For weeks, Chicago has been at the center of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security officials have arrested 800 people as of 1 October, while also using violent tactics such as body-slamming and deploying teargas in residential areas.
Amid the raids and arrests, which have created a pervasive sense of fear, faith leaders have stepped up, putting themselves on the front lines of resistance.
“Faith leaders bring a very powerful prophetic and moral compass into the space,” said the Rev Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, executive director of Live Free Illinois, a group that mobilizes Black churches around social justice issues in Chicago. “While many others may be able to argue the economic impact, or argue the law, faith leaders are typically the ones who are arguing and standing on the side of humanity and for people.”
One of clergy’s most visible actions has been holding regular Friday gatherings, where dozens of people from various faith communities rally outside the Broadview processing facility, where ICE holds people slated for deportation.
Rev David Black of the First Presbyterian church of Chicago says that sometimes faith leaders show up and pray for those detained. Other times, they use non-violent tactics to attempt to block vans from leaving the facility to go out and detain immigrants or from bringing them back to the processing facility.
Black was shot in the head with pepper balls while he was praying outside the facility. Others have been arrested there.
Faith leaders have publicly pleaded with ICE and DHS to let them access the people inside so they can provide spiritual comfort and religious rituals, including delivering communion to detained immigrants. But the DHS has prevented them from doing so. In response, church leaders have sued the Trump administration for violating their first amendment rights.
Chicago religious leaders have also built an interfaith coalition called Faith over Fear to train clergy members as rapid responders to raids, and to ensure churches remain sanctuaries for immigrants. (Earlier this year, the Trump administration overturned previous policy so that immigration enforcement can make arrests in churches.) Faith communities have become sites for organizing, food distribution, Know Your Rights trainings, as well as places of sanctuary for Chicagoans of all backgrounds who oppose the federal government’s presence in the city.
The Guardian spoke to four Chicago faith leaders about the work they and their communities have been doing to support immigrants in their city – and why it’s so critical for them to do so.
Rev David Black, First Presbyterian church of Chicago
As atrocious and nightmarish as this time has been and continues to be, there’s an enormous amount of good that is coming out of people learning to organize and take responsibility for our society. People are not waiting for our government to come save us. People are keeping each other safe and organizing in networks of really deep and rich solidarity with the understanding that we cannot be well as a society unless every person among us is free and safe.
The thing about these churches all across America is that they’re in the middle of communities, and many of them are experiencing declining membership and trying to figure out how to stay relevant, what to do with these resources in this space. This has been a moment of awakening for a lot of faith communities that we’re surrounded by people who need space to organize, to host know your rights training, to just get together and form community. And people are making their churches available.
It’s not just the clergy, it’s the congregations of these churches that are opening themselves with radical hospitality to meet the moment with all the resources they have to bear. The clergy are sometimes the ones who are recognizable in the photos, but they’re held up by congregations that are being so faithful and loving in this moment.
I think people’s faith, especially Christian people’s faith, is coming alive in this moment. We’re seeing that the Bible is not about some remote time. It echoes all the time, and it really is making people understand where the lines are and which side Jesus is on. We’ve seen a lot of people wake up to that.
Rami Nashashibi, Inner-City Muslim Action Network
We are certainly in an unprecedented moment. We are confronting masked agents in unmarked cars, smashing windows and pulling people out of vehicles in front of their children. There’s a feeling of military occupation and a fear not only of arrest, abduction or being targeted - but also the fear of being isolated.
We’ve been even more explicit by saying, especially to faith communities, that we have a distinct role in this moment: not to be silent, not to be sequestered in our sanctuaries, not to be isolated, but to come together and lean into one another by leaning deeper into our traditions and building power together. We need to build the type of power that can respond to the fascist interventions we see in our cities. But more importantly, we need to lean into the vision of a beloved community.
We were coming together on the recognition that it is not just immigrant communities. There have been Black communities on the South Side that have [been victims of intense violence]. There are American citizens that have been confronted by ICE. Faith communities have been trying to make sure that our communities don’t conflate this as simply an “immigrant issue”.
I think this is a moment where we need to confront evil, and we’re doing it by not just the faithful Fridays coming together and praying together. Every week we are on a larger network of calls. We’re informing each other about the types of actions, responses, and needs that our respective communities have. We’re supporting one another when it comes to providing, expanding our food distributions, our shelters that many of us are running.
Although still new in its formation, Faith over Fear has been sustaining our connection to one another. It’s because we all realize that we are in it for the long haul, and we understand that this is not about just next month or next year. This is about sustaining a movement that can build a different future.
Janie Pochel, Chi-Nations Youth Council
I would go to Broadview for Friday gatherings, sometimes by myself, sometimes with my partner, or with some folks in the community. We brought our pipes with us, to smoke out there and pray for the people inside. A couple weeks ago, there was a formal gathering where they gave us room to smudge [a sacred practice that involves burning bundles of sage to bless a place or person] and say a few words.
It’s important that we were there to witness some of the brutality [against protesters] and also for the people on the inside - for them to know that there’s people here that care, even if we don’t know them. We feel some sort of relationship with them, especially as Indigenous people. We know a lot of these folks that are getting kidnapped are Indigenous as well.
It’s important that people see that we’re able to do this in the open, freely, or without fear of being oppressed. Not even a decade before I was born, it was illegal to do a lot of these things; you weren’t allowed to smudge, you weren’t allowed to openly pray. Then in the 1970s [things changed], but a lot of our old people never got to practice our culture or spirituality openly.
We’re all in this together and all forms of prayer [at Broadview], which is powerful. Even if people think that there’s a lot of differences in the way that we pray, or in our spirituality, most of it is the same at the core of it. It does feel like we’re part of a community of spirituality, of prayer. There are a lot of Catholic people there – and even though the history of the Catholic church to Indigenous people is not a good history, these people were acknowledging that history without trying to cover it up or try to downplay it.
Rev Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, Live Free Illinois
When the Faith Over Fear campaign began to form, we wanted to make sure that we were responding to what was happening and letting the administration know that we did not want the national guard or ICE here. We pulled together so that we could have a stronger base and a stronger multi-faith coalition.
We are lifting up our voices to ensure that all people are treated humanely. And that is the most powerful thing that the faith voice can bring to the table. Black churches have always been on the front lines and fighting and advocating for justice and for what’s right.
Live Free Illinois has partners that distribute food in immigrant communities, and we also have partners who have large-scale food distribution in Black communities.
I have been trying to make sure that we get the message and the education out around what’s happening in this moment and how we have to fight back against the militarization of our community.
We’re seeing a shift in how people respond. Initially, the [Trump] administration had messaging going out that “the Venezuelans and Mexicans are coming over, and they’re stealing your job, they’re creating violence and havoc and chaos in the communities”.
It was a divisive message that some people were playing into. Since then, I’ve seen organizations across the country fighting and pushing back on that narrative. You do see the difference in how people are talking about it now. People do understand when we say, “We’re fighting against the militarization of our community,” that the military is not what we need.
