Under a fascist regime, resistance is our spiritual practice

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used a five year old boy as bait and removed him and his father from Minneapolis to a detention camp in Texas. A father and his six children were hospitalized after an ICE agent threw tear gas at their car in Minneapolis. The youngest was six months old. Four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were kidnapped by ICE and are being held hostage unless tribal leaders cooperate with federal enforcement. Reports from a medical examiner in El Paso believe the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos in a Texas detention camp was a homicide, and a fellow detainee reports seeing Campos being choked to death by ICE guards.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable products of a system built on terror and cruelty.

We have seen the horrific footage of Renee Nicole Good being murdered by ICE officer Johnathan Ross while she was attempting to drive away. We only know about these cases because someone bore witness, because they were reported, because they were filmed. How many Black and brown immigrants have disappeared without a trace since the Trump regime took office, their names never spoken, their stories never told? All while our national leaders lie, blatantly disregard the rule of law, and encourage ongoing terror by repeating that these actions come with “absolute immunity”.

This is what empire looks like.

We have also seen something else. We have seen children walk out of their schools in protest. We have seen faith leaders put their bodies on the line to protect their neighbors, and travel across the country to bear witness on the ground in Minneapolis. We have seen communities organize to track and document illegal ICE activity. We have witnessed extraordinary moral courage rising in the face of staggering injustice.

We are not the first people to live under corrupt authority or to endure a reign of terror. And for those of us who follow the Christian faith, we are not without guidance. We follow a brown-skinned refugee named Jesus, executed by the state, who showed us the way of holy resistance. Holy resistance is, and always has been, a dangerous affront to empire.

ICE officers have shown no regard for the rule of law or our rights to due process. Our government has shown that it cannot be depended upon for consistent moral clarity and leadership. It is in these moments that people of faith step up. Our spiritual traditions transcend the policies of any one administration, and call us to a higher standard. This is a time of moral clarity for our country.

This is the moment for spiritual resistance.

In this unprecedented time, loving our neighbor may look like wearing goggles and a gas mask and standing between violence and the vulnerable. Welcoming the stranger may look like documenting ICE operations, recording dates, locations, times, and badges. Rejecting idolatry may look like confronting a complacent Congress and reminding elected officials whom they are meant to serve, and who we claim to be.

Faithful America members across the country have been showing up in spiritual resistance, protesting ICE in their communities, and sending over 21,600 messages, and counting, demanding that Congress approve no more funding for ICE in budget negotiations.

There are many ways to live out our faith in this moment. But silence is not one of them.

Silence sides with empire.

Silence sanctifies violence.

Silence betrays the gospel.

We are called not to be quiet, but to live in the discomfort [and danger] of taking a stand.

Media Contact: Jessi Quinn, jessicaq@faithfulamerica.org, (603)731-7088

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Faithful America is a national organization that educates, organizes, and mobilizes social-justice Christians to advance Jesus' prophetic vision of God's Kindom and to challenge White Christian Nationalism and all the ways it harms our neighbors, our faith, and our democracy.