One of the visions we have as a church is to be a community that nonviolently disrupts injustice. On December 16th two pastors and several elders and members of our church helped us live out the vision by joining an effort to shut down the ICE headquarters and detention center at 630 Sansome Street in San Francisco. Three of them, Rev. Tom Harris, Rev. Diana Gibson, and Ruling Elder Leif Erickson, joined an organized blockade of the entrances to the building in an effort to close it for the day. In doing so they were arrested, charged, and released. This faith-based nonviolent direct action was organized by the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, a long-time community partner of our church.
Our church’s vision is “to grow towards becoming an intergenerational, multi-ethnic, anti-racist, geographically and economically diverse Christian community gathered together and sustained by creative worship, biblically-inspired learning, and empathetic ministry, nonviolently disrupting injustice in the world.”
In this building on Sansome Street our immigrant neighbors attend appointments which should be a routine part of maintaining their status as legal residents of the U.S. Instead these law-abiding members of our community are frequently detained without due process and often deported. These deportations regularly separate families and leave children without one or both parents. Sometimes law-abiding, long-time residents of California are deported to countries they have not lived in since they were children, or countries where they have never lived. Further, there have been consistent complaints about inhumane conditions at the detention center located in this building. In November a federal judge required ICE to improve the inhumane conditions of the detention center, but the complaints have continued. Those in power are consistently failing to respond to concerns and abuses of power reported through normal civil channels. In this situation we may not be able to stop the injustice but we can at least disrupt it by refusing to cooperate.
We the Session of First Presbyterian Church Palo Alto believe our pastors, elders, and church members succeeded in disrupting injustice in San Francisco this week.. Along with 41 other faith leaders from diverse faith communities, they placed their bodies on the line to disrupt the injustice being done, if only for one day. They have our full support in taking these actions; in fact they are doing what we as a congregation are called to do.
