Transcription
The Trump administration is dealt another setback in court. A federal judge is blocking the deportation of hundreds of children back home to Guatemala.
In the early morning hours on Sunday, the Trump administration loaded planes with children who had arrived in the US unaccompanied and are believed to not have a parent here. At least one flight was already en route to Guatemala when the judge ordered it to turn around.
It's Ken Harbaugh with the Minus Touch Network. For anyone who ever believed that Trump's immigration crackdown was really about deporting the worst of the worst, just think about these planes full of terrified kids being sent back to a part of the world they fled because they were scared. I don't care if they are here illegally. They are kids. And the Trump administration's application of the law has become so capricious, so cruel, that I'm no longer convinced that fidelity to the law, especially unjust ones like this, is a virtue. So think about these kids and the way that we as a country are treating them. This is not who we want to be.
Listen to the story of just one of them. Let me just read you the background of one of the plaintiffs in this case. A 10-year-old indigenous girl identified only by the initials LGML. She speaks a rare language. She's detained at a children's shelter in Texas. Her mother is deceased and she suffered abuse and neglect from other caregivers, and our government was about to put her on a plane and ship her off to a completely different country. This is who the Trump administration wants you to believe are the worst of the worst.
I have been waiting for America's churches to rise to the challenge of resisting this administration. I know it can be frustrating. Too often the face of America's faith community is MAGA evangelicals who thunder from their pulpits without ever truly understanding Christianity's actual message. The fact is, though Trump won a supermajority of evangelical voters, they do not represent the majority of Christians in this country. There is a movement now, an organized resistance led by faith leaders to resist the Trump regime's immigration policies. 5,000 churches have joined that cause, and their number is growing. I spoke with the organizer of the movement, Pastor Doug Pagitt, about what is being done by these churches to prepare for what is sure to be even greater brutality from the Trump administration. Here's our conversation.
Welcome to the Ken Harbaugh Show. My guest today is Doug Pagitt, a pastor, author, activist, and the founder of Vote Common Good, where he works to inspire faith communities to engage in politics with compassion, justice, and love for one's neighbor, challenging toxic religion while promoting a hopeful vision for American democracy. Doug, welcome to the show.
Ken, such a privilege to be with you. I would love to get into this recent effort that you have launched because to me, it feels like such a long time coming, and you and I have talked about this in the past, but what seems like the wholesale co-option of the American evangelical community by MAGA and Trump. And there are so many of us asking, where are the faith leaders? And they're out there, and you're one of them, and there is pushback. Can you, can you give us some, some hope, some encouragement, and tell us about the 5,000 fellow churches that you are pulling together to resist?
Yeah, look, our work at Vote Common Good is really targeting faith voters, especially white evangelical and white Catholic voters who know that Donald Trump doesn't fit with their sense of America and certainly not their sense of their faith. But a lot of those people are reflexive Republican voters. You know, it's just, a lot of people end up going to church and end up coming out a Republican, and they can't even always explain why that happened. It's just an identity package that they end up in. But there are so many issues for which how Donald Trump and how MAGA and even Republicans talk about the world, it doesn't feel good to these faith voters enough to make many of them leave the Republican party, stay away from MAGA, not vote for Trump. By the way, even though Donald Trump won with more voters across more demographics in 2024 than he received in 2020 or even 2016, he was losing faith voters. He was just picking up in so many other places. And that's frankly, that's, um, a little good news, right? There's not enough that have moved, but a lot of faith voters don't feel like they can stay connected with this. And immigration is one of the big issues, and the way immigrants are treated is the center of that. So we know that people stepped away from Republicans and from MAGA and from Trump over kids in cages, and now they're doing it over alligator Alcatraz and other facilities that are being built with the sheer intention to intimidate and be cruel. So, we know that this is an issue that a lot of people will stand up around and say something about because faith communities care about immigrants, frankly. It's, um, it's they're kind of the backbone of the immigrant experience in the United States. Faith organizations, faith churches, faith people have just spent a lot of their time and said a lot of their identity around that. So, we knew that this would be an issue that people would want to say something about. So, we tried to give them a chance to do it.
You're sounding almost like a political strategist in your description of it as a, as a wedge issue, but I've got to believe in your heart, this one feels like the moral test of our times. It is certainly useful as a political tool to peel faith voters and even evangelicals away from Trump. But gosh, to me, it hits deeper than that. It is, I mean, it feels like Europe in the 1930s.
Yeah, there is no doubt that this feels like something that our government is doing that strikes at the very ethics of a lot of people in this country, especially religious people. They have an ethic of care. They have an ethic of kindness. Now, a lot of people want to push for justice. They want to push for a legal way and all this, but they fundamentally want people to be given their rights and treated fairly. Like, you don't, there's no one who argues against that, right? Other than this sliver of MAGA who wants to tell people that if we determine you to be a criminal in our eyes, not in the eyes of the law, but in our eyes, we can treat you any way we want to. Now, here's the thing about morality and political identity as we understand it. People don't vote on policy per se. They vote for candidates that make them feel like they're a good person. Package of policies, the way they act, they, they have a narrative. You know, we, we all find a way to make ourselves the hero in pretty much every situation. And a lot of people can't figure out how they're the quote good guys in this situation when the government is treating people this way. And they don't want it. No one said in an election, "Yeah, what we want you to do is go to Home Depot and round up a bunch of day workers and put them into a makeshift hostage situation in South Florida in the Everglades."
