In response to the crisis of mass deportation, faith leaders and clergy are taking a moral stand. Whether it’s clergy protesting in Minnesota or faith-based mutual aid networks dedicated to assisting immigrant communities, people of faith are fighting against injustice. What comes next? What demands can Christian leaders make to shape our collective response beyond immediate protest and protection?
A framework for real justice going forward has three parts: Abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and related agencies; welcoming immigrants through immigration law that includes rather than excludes; and participating in truth and reconciliation work, which may take various forms—including national or local truth commissions.
Abolishing ICE takes funding and power away from agencies committing atrocities and state violence. Welcoming immigrants by loosening and simplifying immigration laws encourages people to immigrate, a first step toward repairing the terror of mass deportation. Truth and reconciliation commissions, and other voluntary truth-telling processes, insist that the truth of the harm done must be remembered.
Abolish ICE
The first step toward justice is abolishing ICE. The harm done by enforcement and removal operations must be stopped.
The call to “abolish ICE” doesn’t stop at ICE. Renee Good was shot by an ICE agent. Alex Pretti was shot by a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Protection officer. To abolish ICE means that we must stop funding for ICE and CBP. We must also abolish the Department of Homeland Security, which operates and staffs both ICE and CBP. It is important to note, as journalist Garrett Graff points out, that DHS was created after 9/11 with a structure that easily lent itself to authoritarian violence.
Any necessary functions, like FEMA and the TSA, customs inspections, or investigations by DHS, can be moved to other agencies, as historian David Perry argues. The bureaucracy of immigration paperwork—part of an orderly system—can be separated from immigration enforcement, removal, and deportation. End enforcement and removal operations against immigrants. We don’t need any agency conducting the state violence of detention and deportation. It’s time to close the camps and let people out.
The move to abolish ICE can begin incrementally. “Non-reformist reforms,” like efforts to claw back and reduce DHS funding, help to shrink the violent system of immigration enforcement and detention. But to be clear: The goal is abolition. Faith leaders should use the language of “abolish ICE.” This is the language of the movement; affirm it.
Welcome Immigrants
Abolishing ICE, CBP, and DHS is not enough. Reparations to immigrant communities means, among other things, reworking our immigration system. Christians should advocate for a complete restructuring of immigration law to welcome and encourage immigration, as well as protect a baseline of human dignity. This means a paradigm shift in how we handle immigration. We must shift our imagination: Rather than writing laws to keep people out in the name of so-called security, we must celebrate immigration as a great good that makes our society stronger. We must reject the criminalization of immigrants, which, as Andrea Ritchie writes, normalizes violent policies against them. This paradigm shift, from fearing immigrants as criminals or invaders to treating them as neighbors, is an obligatory act of repentance.
Reparations for harmed communities must include not only setting every detained immigrant free, but also offering a pathway to legal residence and citizenship. Amnesty for undocumented immigrants is an essential, material step. Easier legal pathways for immigration going forward will provide a more just future.
The reality of current U.S. immigration law is that it is nearly impossible to immigrate from many countries. This was the case before Donald Trump’s second term as president, although the Trump administration has severely narrowed legal pathways like the refugee program. Historically, one of the most secure ways to gain legal status for those fleeing their countries of origin due to fears of persecution was by making asylum claims. Yet the Trump administration has increased fees for people seeking asylum, and our government has locked them up—a longstanding practice made worse by the new administration policy of denying bond hearings for asylum seekers. (The legality of this horrific policy of mass detention, which applies to asylum seekers as well as others unlawfully present, is still being fought in the courts.)
Our restrictive immigration law must change from a system that excludes to a system that welcomes. To get there, our advocacy may sometimes take the form of supporting policy changes that are small steps in the right direction. But we must always advocate for and assess such steps based on the ultimate goal: creating a system that helps people come into the country rather than upholding one that keeps them out. Welcoming new immigrants is a moral obligation and a joy as we build relationships across differences of ethnicity. God shows no partiality according to ethnic origin (Acts 10:34-43). Christians should desire a society freed from divisions of national origin, practicing love for new neighbors as an expression of faith.
