Bishop Exposes What ICE Is Really Doing Inside Churches | Bishop Dottie Escobedo-Frank

Interview with Bishop Dottie Escobedo-Frank

KAY BROWN, HOST: All right, welcome to Hotspots. I'm so glad you're here. Today we'll be looking at the increasingly coercive and illegal actions being used by our government against immigrant communities across the country — aggressive ICE raids, abusive and inhumane detention facilities, and targeted attacks on cities and minority groups to create fear and silence opposition.

Today I'll be visiting with United Methodist Bishop Dottie Escobedo-Frank. Thank you so much for joining me, Bishop Dottie. Really appreciate it.

BISHOP DOTTIE ESCOBEDO-FRANK: Thank you for inviting me. Yes, nice to meet you.

BROWN: Nice to meet you. The Rev. Dottie Escobedo-Frank is the resident bishop of the California Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church. She has served the church and the community in progressive roles and responsibilities throughout her career, including supporting the unhoused, immigrant populations and marginalized communities. She's the author of numerous books on church vitalization and transformation, a daughter of Lutheran missionaries.

She was trained as a social worker specializing in foster care and medical pediatric crisis management. She has a master's in social work from Arizona State University, a master's in divinity from Claremont School of Theology, and a doctorate in ministry from George Fox Evangelical Seminary. Bishop Dottie has held many roles in the church, including as a deacon, elder and pastor of six churches.

She currently chairs the Justice and Reconciliation Committee for the Council of Bishops. Bishop Dottie, as you know, the Council of Bishops recently issued a statement about the current state of affairs in our country condemning the use of lethal force in public spaces and the detention of people who don't deserve to be detained.

And I'll just read a short piece of it: "The United Methodist Church deplores the use of violence, fear, separation and intimidation as a means of creating social order. Such means do not build beloved community. We reaffirm our longstanding commitment to the sacred worth of every person and to the way of peace taught and embodied by Jesus."

"We stand against the separation of children from their families and detest the inhumane, evil actions that are perpetrated by governmental authorities." So it was a really powerful statement. And I wonder if you could tell me what prompted the Council of Bishops to speak out and become involved?

ESCOBEDO-FRANK: I believe that statement was made after the violence that happened in Minnesota. And so, the bishops have been working on caring for our immigrant brothers and sisters for a long time. That was a moment right in our history where the violence was perpetrated in front of us. And so the statement came out after that. The Council of Bishops made that statement then.

BROWN: And what specific behaviors and actions were you addressing in putting that together?

ESCOBEDO-FRANK: So in that moment, we watched where two people were killed on the streets of Minneapolis — I believe they're both in Minneapolis. And so of course we're going to condemn the violence that ends in death that we saw, that most of us saw. If we watch the news during that period of time, it's abhorrent — I feel it's abhorrent for us to address our protesters and our immigrant communities in that way. We know that immigrants and people who stand for immigrants have been killed in the past. But a lot of times it didn't happen in such a public arena.

So immigrants have lost their lives along the way before, and citizens before who were thought to be immigrants. But in that particular moment, it was the violence that happened. And we'd also watched how children — there was a 5-year-old little boy who was taken away with his father in that same area.

And so just the harm upon harm that kept happening in that moment, we felt the Council of Bishops felt like it was a time when we needed to speak out.

BROWN: How are the Trump administration's policies on deportation, moving people out of the country, impacting people in our area?

ESCOBEDO-FRANK: Yeah, so in the California Pacific Conference of which I'm a bishop, we've seen people removed without due process, without a judicial warrant and taken to ICE facilities. In Los Angeles, for example, we have the federal building, which has a facility in it, and people have been removed and sent there — again, without due process. And a lot of folks in our own area also have gone to their court hearings, their court processes that they are legitimately in according to what has been required of them.

And after they're done with the court hearing, we've seen them carted away by ICE agents who are waiting outside for them to finish their process. We've seen children crying when their mothers were pulled away from them — little tiny children, elementary school kids, babies.

So we've seen it all in our area, right? In California, we are a state that is rich in its immigrant community's resources. We have people from all over the world in our communities. And we consider that a source of richness and wealth and wholeness that we have this community that can work together with people from all around the world.

