(RNS) — Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s “border czar,” recently announced that the spectacle of violence and cruelty in Minneapolis, which resulted in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, was coming to an end. It’s worth taking stock of what the city and the country have been through over the past two months as federal agents targeted highly visible communities in Minnesota that are marked by their skin color and non-European origins.
The Department of Homeland Security’s anti-immigrant surges are said to be aimed at sanctuary cities or Democratic ones. But nearly everywhere its agents have appeared, DHS has focused on Somali, Haitian, southeast Asian (Hmong, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Thai), Arab and Latino immigrants and their American citizen families.
On Feb. 2, a federal judge halted a cruel plan hatched by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Haitian immigrants, a move that would have made these legal residents suddenly subject to deportation. While Noem argued that Haiti’s situation had improved and TPS was no longer necessary, that argument has been undercut by administration figures’ labeling Haitians and other ethnic groups vermin, scum and garbage.
The presence of these communities is the result of changes in immigration laws in 1965, the same year as the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The Hart-Celler Act removed the national-origins quota system, specifically to make it possible for Asian, African and Latin American immigrants to bring their skills and eventually their families to the United States. Those fleeing violence and terror from a wider list of nations could find asylum, not just anti-communists from European nations and Cuba.
These individuals and families, formally welcomed by Congress, are the foundations of the highly visible, empowering communities being attacked today. They have had a tremendous impact on the larger communities around them. I call them “empowering communities” because as the immigrants acquire their own economic, political and cultural power, they enhance the economic, political and cultural power of their neighbors.
Their impact on the faith life of their cities is just one way immigrants have empowered their localities. Besides enriching the faith practices of their cities and towns, the resettlement of immigrants by religious organizations that specialize in welcoming the stranger has resulted in what sociologist Manfred Stanley and philosopher Jason Stanley point to as “civic friendship” and “civic compassion.” Civic friendship implies “an underlying equality of regard” that people have for one another, which evolves into civic compassion, a condition in which “neighbors” will not abandon one another to “avoidable suffering.”
The occupation in Minnesota and Maine by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seems to be aimed at eradicating precisely these “empowering communities.” The groups have become visible in the civic life of the community — U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar is just one example of the success of the Somali community in Minnesota.
But as importantly for all of us, new immigrants propelled the emergence of civic friendship and civic compassion. Catholic Haitians, like the many Southeast Asian immigrants who fill Catholic churches across the country, have revived Catholic parishes, especially French-speaking ones whose parochial schools become important foundations for civic friendship and compassion. Protestant Haitians, meanwhile, have often formed Baptist churches that fill African American churches with their special events and revivals.
But civic compassion can cross faith lines as well. When Maine’s predominantly Muslim Somalis arrived in New England, many of them having left Atlanta in search of better educational opportunities, their imams and other mosque leaders took the lead in responding to questions about their presence and forming civic friendships. When the KKK and other hate groups organized against the Somalis, Catholics and other Mainers of goodwill came out to demonstrate overwhelmingly in opposition to the hate.
The Trump administration’s tactics and patently racist language take the opposite path, providing a permissive precursor for what writer Daniel Goldhagen identifies as “eliminationist violence.” Racial purity is a not-so-subtle message in the Department of Homeland Security’s social media recruitment campaigns for ICE agents.
In his recently published book “The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation,” U.S. Rep. James Clyburn points to the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow as “a cautionary tale” for this moment. “There are frightening similarities between the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras and the events we are experiencing today,” he writes. “Today the Redeemer [Democrats] and their supporters, the party of the Confederates, … have been replaced by MAGA Republicans and their supporters, who want to ‘Make America Great Again’. … Red shirts have been replaced by red caps. The KKK and rifle clubs have been replaced by Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.”
Other “frightening similarities” are evident at this moment. But we also have reasons for hope: the evidence of civic friendship, civic compassion and, most importantly, spiritual connection in the organized support, the massive demonstrations and the boisterous public determination to be vigilant and bear witness.
(Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is an assistant pastor for special projects at Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor Emerita of African American Studies and Sociology at Colby College. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