If we make easy legal pathways to becoming citizens, people will use them. Anyone who wants to become a citizen should have an easy, legal, orderly pathway to immigrate, live here, and obtain the rights and obligations of citizenship.
Truth and Reconciliation
Truth and reconciliation is a broad category. When it comes to what truth and reconciliation might look like in relation to mass deportation, it largely revolves around addressing past harms by investigating them and then telling the public what has been discovered.
Truth and reconciliation commissions to address mass deportations can be established nationally or by local governments. These commissions would address crimes, civil rights violations, and human rights abuses committed by ICE, CBP, and other federal agents. An Illinois Accountability Commission was already established by Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker—although its goal is mainly criminal prosecution. Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal has suggested that “someday we should have a truth and justice commission.”
Importantly, the truth commission process must go beyond “criminal” acts, as some of the harms being committed are legal under our current system. Truth commissions aren’t simply interested in investigating illegal acts, but they are also committed to empowering survivors to share their testimonies with the public. As Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg writes in her book On Repentance and Repair, public truth-telling has the “potential to liberate victims of great harm—it marks an end to the denial of their experience and an affirmation of the legitimacy of their suffering.”
A truth and reconciliation model appeals to me because of my abolitionist commitments that accountability isn’t just about punishment. Right now, I see people who are so angry at the injustice that ICE has unleashed that their argument is simply “put every ICE agent in jail until the end of time.” But I reject calls for vengeance—even for ICE agents. I also know the temptation is strong to “look forward, not back,” and never wrestle with what accountability would look like for ICE agents who take children from schools or separate babies from their parents. Truth and reconciliation is a pathway that imagines accountability through honest, national reflection and systemic change, not just punishment of individual perpetrators.
Truth and reconciliation is a pathway that imagines accountability through honest, national reflection and systemic change, not just punishment of individual perpetrators.
READ MORE: This Nation’s Violence Is No Longer Private
How do you get perpetrators to cooperate with truth and reconciliation work? One answer, for (national or local) governmental commissions, might look something like a diversion from prosecution model. This model, which organizations like Common Justice use in criminal cases, means that perpetrators who would otherwise face prosecution might instead cooperate with and testify to the truth commission. Prosecutors, with survivor approval, could agree to drop criminal prosecutions or reduce sentences if the truth and reconciliation process is completed. Similar amnesty was famously offered in some cases by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
Diverting from criminal prosecution does not deny the horrific violence we are seeing. When I see what ICE and CBP are doing, I am furious. I desire punishment for that cruelty. But ultimately, I believe that vengeance and punishment do not heal suffering. But telling the truth might be a start toward healing.
Of course, for diversion to even be relevant, we would have to have enough political power to bring criminal prosecutions in the first place. Right now, that feels impossible, as top administration officials are claiming broad immunity for federal officers. The reality is that if we build enough political power to bring prosecutions or even strong civil suits, we will have enough political power to establish truth and reconciliation commissions.
Another benefit of truth commissions is that they can at least begin their work without perpetrator participation. If we don’t yet have enough political power to create official, governmental commissions, truth and reconciliation work can nonetheless begin through unofficial channels: private commissions aimed at taking the testimony and telling the stories of survivors; investigations that make known what happened, even if perpetrators aren’t yet directly involved. We must not be too quick to bypass the hard work of demanding truth for the sake of apparent peace.
Accountability begins with truth but continues through reparations, as we make changes to violent systems. As Ruttenberg reminds us, confession isn’t enough for national repentance unless it is followed by real repair. Truth and reconciliation, whether official or unofficial, must be done in conjunction with abolishing ICE and DHS and welcoming immigrants through an overhaul of immigration policy as we work toward accountability.
Truth-telling alone won’t provide repair. Reconciliation can’t be rushed. Moving forward requires abolishing systems that harm, making material reparation by radically opening our immigration policy, and then looking to non-punitive forms of accountability by creating systems that encourage truth-telling. These are bold demands that people of faith must courageously make, insisting that we must abolish ICE, welcome immigrants, and embrace truth and reconciliation.
Hannah Bowman is a literary agent, public theologian, and the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, where she writes and teaches on the connections between Christian theology and prison abolition.
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