So it feels like an offense to who we are when our neighbors are ripped away from us for no reason, except for the color of their skin or the accent of their tongue. And in my particular area of churches, on Jan. 29, we had an ICE raid in one of our church settings, and they came in and removed a man.

And there were children, mothers, grandmothers, fathers — a big community gathering on a Saturday. They came in, ICE came in, took somebody away, just grabbed him. They came in with their guns and with their full face masks without a warrant at all. Didn't even try to give a warrant. Just grabbed the person they chased.

And they took a community member of ours away. And of course the people who were there, the church was terrorized. It took us a while for everybody to be able to go home because they were so afraid of just leaving the church. After that, they went into the sanctuary and were afraid to walk out and to go home.

So that's going on still here. I went back and talked to that community a couple weeks later. I showed up on Sunday morning at North Hills United Methodist Church when I was with them. The leaders just gathered around me after the worship service and just started telling me their stories about how afraid they were in that moment.

And this one woman said, "I had my grandchild, and I saw the gun, and I just grabbed my grandchild's hand and walked him quietly into the sanctuary away from the guns." And she said that she was calm until afterwards and that the fear she has now is still with her. So these kinds of entries into our safe spaces with guns and masks and without due process are uncalled for and are not who we are as a nation.

It's not what we stand for as a country that was built around people coming to us from all over so that we can be a better country. The more of the global community that comes to the United States, the better off we are as a country. And yet that is being questioned and the policies of this administration are breaking apart our communities and making our neighbors suffer.

I went to another church — this was months and months ago — and I just, again, I usually just show up at church. I don't announce that I'm coming because I like to just see how worship really is and be a part of the worship community. So I showed up in a Hispanic, Latino, Latina church and toward the end, they asked the youth to come up and the youth wanted me to pray for them.

So I asked them, "What do you want me to pray for?" And they said, "Pray that it gets safe again, so that I can go to school. Pray that my dad doesn't cry because he can't work. Pray that my brother and my sister don't get taken away. Pray that I get to stay with my mom."

Heart-wrenching prayers. And I prayed. I prayed for safety for them, for their community. I prayed for them to have courage and strength to get through this time. And I prayed for all of us, the church community, that we would rise up and stand with our neighbors and be close to them and be the strength for them when they couldn't.

So in our churches, we deliver food to people these days because they can't work anymore, or we deliver homework assignments to our kids in some of our churches because they can't go to school. And yeah, it doesn't feel like a safe place to be for some of our churches. It's a tough day.

BROWN: Yes, very tough. Where do you see things headed from public reports? It sounds like there has been a pause in the public confrontations, although we know from reports of independent journalists and people on the ground that deportations are continuing apace. More ICE officers are being hired and deployed with minimal training. Facilities are being acquired and constructed around the country to house detained people. They're just expanding these camps to detention camps and putting people there to await disposition of their cases. Do you see the situation improving or getting worse, or what do you think we're headed for?

ESCOBEDO-FRANK: I have to see the end. I have to see the end game, which is that it will improve and that we will become more human — humans with compassion and not humans with the ability to harm each other. That's what I work for, preach for. That's my hope. But I see that before that happens, the darkness and the evil are exposed. It has to be exposed, and it gets exposed every time these things happen.

Now, just because you see something happen in another city or in our cities on the news one night doesn't mean it's not happening, like you said, multiple times over. That doesn't get reported to the news. And so we know that the detention centers are full, that there are children in detention centers. And these things have to be exposed.

In the Methodist way, when we get baptized, we ask the question of the people who are being baptized or the parents for their children: Do you reject the evil and injustice in whatever forms they come to you?

And this is where we are in our day. We have evil and injustice happening around us, and it doesn't seem like the political arena and the judicial arena are able to stop it. But I do believe that people are rising up. What we saw in Minnesota — the people rose up. Like what we saw in Los Angeles when we were militarized for that time, the people rose up and showed up.

This past week there were 2,000 United Methodists who showed up in Washington, D.C., for a rally to say we stand with our immigrant community, our immigrant neighbors. Two thousand, they say about 5,000 online. So people are willing to show up and speak out against the evils that are happening in our day.

