immigration and customs enforcement

ON JAN. 8, Alberto Castañeda Mondragón was taken to an emergency room in Edina, Minn., with head injuries. It was a few hours after he’d been stopped and detained by Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents. He was then transferred to the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. According to the Associated Press, “The officers told nurses Castañeda Mondragón ‘purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.’” But AP consulted with a doctor who confirmed that his injuries—including eight skull fractures on the front, back, and both sides of his head and five brain hemorrhages—were inconsistent with walls or falls. Castañeda Mondragón recalled “ICE officers striking him with the same metal rod used to break the windows of the vehicle he was in.”

On Jan. 22, federal authorities arrested at least two organizers linked to a nonviolent protest inside Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., that interrupted services at a congregation where one of the pastors doubles as the acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement St. Paul field office.

Celebrating the arrests, Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed through a post on X: “WE WILL PROTECT OUR HOUSES OF WORSHIP 🙏🏻”.

Rev. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minneapolis activist and ordained minister, was one of the organizers arrested. Referring to ICE, she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Feb. 4 that “They have been physically brutalizing people, dragging people from their homes, kicking down people’s doors, coming into people’s homes with big guns, arresting people unjustly, even U.S. citizens, and people who are here legally.” She added, “To have someone serving as a pastor who is also overseeing these agents is unconscionable, unacceptable, and antithetical to the Christian faith.”

SHAFTS OF SUNLIGHT streamed through the clouds on an early November morning when I set out with three older women for a two-hour drive from Los Angeles to the ICE detention center in Adelanto, Calif. I was traveling with Rev. Betty Stapleford, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister, and her affable, wise-cracking friends, Maureen Kimberling and Ellen Deeb. While this was Kimberling and Deeb’s second visit, this was my first time visiting a detention center.

Rev. Betty—as she is affectionately called—began making these monthly trips in 2014, taking seriously Jesus’ command to visit the sick and imprisoned. Her outreach is supported by Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, a nonprofit coalition of inter-faith congregations that advocate for the rights of low-wage workers and immigrants.

She was dressed in vibrant purple, a color she wears every day, partly inspired by Jenny Joseph’s poem “Warning,” with its famous opening lines: “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple.” Recalling her final day as a minister in a church, she said she delivered a sermon about “finding what you love that brings you joy”—even something as simple as your favorite color. Joy would be challenging to find at the place we were headed.

After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good, faith leaders in Minneapolis joined demands that ICE leave their city and repent.

“We have our demands. Hundreds of clergy across this state who have gathered together across faith traditions are standing with the rest of Minnesotans to say not again,” Minister JaNaé Bates Imari, co-executive director of ISAIAH, a multiracial interfaith nonprofit, told a crowd of Minnesotans at a press conference.

The press conference, organized by ISAIAH, drew more than a hundred leaders from numerous faith traditions, representing the breadth of the city’s religious communities. ISAIAH presented its demands: That ICE agent Jonathan Ross be arrested, charged, and prosecuted for killing Good; that ICE immediately cease its surge in operations in the state; and that Congress investigate the Department of Homeland Security.

Over the past several months, the Department of Homeland Security has steadily released promotional videos recruiting Americans to join DHS agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These videos include clips of military agents loading into armored vehicles, bombs falling from planes, and overhead shots of barren cities.

Chicago is in a state of holy rage. Last Friday morning, I stood with many of my colleagues in ministry at a multifaith service outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview, Ill. It would be better to call this facility an abduction center, as those who are detained there have little to no contact with the outside world.

When I talk to clergy in my circles, morale is low. It seems like each day brings another new low in the American experiment. One pastor I spoke with said, “I can go to protests, but what is the point? The people in power don’t care, and it doesn’t change anything.” 

That got me thinking: What is the point of protest? For me, at least, participating in protests is about living in alignment with my values and bringing the considerable privilege that religious leaders have to bear on unjust situations.

This past March, the Trump administration deported over 200 men to El Salvador to be held in the notorious maximum-security prison known as the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo.

White House spokespersons have repeatedly claimed that these men — most of whom are of Venezuelan background — are members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.

However, multiple outlets have reported that neither the U.S. government nor El Salvador have provided any evidence to support these accusations.

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.