As my colleagues and I approached the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) headquarters on Ida B. Wells Drive in downtown Chicago, we rolled our small carts that were overflowing with signs, speakers, megaphones, buttons, clipboards, and umbrellas. The umbrellas were a necessary addition that day as foreboding clouds loomed over the tall, ominous building that immigrant families visit each day for their appointments with DHS and ICE officials.
Tucked in the cart among the usual gear that you will often find in an organizer’s car were several small glass containers filled to the brim with ashes. Getting the ashes safely to the action that morning was a priority, so I had placed them as carefully as I could next to a white envelope and between a set of megaphones. I prayed that the containers would not rattle loose on the way to the site of our Ash Wednesday demonstration that day.
In the weeks prior to that stormy day, my mornings, afternoons, and evenings were spent meeting in person, over the phone, and virtually with fellow grassroots members and colleagues carefully discerning and discussing our ongoing response to the Trump administration’s targeting of Chicago’s immigrant communities. Many of our members from the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership (CSPL) live and worship in the same communities that local ICE officials were raiding.
In the midst of the palpable fear and anxiety in Chicago in the weeks after President Trump’s inauguration, our community members continued to organize Know Your Faith and Know Your Rights trainings, deepen and expand networks of mutual support and rapid response, and meet with local officials and organizational partners to prepare for whatever would come. During one memorable evening meeting in February, several of our members proposed holding an Ash Wednesday event. What we reflected upon that evening is that Lent is a time for fresh decision-making. It is a time to judge what is just and unjust. It is time for us to rely upon the God of justice, the God of liberation, and the God of freedom. Such decision-making in Lent and our reliance upon this God of ours is what we call “repentance.”
After a period of prayer, discernment, and reflection, we took a vote among our members and decided to hold a prayerful demonstration in front of the DHS headquarters on Ash Wednesday. There, we would receive our ashes and call on ICE and DHS to repent for their complicity in systemic sin. To participate in this system, to carry out orders that have not only been issued by the Trump administration but by both Republican and Democratic administrations for decades, ICE agents must consciously and unconsciously choose to dehumanize our communities, our families, and our loved ones and see them as “illegals” and “criminals.”
Doing so rejects the infinite human dignity of our communities and our sisters and brothers. It also reduces the humanity and dignity of the agents. Hatred, racism, and xenophobia are stains upon the heart and soul. If we believe, as one of our priest members reminded us, that the Spirit of God is in each one of us, then it is within those who’ve been oppressed as well as those who are responsible for carrying out injustice. It is our responsibility to expose that truth for the sake of their salvation and ours.
This Ash Wednesday, we decided, would be different from the others. Rather than repenting of our love for chocolate or wine, we chose to nonviolently confront an institution that systematically destroys lives and breaks apart families and communities.
As our member leaders shared ashes with one another under the canopy of the DHS headquarters, a calm resolve spread among us. Miraculously, the forecasted rain and winds for that cold March morning were delayed. As the press arrived, four designated CSPL members—two grassroots leaders, a nun, and a priest—spoke to the media and conveyed our message of repentance and hope. They rejected the demonizing narratives and lies that many politicians and pundits spread to scapegoat immigrants, and they spoke with courage and moral clarity about the path we must follow to address the root causes of poverty, violence, and inequality in our country.
Before we concluded that day, a delegation of members, including a Catholic sister using a walker, picked up the white envelope from the cart and approached the entrance to the building. To no one’s surprise, the doors had already been locked. As DHS officials surrounded our peaceful gathering, our delegation calmly and resolutely conveyed through the glass door that we were delivering a letter to request a meeting with the local head of ICE, to speak directly with those responsible for the unjust activities federal agents were carrying out in our communities.
Seconds and then minutes passed as we waited for a response. A beautiful voice began singing, “We shall not be moved.” Soon, everyone joined in. The media hung around us, sensing the tension in the air. For thirty minutes, we sang this freedom hymn, waiting just outside that entrance door for a response. And then, we were let in to deliver our message.
As we packed up and left that day, something about that morning and the courage of our members spoke to a deeper dimension of Lent. If we believe in the power of repentance, we must also believe in metanoia, our ability to be transformed.
Lent is a time to question our own complicity with silence and cowardice. As Jewish rabbi and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” With faithfulness, determination, and courage, we must work for justice and love our enemies. Lent is full of profound and prophetic possibilities—a time to be transformed by choosing to follow Jesus’ path of love, courage, compassion, and nonviolent confrontation with the forces that breed death and despair.
