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Schools, hospitals, churches in Kansas face moral choice in face of immigration crackdown

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Schools, hospitals, churches in Kansas face moral choice in face of immigration crackdown

By Aaron Schwartz
Schools, hospitals, churches in Kansas face moral choice in face of immigration crackdown
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President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington, D.C.  (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Community leaders have some soul searching to do.

President Donald Trump, a perpetual litmus test for right and wrong, a test our nation has failed for a decade, is now giving civic leaders another opportunity to act morally in the face of cruelty and cowardice.

Trump issued a directive to federal immigration officials that removes protections from arrests in schools, hospitals and places of worship. While Trump and his supporters will revel in the inhumanity of such a directive, the rest of us need to decide in advance about the moral response.

Will ministers watch from the pulpit as people are dragged from the sight of God? Will doctors and nurses violate the Hippocratic oath? Will school boards, superintendents and principals stand idly by as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raid school buildings? Will our neighbors and their children be terrorized as they worship, seek care, pursue knowledge?

These are questions to consider in advance. The shock and indecision in the presence of such abject cruelty and extreme overreach of power will be overwhelming when it comes, and any course of action must be planned beforehand so that reactions are both measured and moral.

While there are differences between hospitals, churches and schools, the people within those buildings — patients, parishioners and pupils — are in the care of doctors, clergy and teachers. They have a moral responsibility to protect bodies, souls and minds.

This means a wide range of community leaders should be prepared to follow our country’s rich history of civil disobedience.

Henry David Thoreau writes: “Most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders — serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few — as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men — serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.”

To oppose ICE arrests at hospitals, churches and schools is a moral imperative. It also puts the doctor, minister and teacher in direct opposition with the government. It may make them enemies of the state, but it does not make them wrong. A person of conscience in these environments has no other choice but to oppose state violence enacted on the powerless.

Such a reaction must be resolute and nonviolent. Community leaders do not owe ICE agents space in their workplaces. They do not owe them information. They do not owe them the movement of their bodies or the speech from their mouths. If identifying a person under our care would cause them physical, spiritual or mental harm, they are obligated to remain silent.

This includes security personnel such as school resource officers. It includes administrators, office staff and fellow parishioners. They must ask themselves: Is our obligation to the enforcers of injustice, or is it to the communities we have sworn to heal, teach and protect? To our consciences? To our gods?

Community leaders should decide now whether the personal costs of noncompliance — including bodily harm or official prosecution — is worth a clear conscience. This is a president and regime that would, to borrow from Thoreau, deport Christ, excommunicate Luther and  Copernicus, and poison Socrates.

Their ignorance is matched only by their cruelty. It takes intelligence, conscience and compassion to oppose both.

Thoreau reminds us that “under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” If injustice comes to my school, I hope to be counted among those who would rather be reprimanded or detained than watch a child be arrested for simply existing.

I hope to be on the side of righteousness. I hope that you are, too.

Aaron Schwartz is a writer and teacher in the Kansas City area. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.