“The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” — Jane Addams (and John Dewey)
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963
The Valley Interfaith Forum on Confronting the Immigrant Crisis was held on Saturday, Sept. 13, 2025, at First Churches in Northampton, about eight months into the second Trump administration. The event was organized as a local response to the growing
threat to persons of foreign origin, or even of foreign appearance, posed by the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda directed by Stephen Miller.
The Sept. 13 immigration forum was a sequel to an earlier public forum held on Veterans Day, 2017 at Edwards Church to honor the legacies of Jane Addams (1860-1935) — the co- founder and longtime director of Chicago’s Hull-House and advocate for factory workers, immigrants, and people of color — and 1931 Nobel Laureate. The humanitarian tradition dating back to Addams and her Hull-House colleagues (later including Eleanor Roosevelt) inspired the organization of the Sept. 13 forum by a group representing several Valley faith institutions.
But Jane herself would have been dismayed if the forum were simply an occasion for talking heads to discuss the evils of the immigration crackdown. As proposed by First Churches Pastor Sarah Buteux and others, the forum should also help immigration service providers attract new volunteers and financial contributors. That led to the “Call to Action Fair” where representatives of local provider organizations and networks met with audience members in the parish hall following the speaker program.
The political context for the forum was summarized in my Sept. 11, 2025 guest column in the Gazette shortly before the forum:
“Among the many lawless measures pursued by the second Trump administration since
Jan. 20, 2025, its campaign of terror against immigrants stands out as profoundly cruel and pointless. It threatens millions of people of foreign origin — including persons born here or holding green cards or visas, or even U.S. citizens — with surveillance, denial of federal health and economic benefits, apprehension, and deportation, all without due process of law.
“The cruelty of ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arrests has been vividly on display thanks to videos by members of the public called to bear witness to human beings being beaten and shackled by armed and masked federal agents, often at the victim’s workplace, school, or routine check-in at immigration offices. Children are separated from their families and detainees are often deprived of medication and access to legal representation.
“ICE detention facilities are infamously medieval. One account describes the arrest of a high school student on his way to volleyball practice in Milford. He was forced to spend six days in a windowless, overcrowded room at an ICE field office before being released. As described in the New York Times (June 29), ‘There was one toilet for 35 to 40 men who had no privacy when using it. They slept on the concrete floor in head-by- toe formation with aluminum blankets to cover them. The food was wretched and the portions tiny; he lost seven pounds in six days.’”
As of Jan. 26, 2026, ICE held 70,766 persons in over 200 detention sites across the country. Tens of thousands more are incarcerated in foreign prisons, most infamously in CECOT in El Salvador, the world’s largest and most dangerous prison facility. Of those held by ICE, 74.2 percent have no criminal conviction, and most of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.
Despite nationwide protests, court interventions, and adverse opinion polls, the Trump administration has deported about 540,000 persons since January 2025, according to the New York Times — in many cases to countries with deplorable human rights records. Although total deportations by the Biden administration were higher (590,000 in 2023 and 650,000 in 2024), many of those resulted from denial of appeals for asylum at the southern border. Stephen Miller’s goal of 3,000 arrests per day has been pursued largely through rounding up foreign-looking persons already residing and working legally in the U.S.
Over the past four months since the forum, the Trump-Miller immigration machine has increasingly relied on heavily armed, quasi-military forces, that are poorly trained and– with reckless encouragement from the White House — act as though they are immune to any legal restraints. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by masked ICE thugs in Minneapolis this January deeply alarmed much of the nation concerning the authoritarian direction of the Trump administration, both as to immigrants and to anyone else who stands up in defiance.
Locally, one spin-off from the Sept. 13 immigration forum is a planned virtual fundraiser on Thursday, March 26 from 7-8 p.m. on behalf of the LUCE Immigrant Justice Hotline, a Massachusetts-based rapid response network established by Neighbor to Neighbor (https://
n2nma.org/). Anyone wishing to join the Zoom call or donate can contact Michael Kane at
mkaneconsulting@gmail.com.
As Jane Addams and MLK Jr. would certainly remind us: We are all in this together.
Rutherford H. Platt is a resident of Florence and an emeritus professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.