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One week ago, at 1am on South Shore Drive in Chicago, locals were awakened by a Blackhawk military helicopter that hovered over a five-story apartment building. The Department of Homeland Security said Border Patrol, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were involved in the raid, which neighbors said included flash bang grenades, drone surveillance, and hundreds of agents on the ground.
“It was heartbreaking to watch,” Ebony Sweets Watson told the Chicago Sun Times [ [link removed] ]. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
Grainy cell phone footage of children taken from their beds to UHaul trucks in the parking lot across the street are the only images we have of a scene that unfolded under the cover of night. But we do not need to see the images to hear the mothers, still crying out one week later.
We do not need to see the images because we know these cries.
They are the cries of the Hebrew mothers, hard-pressed in Egypt land, crying out because Pharaoh had ordered the midwives to take every male children.
They are the cries of the mothers when Jesus was born in Bethlehem and King Herod ordered the extermination of every child under two years of age – the massacre we remember in the church after every Christmas celebration during the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
In The Cotton Patch Gospel musical, King Herod sings his justification for the cruelty visited upon ancient Bethlehem.
All through the ages
wise men and sages
have said there are dirty deeds
that simply must be done.
To keep society going
and the benefits a flowing
there’s the simple necessity
of hurting someone.
It takes strength and agility
And responsibility.
It’s the core of what
leadership’s really about.
So when the red blood starts coming
just think of it as plumbing.
If you’ve got a problem
you must flush it out.
The cruel logic of King Herod’s realism is on full display today in the authoritarian abuse of federal power that Stephen Miller’s masked men are executing in Los Angeles and D.C. and Chicago and Memphis and, we may well assume, in a city near us and you soon.
“Help us!” was the simple cry we heard two weeks ago from a mother in LA whose husband was snatched from his job at a local car wash, thrown into a van, and carried away from his family to a private detention center.
Pertissue Fisher, a woman who lives in the apartment building that was raided last week in Chicago, told CBS News: “No shoes, the kids didn’t have no shirts or no pants on. They just treated us like we were nothing.”
These mothers’ cries must be heard – across the weeks and across the millennia – because they expose something we must know about authoritarian regimes: while they project power through cruelty, their extreme actions reveal that they are afraid.
Pharaoh was afraid that the Hebrew children would multiply and outnumber the Egyptians who worshiped him as a god.
Herod was afraid when magi from the East came to worship the Christ child that Jesus would grow up to threaten his power. So he killed every child under two years old to make sure he got Jesus. (He didn’t know that the Holy Family, having been warned in a dream, got away as refugees).
What are MAGA’s strategists and Trump’s backers so afraid of? They are scared to death that the shifting demographics in American society will make it impossible for them to hold onto power with the old coalition they built on the Southern Strategy’s divide-and-conquer tactics. So they have invested in a new lie – the lie that tells both Black and white Americans that brown immigrants from the South are invading “our” country.
They want us to be afraid of our immigrant neighbors, but their cruelty unveils their fear of our political power. Black, white, and brown people who want an economy that works for all of us are the majority in America. We have the power to fundamentally reconstruct America. As terrible as the news each day appears, the truth is that we are on the cusp of a radical rebirth of democracy in this nation.
They would not be fighting us this hard if they didn’t understand our power.
Which means now, more than ever, we must understand it ourselves. Now is the time to link up. Now is the time to build new coalitions. Now is the time to lay smaller disagreements aside and build as big a tent as possible to take back the tools of government and re-claim our power to become the nation we’ve never yet been.
Listen to the mothers crying. They’re calling to each and every one of us.
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As we expand Moral Mondays in the fight for healthcare during this government shutdown, join Bishop Barber and moral witnesses from across the South online this evening, October 8, for an Emergency Briefing.
You can register here: [link removed] [ [link removed] ]
If you are in the Hartford, CT/Springfield, MA area, Jonathan will be giving the annual Meeting House Lecture at First Church Longmeadow at 7pm tonight. He’d love to see you there. Details below.

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