The visibility and voice of clergy are indispensable to the protest movement forming against President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration tactics, said Michael Woolf, a Chicago-area pastor recently arrested outside a federal detention center.
“Religious leaders are really important in this moment. They have been historically, and they continue to be today because they can show the difference between what is legal and what is right,” Woolf said during a Dec. 9 webinar hosted by the Alliance of Baptists.
Michael Woolf
Faith leaders enjoy a level of credibility that can give lie to the rhetoric the administration uses to dehumanize immigrants and to instill fear in American communities, said Woolf, senior minister of Lake Street Church, an Alliance congregation in Evanston, Ill. “Ostensibly the federal government would say torture is legal, but we know it’s wrong. We can tease out the narratives of the state because we’ve been doing that since the beginning.”
Woolf was joined in the “Building Solidarity for the Defense of our Communities” discussion by Julio Hernandez, executive director of the Congregation Action Network, and Chalice Overy, associate pastor at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, N.C.
Together they described the effect Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions are having on local communities and offered encouragement and suggestions on how congregations can respond when masked agents appear in their cities and towns.
“What brought us to this conversation tonight are the many ICE raids that are happening throughout the country, and what we are hearing from Alliance pastors and clergy and folks about how they are affecting your congregations,” said Alexis Tardy, webinar moderator and coordinator of the Alliance’s THRIVE anti-racism initiative.
Woolf, who is affiliated with American Baptist Churches USA, offered firsthand accounts of the violent tactics federal agents and state law enforcement are using against immigrants and protesters alike.
In November, he was thrown to the ground by Illinois State Police during a peaceful protest outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Ill. He spent seven hours in jail and was told to “shut the f*** up” when he asked to have his restraints loosened. Images of the encounter went viral.
“If they are doing that to me with cameras watching, what are they doing without oversight?”
“If they are doing that to me with cameras watching, what are they doing without oversight?” inside the ICE “torture center,” Woolf said. “This is a moral emergency.”
Woolf, a leader in the nation’s sanctuary church movement, was shot in the leg with a pepper ball projectile fired by state police during a peaceful protest in late October.
His church also has come under fire for its life-size Nativity depicting Jesus bound with zip ties, Mary and Joseph in masks and Roman soldiers with ICE vests.
Christians in the U.S. are now living in a time when they may suffer for their beliefs and when faith leaders must take decisive action, he said. “Progressive clergy operate oftentimes under this illusion that all they can do is preach about something.”
Julio Hernandez
Clergy and churches need to draw attention to the inhumane conditions in ICE facilities and to pressure authorities to release noncriminal detainees before they are charged or deported, he said. “We know the courts and politicians are not coming to save us, but churches can be important spaces of support. We ought to care even if it doesn’t affect our churches right now.”
One approach to providing that support is to promote the solidarity and hope needed to inspire collective action for those in peril and against federal detention and deportation practices, Hernandez said.
“Our faith communities, if we don’t have a word of hope at this moment, then we have failed the Jesus who we follow. If we don’t have a word of solidarity, then we need to close the doors to our churches and start over again.”
The blueprint for cultivating solidarity and courage is Jesus himself, Hernandez added. “As people who follow Christ, we should be among the people who are falsely accused, innocently punished, just as Jesus of Nazareth faced that persecution.”
He called on U.S. churches to embrace the liberation theologies that have sustained persecuted populations in Latin America for decades and that can be used to oppose “the white, blond, blue-eyed Jesus that has been promoted in this country.”
Faith groups also must educate their members and communities on the realities of the Trump administration’s “deportation machinery” and the troubling trend of the “offshoring of our prison industrial complex” to other countries, he said.
“They say they are focused on violent criminal offenders. Here’s one of the worst pieces of rhetoric we’re living with. They’re picking up parents driving their kids to school. They’re picking up construction workers buying materials for work. We’re seeing relatives that have provided refuge for other people (being arrested). Suddenly the American dream is an American nightmare.”
Chalice Overy
Large-scale ICE sweeps in North Carolina have prompted many to move from saying “‘Something needs to be done” to “I have to do something,” Overy said.
“There is a lot of fear in our community, just as you have seen in other communities. We have young folks who are not going to school and people who are not going to work,” she said. “I describe the work of ICE and the Border Patrol in our neighborhoods as a KKK-kind of efforts to terrorize.”
Pullen Memorial recently opened its doors to an organization that trains volunteers to document and report ICE activities. On one night alone, 450 people attended one of those sessions.
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