I do think, though, that as human beings, we are reticent to commit ourselves and to show up for something that doesn't affect us personally. And so it's taken, actually, generations of things happening to get to this point where it seems like it affects people more personally. Now it could be because of social media. We get to see more because of the news. Or because the people that we are seeing on the news are people who look like us now. And so it affects us. Or because we have an actual neighbor who we watched be treated unfairly and be sent to a detention center.

It's not always the big things I think that will change us. It's sometimes the small things. Like in Los Angeles, in the federal building, every Tuesday there's a group of mothers who march around the federal building as a remembrance of the children who have disappeared. And that's a tradition that goes back to Central and South America, and that tradition brought to us.

And so every Tuesday we march around, we pray, we sing, we tell a story of one person who has suffered, one immigrant who has suffered whose loved one is in the detention center. And we actually give a flower to the ICE agents who are there. We place a flower in front of the ICE detention center as a way to say, "You too are a child of God and you too matter," and calling upon their better selves to rise up and be who God created them to be.

So I think little and big events will change our world. And right now we just need to be involved as much as we can. If we can't march, we can learn the songs and teach other people the songs of resistance. If we can't use our voice in a public arena, we can pray. If we can't feed the world, we can feed a neighbor.

I think whatever we can do to support people who are suffering in this moment, everything is going to matter. Everything matters. And there will be a breaking point, in my opinion. There will be a breaking point where it's too much and this will have to stop. We've had breaking points before — we had George Floyd. It broke us open, broke us in our hearts. Our hearts were broken, but it also broke us open to see things we hadn't seen before.

As communities of faith, we can talk about the political world and address the political world, but in my role, I like to address the political world through the gospel. And the gospel is clear that we are to welcome the strangers who are living among us. It's very clear how we are to treat other people. And so out of that lens, we speak to our politics and say, "No, that's not the way we live. That's not our decision to honor God. We can't honor God in that way."

BROWN: Why is it important for religious communities to become involved? Some aren't. And do you feel a moral obligation to be doing that?

ESCOBEDO-FRANK: Definitely a moral obligation to get involved and also to be correct about what it means to be a Christ follower. Because there's this other thing going on called Christian nationalism, which to me is anti-Christian. It's putting whoever the ruler of the day is, the person in charge — it's laying down our morals and values that Christ taught us and bowing before the ruler of the day.

And that's what Christian nationalism is, but it's not what Christianity is. And so we Christians have to speak out against Christian nationalism and say, "That's not in the gospel." The gospel teaches us the exact opposite of that. And I think we go through these periods in our world where we think things are pretty much OK for us.

Even so, we don't see what's happening and how others are suffering. So we go through these periods where we don't speak out as much or we're not guardians of the faith as much. We just let things pass us by — things that we know, "Oh, that's not right. That's not how Christ would do that."

And we let it pass us by because we're not in trouble. But we're in trouble now and we can't let any of it pass us by. We have to address our governmental processes that are causing us harm, causing our community harm and our world harm.

BROWN: Absolutely. And thank you for being part of the group speaking out. I want to just sum up by saying there are now glaring signs that authoritarianism is rising in the United States. People are going missing, children are being caught up in these aggressive ICE raids, as you've mentioned, separated from their families, detained in these awful conditions where many are suffering severe illnesses.

ICE agents have used indiscriminate violence against legal observers, peaceful protesters, bystanders. Innocent people are being killed in the streets. Hundreds of U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained and mistreated by federal agents, often as a result of racial profiling. Detainees have been subjected to inhumane conditions and abuse.

More than 500 human rights violations have been reported, including sexual assault, medical negligence and mistreatment of children and pregnant women. So always on these podcasts, I like to come back to the question, which you've partially already addressed, but what can we do?

Some people are withdrawing, some people are just feeling overwhelmed, but I'd sum it up this way: Have courage, show up, speak out as the Methodist bishops have done. Stand with the suffering. Advocate for justice. We've got to demand that our leaders stop escalating attacks on our human rights.

We, the people, have the power, we have the momentum, and we are working for peaceful regime change here in the United States. So thanks for being here with me, Bishop Dottie, and thank you for being here and hope to see you next time on Hotspots.

ESCOBEDO-FRANK: All right, thank you, Kay. I appreciate getting to know you, and thank you for this conversation. And God be with you.

BROWN: Thank you so much.

ESCOBEDO-FRANK: And God help us all.

BROWN: God help us all.

.