Holy Week Takes on Deeper Meaning Amid Immigration Crackdown at New York Church

NEW YORK On Good Friday, the Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz led a path of ashes around a Brooklyn block.

A mariachi group and about 60 other people walked by the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. That’s where Ruiz serves a group of mostly Latino immigrants in the Bay Ridge neighbourhood.

On Good Friday, a sad day during Holy Week, the band played sombre songs. This year, though, the parade was even more important.

People did the Stations of the Cross on a grey afternoon after work. This is a Christian practice that remembers how Jesus was tortured and killed.

A lot of the people who went to the memorial had a new understanding of it because of how the federal government is targeting immigrant groups and the possibility of being arrested in a place of worship.

A Mexican pastor named Ruiz, 54, with spiky hair, spoke before the parade. “Many of the people, you don’t see the crosses on them.” “But they are really being killed on the cross right now.”

A lot of people at the service said that just being there is dangerous because of the ban on immigration. Some people were scared for their family and friends. Others were sad that a new age in American immigration policy had begun.

During the Biden era, there was a lot of immigration to New York City. This was partly because of efforts by states that are run by Republicans. Now that Trump is in office, there are more immigration raids, the city doesn’t protect people as much, and people are afraid that immigration officials could go after churches.

In his campaign, President Donald Trump promised stricter new immigration laws, especially for dangerous criminals living in the U.S. illegally. According to a statement made in January, the Trump administration got rid of rules that stopped police from detaining people at places of prayer.

“Thugs will no longer be able to hide in schools and churches in the United States to avoid being caught.” “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trusts them to use common sense,” a Dept. of Homeland Security spokeswoman said in a news release on January 21.

Fear of these kinds of crackdowns is making clergy like Ruiz, who came to the U.S. as a teenager, guide their congregations through them.

After going to an immigration court hearing, Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Centre of New York, said on the phone, “I don’t think there’s ever been as important a time to be able to show our faith and values more publicly.” “Total lawlessness is seen as a strength in our society right now.”

Ruiz’s group went around the block, going past row houses and low-rise apartment buildings in a neighbourhood that used to be mostly white immigrants but is becoming more Arab, Latino, and Asian.

Breyer said that a lot of faith groups have reacted to the crackdown on immigration.

“The imam of a mosque in the Bronx took the Quran’s call to house the stranger to heart and has done so,” Breyer said. Breyer works at St. Edward the Martyr Episcopal Church in the Spanish Harlem neighbourhood of Manhattan. The church has a food pantry and a legal centre for people seeking asylum. Jews from the activist group Jewish Voice for Peace held a Seder meal outside of the Manhattan federal immigration building to protest the arrest and detention of Palestinian student organiser Mahmoud Khalil.

Lines of the Cross on a block in Brooklyn

At Good Shepherd, a woman carrying a small wooden cross with palm leaves tied around it led the group. Ruiz said the woman was going to be baptised soon. The first station on the Way of the Cross was near the corner of the plain church with the greyish front and bright red doors. From the Bible, Ruiz started with the second reading in Spanish. This is when Roman officials make Jesus carry the cross like a criminal while others watch.

There are 14 places in the places of the Cross, and it can take hours to do them all. There are now only four spots left. Ruiz stopped at every corner of the Brooklyn block to read gospels in both English and Spanish. Ruiz, who used to be a Catholic priest, said he cut it short so that people would pay attention as Jesus takes up the cross, gets help carrying it, and is stripped of his clothes before he dies.

A food truck, a Starbucks, and a Chinese halal restaurant across the street were all things they saw. On the side, Latino and Asian delivery people sat on their bikes and checked their phones for new jobs. Women with hijabs walked around the group. Twelve young people played guitars, horns, and violins in the mariachi, which played sad music.

Ruiz’s white robe is torn at the neck. New York City cops arrested Ruiz, other clergy, and city officials in 2018 during Trump’s first term when they tried to stop an immigrant rights activist from being deported.

At the time, the city was advertising that it was a sanctuary, even though police were detaining people. Mayor Eric Adams recently asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to come back to the Rikers Island jail complex. Adams has also tried to loosen the city’s “sanctuary” laws, which make it harder for the NYPD to work with ICE. He said the city needs to get rid of criminal immigrants.

People know that Ruiz’s church helps migrants get started with the legal system by giving them food, housing, and services that can help them get their papers and understand the system. It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that Ruiz helped undocumented people whose family members had died from the disease and were being left in city mortuaries to be buried.

As of 2023, a study said that about 40% of New York City’s 8.2 million residents are immigrants. There are about 412,000 people in the city who are not legally in the country. Many of them have lived there for years.

The church as a safe place

Since 2022, more than 200,000 people seeking asylum have come to New York City. Some came by bus because Republican states were trying to take advantage of the city’s position as a sanctuary. There was a state of emergency in the city, and churches, shelters, food pantries, and groups all opened their doors to help people.

Ruiz said that news stories and videos of arrests have been hard on the group.

Ruiz said that two boys from Venezuelan families who go to the church often were sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre. Their names were on a list of more than 200 Venezuelan men who were being held in the infamous jail. This is how their family found them.

Ruiz said that one of them worked as a delivery person. Both of them had tattoos, which the Trump administration has used to say that Latino immigrants are in gangs.

Ruiz also said that people used to come along with them as they went through the neighbourhood for the Stations of the Cross. Some people, including Ruiz, saw that fewer people joined this year.