Resistance as an act of solidarity, resistance as an act of deep love in Kent County

Editor’s note – On Sunday morning I was asked to give the homily at All Souls Community Church. The theme I was asked to speak on was resistance.

Good morning everyone. Thanks for braving the cold. I was invited by Pastor Greta Jo to come and talk with you all this morning about resistance work, specifically resistance to oppression. I want to start off by reading some wisdom from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

These words from Dr. King were spoken in 1967, in his Beyond Vietnam speech, but they could very easily have been spoken today, especially since the US continues to spend $1 trillion on militarism, which is more than the next 10 largest military budgets around the world combined, along with daily state carceral violence at the hands of law enforcement agencies against Black communities, Latinx communities , poor communities and increasingly against undocumented immigrants.

The theme of my reflection today is centered around the idea of resistance, specifically resistance to systems of oppression. Again, Dr. King can provide us with some insight. In that same 1967 speech I referenced earlier, Dr. King said:

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

The system of oppression that Dr. King is referring to is the economic system of Capitalism, s system which primarily benefits the Capitalist Class, the millionaires and billionaires.

There is certainly no shortage of systems of oppression that we need to resist, like militarism, white supremacy, colonialism, transphobia, patriarchy and state carceral violence. These systems are structural and institutional, which means it will take a great deal to not only resist them, but to dismantle them.

Now in order to resist systems of oppression we need to determine what our goals are, meaning what do we want, and what kind of world do we want to live in. We then need to develop strategies and implement tactics in order to achieve those goals. As someone who has been organizing for nearly 5 decades in Grand Rapids, too often what people do when they are angered is they protest. They hold signs, they march, they have rallies and then they go home. The problem is that protesting more often than not is performative, it is symbolic and it rarely leads to change. Why, because protesting is not resistance. In fact, protesting more often than not is reacting to some atrocity, and when we react we tend not to think strategically.

Right now, what thousands of people are doing in Minneapolis, is resistance, which involves a general strike, shutting down commerce, blockading the ICE office, and people in the streets disrupting business as usual, so that ICE cannot kidnapped more undocumented immigrants. I’m not saying that protesting ICE is bad, but what if we redirected our energy in a strategic way, in a way that would directly benefit the very people that ICE is targeting – undocumented immigrants.

I am part of the core team with GR Rapid Response to ICE. We work directly with the immigrant-led group Movimiento Cosecha and do what they ask of us. As the Zapatista movement says, “We lead by following.” Right now, here is how GR Rapid Response is resisting ICE in Kent County.

• First we build relationships with undocumented immigrants, then listen to what they want, so that they could keep themselves and their families safe.
• Second, we respond to calls on our hotline for direct intervention when ICE attempts to kidnap undocumented immigrants in Kent County.
• Third, we accompany immigrants who have appointments at the ISAP office at 545 Michigan, the ICE office at 517 Ottawa and during court appointments, in order to reduce the chance of being taken by ICE during those appointments.
• Fourth, we are doing patrols in neighborhoods where immigrants live/work and where immigrants have told us that they have seen ICE operating. We do this on a daily basis in 6 different neighborhoods as a way to prevent ICE attempts to kidnap members of the affected community.
• We work with faith communities, community centers, non-profits and other entities that would declare themselves as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants and then provide safe houses for them to stay in when they no longer feel safe where they live.
• We work directly with Cosecha on organized campaigns to get local government bodies to adopt sanctuary policies that would make it harder for ICE to arrest and detain immigrants by not collaborating with ICE. We are currently doing this with Kent County and the City of Grand Rapids. The Kent County Sheriff’s office is conducting ICE holds at the Kent County Jail. Five of us were arrested for occupying the Sheriff’s office to draw attention to the fact that they are collaborating with ICE by conducting holds for ICE. At the City level there is a boycott of Mayor LaGrand’s businesses, since he refuses to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies that Cosecha has been demanding.
• We provide mutual aid to families that were directly impacted by ICE violence with transportation, material aid, financial aid and legal support for those being detained. Author and organizer Dean Spade says, “Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.” This is what distinguishes Mutual aid from charity.  

For people to be part of this work they have to attend a training, so we are better prepared to show up in solidarity for affected communities and to make sure that we don’t practice white saviorism. We as volunteers do not arrive as protectors of the vulnerable, but as co-conspirators. The language of “defending immigrants” often reproduces the very hierarchies we aim to dismantle, casting some as saviors and others as saved. This reproduces the “false generosity” of liberalism, one that preserves systems of domination under the guise of aid. Instead, we align ourselves with an ethic of solidarity, not saviorism.

Resistance then should be seen as an act of solidarity and deep love.

So what can you do right now to resist ICE in Kent County?

• You can share and donate to the Mutual Aid requests on the GR Rapid Response to ICE Facebook page.
• You can sign up for a training.
• You can get your faith community to host a training and work to declare themselves a sanctuary.
• You can attend the Melt ICE concert at Fountain Street Church on February 15, with live music and ticket sales going to families affected by ICE violence.
• Attend or host a workshop we do on the history of US immigration policy, so we can better understand the historical context for what ICE is doing.
• Lastly, you can join Movimiento Cosecha’s campaigns to pressure Kent County and the City of Grand Rapids to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies that will make sure that the GRPD and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t collaborate with ICE.

I am well aware of the fact that what ICE has been doing recently seems so outrageous, but the fact of the matter is that ICE has been arresting, detaining and deporting over 10 million immigrants since they were founded in 2003 and most of the people killed by ICE have been immigrants, either shot or died while in detention facilities. The biggest difference now is that the have a much larger budget to engage in brutally repressive actions primarily against affected communities. I also know that two non-immigrants have been killed in recent weeks in Minneapolis, but I want to emphasize again that there have been hundreds of undocumented immigrants that have been killed by ICE agents, either using lethal force or while they have been in detention centers. Where was the outrage when immigrants were killed?

I get that you might be afraid to get involved and to take risks, but no social movement in the history of this country has ever changed anything without taking risks. So let us be bold in our words and our actions, even if it means we take risks to our own well being. As the late Archbishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero reminds us, “We must not love our lives so much that we avoid taking the risks in life that history calls for.” History is calling for it NOW!