Helping their neighbors in Minneapolis

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn.—When Jesse Phenow first arrived on a refugee family’s doorstep in Minnesota years ago, he was doing so to fulfill a requirement for a class he was taking at Bethel University. He’d just recently volunteered with an organization that gave new refugees a point of contact—someone who could show them how to ride the bus and get to government offices or the grocery store.

Phenow thought he was welcoming this family to his home, to Minnesota. In reality, they welcomed him into theirs.

“When I walked in the door, this family completely flipped that narrative for me,” Phenow said. “This family was incredibly resilient. They were savvy in the ways that they were able to, even just in the short time being here, access and navigate systems.”

The mother, father, and six sons (a seventh son was born later) were refugees from Myanmar, also known as Burma. As members of an ethnic group known as the Karen, they faced severe persecution in their home country. For them and other refugee families, arrival in places like Minneapolis meant safety at last.

Today, Phenow co-directs the Urban Village, a Minneapolis-based organization that works with Karen refugees in the United States. Phenow said that the people they work with came to the United States legally and have followed the law since arriving here.

But over the last several weeks, refugees from the Karen (pronounced “keh-REN”) community and others have found themselves the targets of U.S. federal agents. And many immigrants, including those who arrived in the United States legally, now worry they will be deported to the countries they left.

On Thursday, White House border czar Tom Homan said the Trump administration was ending Operation Metro Surge, its large-scale immigration enforcement effort in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. The operation was launched in December and became a matter of widespread controversy, particularly after agents killed two U.S. citizens last month.

The increased enforcement put Minneapolis-area pastors in a tenuous position. Some who say they support immigration laws also said they felt a call to help immigrants in need. As some Minneapolis residents took to the streets to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s activities in their zip codes, many churches and professing Christians focused instead on helping their neighbors or congregants by providing food, advice, and encouragement. Some assistance efforts work with both legal and illegal immigrants. Others—like Phenow’s organization—help immigrants who came to the country through legal pathways but still fear aggressive immigration enforcement.

“We understand and agree that the authorities must pursue criminals. But what is happening now goes far beyond that,” said Joel Ramirez, pastor of Iglesia Centro Cristiano Minneapolis, a Hispanic church in the Twin Cities that affirms the Apostles’ Creed. “Families with no connection to criminal activity are being targeted. Good men and women who work hard, obey the law, raise their children, and contribute to society are living in fear.”

Ramirez said one of the deacons at his church, an Ecuadorian and father of two, was deported earlier this year.

Ramirez said that some immigrants who shouldn’t fear deportation are still afraid to leave their homes. In January, he said, he visited a 16-year-old whose mother was suffering from severe stomach pain but was afraid to visit a doctor, even though she had a valid work permit and a pending asylum case. (Immigrants with pending asylum cases cannot legally be deported until those asylum applications have been resolved.)

Another Hispanic church, Dios Habla Hoy in southeastern Minneapolis, says it has delivered food to roughly 32,000 families—with an average count of about four people per family—since the start of ICE operations in Minneapolis late last year.

The congregation initially thought they would only serve 10-20 people, said Sergio Amezcua, the church’s pastor. But in the first 24 hours, according to Amezcua, they received registrations from 2,000 people, mostly Latino immigrants. Some recipients are U.S. citizens who are afraid to go grocery shopping for fear that ICE will detain them based on their race, the pastor said.

Amezcua said his church helps whoever needs it, without asking about recipients’ immigration status or why they need food. It’s been handing out around 5,000-6,000 boxes of food each week.

“The question is, what would Jesus do in this situation, you know?” Amezcua said. “And when people were hungry, Jesus fed them. And so I really believe in the Gospel of Matthew when Jesus told some people, ‘Get to My right because I was thirsty, you give Me water; I was hungry, you fed Me; I was in jail, and you visited Me. And they were going to ask, like, ‘When did we do that, Lord, to You?’ And He’s like, ‘When you do that to one of these who couldn’t feed themselves.’”

Some of the people that Amezcua’s church helps did enter the country illegally, he said.

“I mean, we want people to enter the right way,” he said. “But unfortunately, for south-of-the-border people, it’s been almost impossible.”

Amezcua added that he knows many immigrants who have lived in the United States for two or three decades, paying their taxes while trying to gain legal status.

“I don’t promote [crossing the border illegally],” he said. “But listen: we’ve got millions of people here that way. … This immigration system is broken, and we need to fix this.”

Amezcua doesn’t think that Operation Metro Surge’s ending will lessen the need for his church’s large-scale food drive. He said pastors in Los Angeles and Chicago have told him that immigration efforts will likely ebb and flow for months. “They say it goes up, and it goes down, but there’s always activity. And so I think we’re packing for the long run,” he said.

Ramirez and Amezcua’s situations reflect the tension many pastors and evangelicals face across the country. The National Association of Evangelicals recently issued a statement aiming to balance support for proper enforcement of immigration laws with the recognition that even many immigrants who originally arrived in the United States illegally have for years led peaceful and otherwise law-abiding lives. The organization has called for U.S. immigration reform that would offer more legal pathways for immigrants to enter the country and prioritize family reunification in immigration decisions.

Jesse Phenow from the Urban Village stressed that all the people his organization works with are either refugees who arrived in the United States legally after being vetted through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program or people who have applied for asylum. Both groups have followed U.S. immigration laws, Phenow noted, and both groups have good reasons to fear being sent home. As an example, he pointed to refugees from Myanmar, whose country is currently locked in a civil war and governed by a junta.

“There is a ton of examples of people that have come onto the radar of the Myanmar military and who have disappeared or have been in prison for the rest of their lives,” he said. “The fears of the Myanmar military are why so many of these people are here in the first place.”

Some of the people the Urban Village has worked with in Minneapolis have been detained by ICE personnel, he said. These were not people who had come to the country illegally, frivolously applied for asylum, or committed crimes while in the United States, Phenow said.

Late last month a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing ICE agents from detaining recently arrived refugees who came to the United States legally. The restraining order came after several lawfully admitted refugees sued DHS for arresting and detaining them even though they were legally present in the country.

When ICE agents first began detaining legal immigrants that he worked with, Phenow and his organization posted guidance for immigrants on social media.

“Our communications in the early days to our community were that, No. 1, we didn’t understand why they were being detained. And then, No. 2, our advice, because we didn’t yet understand what was happening, was for folks to stay safe and to not find their way into detention,” Phenow said. “Our advice was, ‘Absolutely stay safe, stay home, don’t put yourself into a position, a situation that would open the door or that would make you an easier person to target.’”

Last month, Fox News published a report saying that the Urban Village had directed its advice at illegal immigrants. Phenow calls that assertion “deceitful and wrong.”

Yet the article prompted a flurry of online threats toward Phenow and the Urban Village, he said. The night after the article was published, Phenow laid in bed in the same room as his 18-month-old daughter and his wife, who was 35 weeks pregnant with twin girls.

“I couldn’t sleep, because I was having images and experiencing an incredible amount of fear seeing these images [in] my mind of armed men knocking on my door,” Phenow said. “And then it dawned on me … that’s what people in [the Karen] community are also experiencing.”

When Phenow explains why he tries to help refugees in Minneapolis, he too thinks of Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew.

“The questions are: ‘When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was thirsty, did you give me something to drink? When I was in prison, did you visit me?’” he said. “And I interpret that to mean that it’s not about just a faith rooted in belief. It’s about a faith that’s embodied.”