On March 8, the Trump administration escalated its attack on free speech and protests by detaining a lawful resident for his role in Columbia University’s campus protests for Palestinian rights, saying that it was the “first arrest of many to come.” Sojourners spoke to seminaries, divinity schools, and Christian colleges and universities to try and understand how schools are defending international students amid the crackdown.

Now that President Donald Trump has rescinded longstanding policy limiting U.S. immigration enforcement in churches and other sensitive locations, some church leaders are wondering what they should do if an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer comes knocking.

As we enter a second Donald Trump presidency, the stakes could not be higher for undocumented people and asylum seekers in this country. Having promised mass deportations to a degree never attempted in the United States, President-elect Trump’s new border czar, Tom Homan, has signaled that the administration’s cruelty will begin in my backyard — Chicago. What he might not be counting on is organized resistance from labor, faith, and immigration leaders that will attempt to thwart these plans.

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, reports emerged from the Irwin County Detention Center, an immigration facility in Georgia, detailing forced hysterectomies performed on migrant women held in custody. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Ocilla, Ga., owned and managed by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company, oversaw these surgeries in what have been described as appalling conditions and an “utter lack of care of detainees’ health” during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Tragically, as too many people fail to realize, forced sterilizations are not a recent development. Rather, as a form of state violence they date back more than 100 years, when states across the country (beginning in 1907 with Indiana and followed in 1909 by Washington, California, and Connecticut, as well as many others over time) approved “eugenic sterilization.” These early laws passed by state legislatures allowed state officials to sterilize males and females—some as young as 12 or 13 years old—believed to have inheritable and incurable diseases or afflictions, including insanity, mania, or dementia.

Earlier this month, a California judge ordered the release of more than 100 migrant children from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, but after ICE failed to meet specific prerequisites to release the children, the judge declared her order was “unenforceable,” leaving children in detention.

The guidance does not affect international students taking in-person classes. It also does not affect F-1 students taking a partial online course-load as long as some of their classes are conducted in-person. M-1 vocational program students and F-1 English language training program students will not be allowed to take any classes online.

Yazmin Juárez, a Guatemalan asylum seeker, told a House Oversight and Reform subcommittee that her 19-month-old daughter died because of medical negligence at a federal detention center in Texas.

A Border Patrol official told a state lawmaker that the agency doesn't accept donations for facilities where children are reportedly being held in substandard conditions.

“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.