Last week, a 37-year-old mother was shot and killed by an ICE agent. I don’t have words to express my grief and outrage, but I know we cannot continue down this path.
Since Donald Trump took office, ICE has been emboldened to act ever more belligerently and to terrorize communities without any real accountability or oversight. When Congress chose to pour billions of dollars into ICE they helped supercharge the infrastructure to strip every person in the United States of their basic human rights.
ICE agents are showing up in neighborhoods wearing masks and snatching parents away from their children, imprisoning students for things they’ve written in the college paper, and deporting people to countries they never set foot in.
Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year. The real number of deaths is likely higher because it doesn’t count people who were killed in the process of being detained.
Federal agents are even reportedly trying to turn a recently shuttered brewery in Merrimack into an ICE detention facility.
Millions of people of conscience and goodwill are looking to one another for the courage and the wisdom to take a new path. The good news is that there are people on this road already.
Every month, I join faith leaders and immigration activists to sing, pray and walk seven times around the Norris Cotton Federal Building in Manchester, where ICE has its New Hampshire office. As in the story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho from the Hebrew Bible, those who walk this path each month know that the aspiring Americans we’re walking for face long odds. Still, we walk undeterred.
After the walk, there is an organizing meeting of the Immigrant Solidarity Network. This is where people regardless of faith meet to educate one another about our broken immigration system and share plans for how to defend the rights of people harmed by our current federal immigration policy and fight for long-term reform to bring justice to our broken immigration system.
In my class on Religion, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, I teach my students about the long and often painful history of immigration in the U.S. Many of my students are shocked and disbelieving when I explain that there is no “line” for most people to wait on to come legally to this country, and that unless a person meets one of a few exceptional criteria, then their only option is to become undocumented.
I also teach about the long history of faith leaders and religious communities standing up for immigrants and refugees, welcoming them to the U.S. and pushing for a more fair and just immigration system.
As ICE continues to incite fear across the country and rip communities apart, we have to approach our activism with persistence and determination, as well as recognize the need for solidarity to bring about real change.
Hope is created when we all come together to do better for ourselves, our families and our neighbors. Find community. Keep showing up. And most of all, keep using your voice to advocate for a future where everyone is treated with justice, respect and dignity.
The Trump administration wants us to be divided, to be silent, to rage and be angry so they can call us violent and use that to justify more violence against people. We cannot let that happen. We must stand up, show up and call on our representatives — local, state and federal — to act to reign in ICE, to prevent what happened in Minneapolis from happening elsewhere, to stop terrorizing families, to exercise oversight and insist on accountability and to stop building the infrastructure that enables this horror and injustice in our communities.
This work is alive and well in New Hampshire. Please join us.
Carleigh Beriont is a historian who teaches about the intersection of religion, politics, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. A Hampton resident, she is a candidate for Congress in New Hampshire’s 1st District.