEE HIGH levels of stress and anxiety in immigrant communities. At Mixteca, we provide direct services for immigrants, like “know your rights” and legal clinics, but we incorporate mental health components. People may be waiting to meet with the lawyer, and we have little packages with lavender, a stress ball, something you can smell, touch, and hear to activate the five senses. We get feedback from the community like, “I don’t know why, but I feel better when I meet with my lawyer here.” We create spaces where the community feels safe, or safer than other places.

I don’t know if we are safe at this point. People ask, “Can I send my daughter to school?” [We see] kids whose parents were deported struggling to make a living. People ask “Can I go to the hospital and have my surgery? I need it, but I don’t want to get deported.” Others say, “I’ve been in this situation for many years. Immigrants are under attack every day from the day I got here.”

Being here in the front line, it’s heavy on us as well. Imagine listening to one person and then the next one, and the next. As an immigrant, I feel honored; this is what I want to do with my life. I don’t have to push my team to take care of others, but I have to push them to take care of themselves, because I know that is the hardest part for us. I burn palo santo. It was used by my grandma to clean a space. The smell really helps me to center. I usually do it in the morning, or any time I feel like the day is really heavy: Just burn my palo santo and bring my ancestors, my abuela and whoever needs to be here to support with the heaviness of the work.

IT SHOULD HAVE surprised no one when Donald Trump, who boasted to a New York City crowd, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out,” began carrying out his promise on Inauguration Day. Immigrants have been the target of Trump’s most aggressive rhetoric since he entered politics a decade ago, and he loves hyperbole. Trump is making the removal of migrants a centerpiece of his new administration by declaring a state of emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, mobilizing National Guard units, and sending troops to do his bidding. The warlike imagery and language he uses are hard to hold alongside the Christian belief that we are all created in God’s image.

With approximately 11 million undocumented residents in the United States, there is legitimate reason to fear what Trump is enacting in his second administration. I say this as someone who witnessed what a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor called “the largest single-state immigrant enforcement operation in our nation’s history” during Trump’s previous administration. It occurred in 2019, in Mississippi, where I live. I know that whatever else happened that day, children were left without parents, families were cut off from loved ones, and communities were filled with a sense of confusion and terror. But I also know from that experience that, even in the worst moments, there were people and places where hope and comfort resided, too.

On day one, Trump began translating his campaign rhetoric to actual deportation methods. The point is sometimes made that Trump’s first administration deported fewer people than Biden’s or either of Obama’s administrations. While that may be accurate, context is everything. For example, deporting someone who just crossed the border illegally is very different from deporting someone who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years. While the numbers of people matter for each impacted individual and family, it also matters how people are targeted and why inciting terror is the tool of choice. Tom Homan, who Trump has chosen to oversee the nation’s borders, has said we should expect “shock and awe” from the current administration’s deportation efforts. That comment, coupled with Homan’s promise to conduct more workplace raids, suggests how deportations will be handled. That language calls to mind the workplace raids that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials conducted in Mississippi in 2019.

I am not sure what else needs to happen so the entire U.S. church wakes up to the realities of the evils entrenched in our immigration system. Honoring the dignity of all people is our calling as Christians; no other entity is tasked with recognizing the image of God in every person. Our Latine brothers and sisters are leading the way, but the whole church should be outraged; we should be demonstrating without ceasing. We should not let people sleep until they see the humanity of every migrant.

“In a representative democracy, if our legislators are not legislating in accordance with the moral law that we’re given by God, then it’s really on us to select representatives who will legislate in accordance with that law,” she said.

Knowing that so many more suffer from inhumane incarceration, I joined with more than 20 interfaith clergy from around Oregon and got arrested “for failure to comply” by sitting in a prayer circle in front of the main gates of our local ICE field office. We were gathered with hundreds of others, lifting up stories of those still detained and separated from families, singing songs of lament and joy, and praying that justice would prevail.

Kevin Landy, a former ICE assistant director responsible for the Office of Detention Policy and Planning under the Obama administration, said the move to house so many detainees at once in federal prisons was “highly unusual” and raises oversight concerns.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that an immigration statute requiring the deportation of noncitizens who commit felonies is unlawfully vague in a decision that could limit the Trump administration's ability to step up the removal of immigrants with criminal records. The court, in a 5-4 ruling in which President Donald Trump's conservative appointee Neil Gorsuch joined the court's four liberal justices, sided with convicted California burglar James Garcia Dimaya, a legal immigrant from the Philippines.

The sweep comes in the wake of nationwide ICE raids of nearly 100 7-Eleven stores that resulted in dozens of arrests less than a month ago.

“We have been angered about the detention of our undocumented members and allies from the New Sanctuary Coalition,” said Onleilove Alston, the executive director of Faith in NY, a multi-faith and multi-race network of over 70 congregations working for justice in New York City. “We know that God doesn’t create anyone illegal but that everyone is created in the image of the divine. Now is the time for congregations to stand with stranger as the Bible commands, and now is the time for clergy to put their bodies on the line for those in the shadows.”