“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil … and deprive the innocent of their rights!” 

Isaiah 5.20, 23

Justice and love inseparably lie at the heart of the Gospel. Israel’s prophets urged God’s people to care for the poor, needy, and outcast—indeed they often vigorously reminded God’s people to consider this essential work of covenant fidelity before God. So too the earliest Christian communities welcomed foreigners and sold all they had and distributed the proceeds to anyone in need. The sweeping testimony of Scripture consistently reveals a God who loves capaciously and insists on the just ordering of all created life. In response to this God, we Presbyterians likewise take up the responsibility to love our neighbors as ourselves and to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

So it is with heavy hearts and outraged spirits that we join our siblings in witnessing the overlapping crises in Minnesota. Alongside the two ICE-involved shootings last week, we’ve witnessed dozens of credible reports of people brutalized by ICE agents wearing masks, camouflage, and driving unmarked vehicles. These come alongside the continued family separations and wholesale disregard for due process and legal protection from racial profiling that immigrant and minoritized communities have experienced most directly.

The ordinary responses to plausible violations of human and constitutional rights include urgent calls for investigations and promises of accountability. But representatives from across the current Administration have swiftly worked to undermine the possibility of public accountability, accused ICE’s victims of domestic terrorism, and opened investigations into Minnesota’s elected officials. 

The civic crises in Minnesota are multiple and overlapping: militarization of the police, unaccountability of law enforcement, rampant civil rights violations and racial profiling, political officials politicizing and inflaming the ensuing unrest, immigrant and citizen populations alike afraid of further terrorization by immigration enforcement, and the threat of sending the military in to what is already a chaotic situation spiraling out of control.

Presbyterians are well-positioned to prophetically recall that, despite how overwhelming they feel, these are not unprecedented times. The law enforcement violence we are witnessing comes in a long history that recently broke through the public consciousness following the murders of George Floyd and Michael Brown Jr. The threat of invoking the Insurrection Act recalls its last use in 1992 during the LA riots following the brutal beating of Rodney King.

The PC(USA) has decried US immigration policy and enforcement for decades. In 1993, the 205th General Assembly expressed grave concern over the reports of bodily and sexual violence perpetrated by the US Border Patrol and Customs Service and called a federal review board to promote officer accountability. The church was concerned that “agents routinely violate all professional law-enforcement standards on the use of firearms regarding firing warning shots and firing at fleeing persons.” Again in 2003, the 215th General Assembly opposed “Operation Gatekeeper,” which the church saw as resulting “an increase in militarization” and in “violations of human rights, deaths … and racial profiling of Hispanic peoples.”

And again in 2010, following the creation of ICE the church commended a study on Immigration and Border Enforcement which found that domestic immigration agencies were routinely credibly accused of systemic harassment, racial profiling, and human and civil rights violations.” The report suggests that CBP and ICE seemed “to operate with impunity.”

Enough is enough. It is time for neighbor-love and democratic justice as Presbyterians have long been advocating for. Presbyterians value the constitutional and civil rights for all who reside in the U.S. regardless of immigration status and urges action to resist government policies that harm immigrant communities. Contact your officials in the White House, DHS, and DOJ today to decry the unconscionable treatment of immigrant populations, the continued practice of family separation, and the unaccountable and lawless domestic policing of ICE. And contact your congressional representatives to demand that Congress provided much needed oversight.