Being brave together to meet the surges of ICE

Reverend Jane Field is Executive Director of the Maine Council of Churches and an ordained Presbyterian (PCUSA) minister who has served Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, and Lutheran churches in New York City, Connecticut, and Maine. She is part of the resistance movement against the surges of the ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Like in Minneapolis, in Maine and all over the United States immigrant citizens became targets of violence. In this challenge for the communities, a resistance movement flourished. At the forefront there were also faith leaders and communities from different religious backgrounds. Jane Field is one of them. She says:

“The Faith Community here in Maine was at the vanguard and the forefront of resistance efforts. We helped to push back against the activities of the ICE agents while they were here and against the federal government and Department of Homeland Security. We also worked at the forefront of aiding and assisting our immigrant neighbors who were under threat and being harmed. Many of them lived in lockdown in their homes or hiding in other people's homes. They were afraid to go to work, to let their kids go to school because those were places where ICE were waiting to snatch people. They would even snatch people out of their cars.”

Jane Field speaks with great determination and hope about the emergence of this networks of trust:  “There was a network through a hotline of volunteers who were walking kids to school, driving people to work, getting groceries for people who were in hiding and delivering them to them so that they didn't have to go out of their homes. That was all grassroots and decentralized. That was all mutual aid. It was not done through the government, not even at the state or municipal level. It was all just volunteers.”

In an interview for upcoming issue of evolve magazine, Elizabeth Debold speaks with Jane Field about resistance out of love and deep faith.

‍