I read this article from This Week in Worcester (Mass.) and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. That’s a very local source to be breaking a national story and the anonymous sourcing — while necessary and justified here — makes its conclusions less conclusive than they might be if they were documented on the record.
But hold that thought for a moment, we’ll come back to that.
The Charlotte Observer is a well established newspaper — a big city daily with a long history and as solid a reputation as any. Been around since 1886 and has a bunch of Pulitzers and other impressive awards. So let’s start with a report from them.
“Church members flee as federal agents arrive at east Charlotte place of worship“
Congregants of an east Charlotte church scattered into the woods Saturday when masked federal agents arrived and detained one of their members, according to witnesses.
About 15 to 20 church members were doing yard work on the property off Albemarle Road while their children played games and their spouses cooked meals. Agents parked just outside a closed gate leading to the church parking lot and ran into the yard, said the pastor, who did not want to identify himself or his church.
The agents asked no questions and showed no identification before taking one man away, whose wife and child were inside at the time, the pastor said. They attempted to grab others, too.
“Right now, everybody is scared. Everybody,” he said. “One of these guys with immigration, he say he was going to arrest one of the other guys in the church. He pushed him.”
Inside the church, women and children sobbed as they wondered whether their loved ones had been taken. Some yard workers fled into the surrounding woods when officials arrived, including 15-year-old Miguel Vazquez.
“I thought, ‘Wait, why am I running? I’m a citizen,’” Vazquez said. He was friends with the man who was taken and worries about the family he left behind.
The church is suspending services and yard work until members feel safe to gather again without the threat of immigration raids, Vazquez said. Church members were aware the U.S. Border Patrol was planning an operation in Charlotte this weekend but didn’t think twice about their place of worship.
“We thought church was safe and nothing gonna happen,” Vazquez said. “But it did happen.”
It was a church picnic on church property, but to the CBP Klan, it was a target. They entered the church’s property and the church building itself as though they had every right to enter any property and any building they chose.
This is just what these “federal agents” do now — whether those agents are with ICE or with Border Patrol (Charlotte is nowhere near any border) or with any of the other federal agencies that have stopped doing their main jobs in order to assist ICE and CBP with this one.
So maybe you’ve never heard of This Week in Worcester and maybe you’re skeptical of a tiny local outlet’s claim to have broken a big national story without any named sources on record. Whatever — the context and support and evidence backing up their reporting is in this story from the Charlotte Observer and in dozens of similar stories documenting similar raids on houses of worship all over the country.
Here again is that story from TWiW’s John Keough, “Trump DHS Plans Immigration Raids on Churches Over Holidays.”
Agencies within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) intend to implement a comprehensive plan to target Spanish-speaking churches across the country during the upcoming holiday season between Thanksgiving, Nov. 27, and Christmas, Dec. 25.
Three U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys, including one assigned to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the district of Massachusetts, one to the district of Rhode Island office, and the third posted at an office in New York told This Week in Worcester they received briefings on the plan.
The attorney in the Massachusetts office said that they attend a Baptist church in Massachusetts and is a registered Republican. He said that he does not see how this plan is in line with either American values or Biblical doctrine.
The attorney in the Rhode Island office confirmed both the briefing and internal discussions about the legal issues surrounding arrests at churches over the past three months.
The attorney in the New York office spoke in depth about the plan being recently updated to include mosques and liberal synagogues in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in the New York City mayor’s race.
The attorneys spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. All three said the plan is not regional to New England, but a nationwide strategy. …
Multiple versions of the plan are being reviewed by DOJ staff lawyers. The topic is a regular part of operational discussions between staff at the DOJ and the DHS.
Both attorneys also said that the Trump administration is pushing high-ranking Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) officials for public support of the plan, including Hispanic pastors.
Two Hispanic pastors who lead Southern Baptist churches in New England say that SBC President Clint Pressley and its executive board received briefings on the plan and discussed it with Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller and White House Border Czar Tom Homan.
An SBC representative says neither Pressley nor its executive committee received any briefing on the plan.
A Hispanic pastor who leads a Pentecostal denomination in New England told This Week in Worcester that ICE agents visited his church several times and another visit came from an individual who identified themselves as an FBI agent. In all three conversations, agents asked questions about the names of specific congregation members, their home addresses, and the frequency they attended church services.
“The point here is that our neighbors are in danger and we need to protect them.”
The sentence above is in quotes because I’m quoting from this post from back in April, “Interfaith volunteers needed to guard nonwhite churches.”
What I wrote then seems more urgently true today.
I do not know of any coordinated effort like the interfaith action in Denver in 2019 but it seems to me that a similar “neighborhood watch” network is urgently needed now to protect these neighbors from ICE. This would be a service that probably could only be provided safely by white folks.
I have no experience or expertise in organizing such a network. But if I had the opportunity, I’d gladly sign up for a shift to spend a Sunday morning in the parking lot of some Hispanic evangelical church, hanging out with some Quakers or atheists or whoever else volunteers, ready to blow a literal whistle or sound a literal alarm at any sign of Trump’s blackshirt army of deportation thugs. Or whatever it might look like.
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