How has your day-to-day life in the Twin Cities been impacted by recent ICE activity?
I noticed my life shifting the most on January 11, when my husband texted “CALL ME” while I was at work. He had heard that ICE was going door-to-door in nearby neighborhoods; he’d also heard that they were looking for Hmong and other Asian people in particular. I’m Korean American, and our kids clearly look Asian. I started to panic.
I didn’t have time to explain the difference between an administrative warrant and a judicial warrant, and ICE would not really care if we stood up and demanded to see a judicial warrant anyway. I told my husband to bolt all the doors and not to open them for anyone. He did that, along with turning out the lights and closing the blinds.
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When I got closer to home, I asked our neighbor—who also happens to be the pianist at my church—if he could meet me when I parked and walk me to my house. That was a defining moment for me.
Our children’s school went virtual after a student and a parent were confronted by ICE near the school. My family and I decided to go to my parents’ house in Iowa for several days, and I used up the rest of my paid time off to do it. It was so bizarre, driving to Iowa with a file cabinet containing paperwork that proves we are US citizens. It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.
How are you approaching giving and receiving pastoral and community care?
Community care has been one of the most powerful and sustaining things that we’ve seen as a result of what’s happening. It’s bringing neighborhoods together. Many of us are involved with donating groceries, time, and money to support neighbors in the countless mutual aid networks that have arisen in this time.
After Alex Pretti was killed, my neighbors and I all stood out on the corner, and somebody bought tea. We talked while we lit candles—that’s part of community care. I’ve also become involved with some of the movement chaplaincy work here.
Tell me about movement chaplaincy.
Movement chaplaincy emerged after the George Floyd uprising in 2020. It came specifically out of Minneapolis in response to people on the ground wanting spiritual care and accompaniment. Kelly Sherman-Conroy, an amazing Native theologian, was involved with convening the Twin City Interfaith Movement Chaplains. She and others have been doing it for quite a while now.
I just started getting involved with movement chaplaincy. It’s been a different way of showing up as a clergyperson than I’ve done in the past. It’s a different kind of embodiment, showing up as a chaplain instead of an activist—those are very different roles.
Anyone who has done work in chaplaincy—or clinical pastoral education training—knows that you have to have a certain amount of inner space to be able to show up as a chaplain. There are some days when I would not feel right putting on the movement chaplain vest because I don’t have that space.
How do you show up differently in a chaplaincy role than you might when you’re participating in a protest?
I’ve shown up as a clergyperson at press conferences in solidarity with the Somali community, to demand that ICE leave Minnesota and that the officers who killed Renée Good be arrested and charged with murder. Those were intentional moves to stand up in an interfaith context with other clergy.
Showing up as a chaplain is about going with a few other chaplains and working as a unit around the edges of a crowd to see who needs care. It’s about having a watchful presence.
Sometimes people will seek us out, and they’ll strike up a conversation. We’re there to offer presence. And with such cold weather, having chaplains offer a table with hot tea and coffee—I love that, it’s just a very intentional thing.
It’s hospitality.
Yes, and the role of hospitality has so often been relegated as a gendered role and seen as lesser than. But it’s such a powerful way to show up in caregiving—and in caregiving as resistance. Everybody has to eat. And a lot of people right now can’t shop for food, or they don’t have money to go shopping for food because they can’t go to work, or someone who used to provide isn’t in their home anymore.
To be able to buy the food that people will actually eat, good food, and serve it to them—that’s radical hospitality to me. But it’s just also being a good neighbor, and that concept of radical, loving, neighborliness is something I’ve seen as an outpouring throughout the community. I’ve never seen so many sambusas passed around in my life.
You were a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School in 2014, when a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. You became involved in the protests that ensued. What did you see in the clergy who were present at the protests?
Before I drove from Nashville to Ferguson the first time, I called the local public library, because the schools in Ferguson were closed and they were hosting students. I told them I was a former teacher and asked if they needed volunteers. That’s originally what I went there to do, but then I started protesting, too.
Being in seminary is grueling, and I was wondering if I should do the 51-hour program to get an academic master’s degree instead of the 84-hour MDiv required for ordination. But in Ferguson, I kept seeing clergy like Karen Anderson, Traci Blackmon, and Starsky Wilson showing up in support of the protesters on the front line. When young Black protesters were arrested, clergy were the ones who could visit them—I began to see that there are two kinds of people who have access to the jails, lawyers and clergy. Clergy waited for the protesters until they were released.
I also remember that when some of the clergy were arrested for civil disobedience, the young protesters waited for them in solidarity. We’ll wait for you as you waited for us, they said.
Seeing the trust they had built was a moment of clarity for me. It was about relationships. It wasn’t about control, about clergy telling the protesters what to do or not do. It left quite an indelible mark on me, and it helped me understand why it was so important for me to finish my MDiv and pursue ordination.
In the American tradition of protest, clergy have typically been present. What connections are you making now between the tradition and the role of clergy?
For most people, it takes a significant amount of privilege to be able to be ordained. It requires time, money, and often social connections to attend an accredited theological school. A denomination’s ordination process can take years—mine took five. You still have to pay the bills, and you may also have children to care for or debt to pay off. Throughout history, people who were ordained were socioeconomically privileged, and they leveraged that privilege to stand in solidarity with people. That is often still the case.
Here in St. Paul, I have more privilege as an East Asian American and a US citizen than, for instance, a Southeast Asian refugee does. I’m less likely to be targeted based on the shade of my skin, and I can speak English because I was raised in Iowa.
Whatever kind of privilege we have as clergy, we need to be willing to use it to speak up and follow that lineage of public witness. Not to do so recklessly, but to choose the way that is best aligned with our moral compass, which includes what’s best for our families, too.
In most denominations, the fact that women were not permitted to be ordained until fairly recently means that there is less of a documented history of women marching in clerical roles. I think this is why it was so moving for me to see these women clergy in Ferguson.
Minneapolis is home to the largest synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the ELCA is one of the Whitest denominations in the United States. If there was ever a time to use that privilege, it’s now, and I have seen a lot of ELCA people out there in public witness. Meanwhile, we all still have to do the hard work of dismantling racism within our churches, which is so much less glamorous than public witness. It requires repair and repentance.
How are you accessing hope right now? What resources are helping you sustain it?
It’s been helpful for me to reach out to clergy and friends outside of Minnesota, the kind that you can text or call who automatically understand. That’s usually my Black clergy friends, because they already know what it’s like to be racially targeted—I don’t have to explain that to them. It gives me hope to recognize that this is part of a deeply rooted historical struggle.
I’ve also been rereading Howard Thurman’s Meditations of the Heart. One of my favorite sections comes near the end of “A Litany of Thanksgiving”: “The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the children of God as the waters cover the sea.”