Hey, it's Ken Harbaugh. Quick break to say thank you to everyone who's been following and supporting this show and this channel. None of it happens without you. And if you haven't yet subscribed to my Substack page, I'd really appreciate the follow. It's a great way to make sure you never miss an episode. It's free to sign up, and if you're able to pitch in a few bucks, every dollar goes back into the show. Just search for the Ken Harbaugh Show on Substack or click the link below. Thanks.
How ecumenical do you think this faith-based resistance can become? Because on one hand, I still see evangelical pastors thundering law and order from the pulpit. And I see Catholic bishops saying, uh, we're going to provide sanctuary and warning their undocumented parishioners not to show up. I mean, these evocations of 1930s Europe seem over the top until you hear what's actually happening in these parishes. Can you share some of those personal stories and then maybe give us some insight into how faith communities are hopefully influencing each other in a positive way?
So, we have to find a way for faith leaders and for their communities to speak boldly about issues without feeling like they're picking political sides. Now, that's a little heartbreaking for me because I think right now we have a politics that is all about morality and immorality. So, it's really hard to do this. But look, churches and faith communities are, you know, as sophisticated as the rest of civic society, and we need to figure out how to do so. So, what we're doing is providing a 10-point plan for communities. We have a downloadable toolkit on our website at votecoomgood.com, and it's a place that describes what faith communities can do. And it's, it really runs along a spectrum from things that you already mentioned where leaders can talk to their immigrant communities. They can also put material in their churches that give people instructions about what their rights are and what ICE is allowed to do and not allowed to do. You know, one of the things we've learned in this work over the last six months is that when there's an observer of any kind interacting with ICE, when they try to detain a person, ICE behaves differently. When it's a white person who's observing, they behave even more differently. And if it's a religious leader of any race or tradition, that's when they tend to behave in ways that are most consistent with the laws of this country. So there is something of moral outcry that can happen. So we're asking people to simply be aware and start to name what they can do and what immigrants can do and what their community can do. But it can also run all the way to providing sanctuary. And, uh, back in, back in 2018, uh, at my church, we housed a person for more than a year and kept them in safety until they could have their case properly adjudicated. So, some churches are doing that. They're actually bringing people into their facility or into property owned by the churches and providing physical sanctuary for them. But that's all along a spectrum. There are a lot of things people can do that don't bring them quite to the point where they have to house someone.
Do you ever step back and just listen to yourself saying that in 2025 in the United States of America? Because I find myself in these red line conversations all the time with academics and other leaders talking about, you know, what line are we waiting to be crossed and when are we going to act? And I'm to the point of asking, well, we're way beyond the red line. What is our response? How soon do we start hiding people in our attic? And you just described the church version of hiding people in your attic. It, I think we have to reflect on that. That's that's insane.
Yeah. You know, I feel like a crazy person when I talk about this stuff, and we're putting toolkits together of non-violent resistance against the federal government who are sending masked federal agents into communities and going through doors of homes and businesses to apprehend people. That feels like I am exaggerating the case. And frankly, I think we're understating the case. I think it's happening more often, and it's happening in more nefarious ways than we even know how to identify. So, yeah, I absolutely feel that way.
The fact that you just pointed out that ICE agents behave differently when white people are filming them, and those are 90% of the videos we see, it begs the question, what aren't we seeing? And it's got to be horrific.
When this kind of moral hazard is taking place, it is harming everyone involved. We've spent time with border agents, border patrol agents who are sickened by what they're asked to do. These people who are signing up for ICE now or signed up for ICE a few years ago and are given these assignments. We're hearing stories of them feeling horrible about what they're being demanded to do. So we not only want the faith community to support the migrants, we want them to support the law. We also want them to support these agents who can and should say no to these orders that are being given to them that I think are extra-legal. I think they're outside of the law. I mean, frankly, I think this administration is lawless. Like they're outlaws. They don't even care what the law is. They don't think they're breaking the law. They are unconcerned with the law. But there are thousands of evangelical churches that are on the other side on this issue and many other issues. The problem is they don't speak up. They don't say anything. Now, that's what gets scary when you start to think about other times when Western societies have dealt with the kinds of oppressions that we've seen and watched the church wilt away or even worse, become a spokesperson for a regime that is harming its own citizens and other people in the world. So, this is really a call for people to say something and to stand up. You know, not everybody has to go all the way to sanctuary, but they can do one thing more than they did yesterday. And we think that that's a pretty good way to think about how you can incrementalize yourself into this kind of social action.
Well, I'm inspired by what you're doing, Doug. We'll have to end it there. Where can people find out more about your organization and this network of resisting churches?
Yeah, thanks. All of our information is at votecoomgood.com. And I'll say to anybody who's a part of a church, don't wait for your leaders. Take a look at the toolkit, download some things, bring it to your leaders. We have to have a grassroots movement inside the faith communities and not wait for pastors and bishops and leaders to be the ones who are going to tell the congregants what to do. This is a time for the we the people of these churches to rise up and say, these are our churches, and we need to call our leaders to action.
That's right. Well, that's the church wherever two or more are gathered in my name. Thanks, Doug. We'll put the link below.
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