As this issue of America is being prepared for publication, Congress has just passed a bill that separated funding for the Department of Homeland Security from a larger budget package, ending a brief partial government shutdown and starting a two-week window for negotiation of legal restraints on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge. The debate over those reforms will unfold while this issue is making its way to your mailbox.

Like so many, I have been thinking about and praying for people in Minneapolis for the past month. Certainly, that includes praying for an end to the “indiscriminate mass deportation of people,” as the U.S. bishops described it in their November “special message” on immigration, and for a drawdown of the enforcement surge in the Twin Cities.

It has also included prayers of gratitude: gratitude that over the past month, more and more Americans have been moved to reject the violence our government is directing against our immigrant brothers and sisters and often against American citizens who dare to object to it. Gratitude for the courage of those who speak out in protest, as the Our Take in this issue highlights. Gratitude for those who have borne witness, in person and via video, so that the rest of us are not taken in by lies, as my colleague James T. Keane eloquently explains in this issue’s Last Take.

Even more, I have found myself moved by gratitude for the basic witness of goodness in and around and behind the more visible protests against the demonization of those who have come to the United States, following the pattern of so many of our immigrant forebears, seeking a better life for themselves and their families. That goodness, providing for the immediate and practical needs of people who are living in fear of immigration enforcement, is a concrete answer to Jesus’ profound question following the parable of the good Samaritan: “Which of these…was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?”

Laura Kelly Fanucci, in an article published on America’s website on Jan. 30, captured that reality, including a number of quotes from fellow Minnesotans. I am devoting the rest of this column to Ms. Fanucci’s introduction to that piece, in the hope that you will read the whole article online and join in gratitude for the goodness of those who make themselves neighbors to the vulnerable and the suffering. That response is at the heart of the Gospel, modelled on the generosity of Jesus offering himself for us.

⸻

Make breakfast. Check the news. Wake the kids. Check ICE activity website for updates along the drive to school. Pack lunches. Text friend to confirm I’ll bring home her kids today since she’s not leaving the house. Brush kids’ hair. Put Signal app notifications on silent since local mutual aid groups are already buzzing, but I can’t answer. Brush kids’ teeth. 

Scribble grocery list of items to buy for neighbors who have been at home for weeks. Run outside to warm up the car. Hear radio updates about local preschooler detained by ICE. Dash back inside, zip kids’ coats, pull on mittens, tug on hats. Head out into the frigid cold again.

I am a Catholic author, a mother of five, and a Minnesotan. In the past month, the last part of my identity has taken over my life and work. The dramatic and violent occupation of our cities by federal agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul has become national headlines. The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the detainments of children and elders, the countless friends who are U.S. citizens staying home out of fear that their brown or black skin will put them in danger—all have moved me to join thousands of Minnesotans in rallying to care for our neighbors living under the threat of deportation.

We are buying groceries for families who have not left the house in over a month because they fear being targeted by ICE. We are driving children to school because their bus stops are no longer safe. We are organizing patrols to stand outside daycares and schools, to make sure children and parents can get in and out safely. We are fundraising rent money for neighbors who can’t go to work for fear of detainment or deportation. We are helping find midwives for pregnant women terrified to go to hospitals and finding nurses willing to check on elderly and disabled neighbors with serious conditions. 

We are calling our representatives and writing our bishops. We are asking our pastors to speak up for their suffering parishioners and thanking our liturgists for including the dead in the Prayers of the Faithful. We are mobilizing parish emergency funds, holding prayer services, buying diapers and formula, and bringing coats to the detention center where people are put out into the subzero cold after they are released, with no way to get home.

Read the rest of the piece here.

This article appears in March 2026.

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.