"We're not the Statue of Liberty country."

From the Borderlands

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"We're not the Statue of Liberty country."

As the ICE Gestapo fills its Gulag with our neighbors, family, colleagues, and friends, the time is NOW to call this country to its conscience. Or melt down Lady Liberty.

Sarah Towle

Apr 13, 2025

Transcript

Welcome new subscribers! And hello to one and all!

THE HOPE KNOWS NO BORDERS BOOK CLUB & WEBINAR SERIES kicked off on March 30, 2025, with a focus on providing Sanctuary & Building Railroads.

As the US Department of Homeland Security's 80k-member+ forces — ICE and Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol — continue their Reign of Terror, disappearing people with no criminal record into its 200+ prison Gulag, which now includes a high-security concentration camp in El Salvador, we must:

RESIST government overreach as a civic duty;

REFUSE government lawlessness as a legal responsibility;

RECLAIM our values as a democratic nation and communities of faith; and

RECALIBRATE our moral compass, letting it — not Fox News — be our guide.

There is a reason the MAGA party doesn’t want history taught in our schools: because there is much to be learned from the actions of folks who’ve walked before us, modeling how to wrangle the long arc of history toward justice. The only way to avoid allowing the worst of the worst human impulses to rear their ugly heads again is to examine and understand 1) how some among our predecessors excused evil, finding justification in the unjustifiable; as well as 2) how other more courageous souls stood against them, even at the risk of their personal safety, to say, No! We are better than this!

We must be willing to confront the human-made atrocities of our past — genocide, mass murder, enslavement for profit — in order never to repeat them; in order to stop them from ever happening again.

In this first webinar of the Hope Knows No Borders Book Club, we do just that. We dig into our immigration past to learn from the co-padres of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, Reverend John Fife and Dora Rodriguez (Crossing the Line, Chapter 11), of Tucson, Arizona, as well as current Sanctuary providers, Reverends Babs Miller and Jim Rigby, of Austin, Texas.

Among the many insights you will discover in this podcast are:

We’re not the “Statue of Liberty country” we’ve all been taught to believe in. We are a white supremacist state from the founding. “We are South Africa with nuclear weapons.”
Now as then … and the time before that … churches, universities, unions, individual dissenters, and communities allied in justice are being targeted for defending the most vulnerable among us.
We must protect victims of persecution because, since the Nuremberg Tribunal following the Holocaust, human rights have taken precedence in international law over the actions of the state. They are the highest standard to which we can all be held.
This historic moment is an opportunity to call this country to its conscience. But it will require us — the grassroots — to do it because we cannot rely on our elective officials right now.
It is ALL our civic, moral, and legal responsibility to hold the federal government and its agency actors accountable for their violations of human rights and international law.
Until these dark times are behind us, we must provide a bulwark against the monstrosities to come. We must commit to becoming a trillion tiny grains of sand that jam the gears of the machinery and keep it from turning.

When they come for your immigrant neighbors, family, colleagues, and friends, don’t look away because you think you’re not one of them. Understand that the denial of their due process and constitutional rights today means the denial of your due process and constitutional rights tomorrow. If Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, can be imprisoned and expelled simply because the people in power do not like his views, then all our constitutional rights to Freedom of Speech and Assembly are under threat. If Kilmer Abrego Garcia can be mistakenly caught in an ICE dragnet and renditioned to lifetime enslavement in a third-country prison camp without due process under the law, then all our due process protections are compromised.

REMEMBER the primary lesson from the Sanctuary Movement:

Activism is not “Civil Disobedience” when it’s the government crossing the line. It is our Civic Duty, as well as our moral, legal, and spiritual responsibility, to protect all victims of human rights violations and to hold all bad actors, even the federal government, accountable for their crimes.

To paraphrase Jim Corbett, who you’ll meet in this podcast, we cannot let the worst of the worst happen on our borders and in our communities in our lifetime.

On behalf of John Fife, Dora Rodriguez, Babs Miller, and Jim Rigby, and with my profound gratitude for their participation, I hope you make time for our timely and important discussion. (Transcript available behind the tab at the top.)

The only way through this is together,
Sarah

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