Brooklyn Faith Leaders Forge United Front Against ICE Raids While Trading Notes on Democracy

An interfaith immigration summit in Kensington reveals the quiet resilience— and organised activism— underpinning New York’s response to federal deportation efforts.

On a chilly spring morning in Kensington, Brooklyn, incense mingled with anxiety. Inside the Flatbush Jewish Center on March 22nd, dozens of faith leaders—rabbis, imams, pastors—and a smattering of community volunteers came together, united by a shared alarm over the federal government’s hardening deportation posture. The scene—Muslim and Jewish leaders breaking bread amid Know Your Rights posters—felt at once familiar and charged with new urgency.

The event, dubbed the District 39 Interfaith Immigration Summit, is no mere kumbaya affair. Hosted by Council Member Shahana Hanif and the Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY), the summit aimed its sights squarely at the ongoing raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the city. While the headlines may wax and wane, the human toll of mass deportations—disrupted families, frayed neighbourhoods, lost trust in institutions—remains stubbornly high in the city’s patchwork of immigrant enclaves. Many present had already witnessed ICE’s “knock-and-announce” tactics in their streets.

Ms Hanif, who represents a district encompassing Kensington, Borough Park, and parts of Brownstone Brooklyn, understands her communities’ fears. Hers is a district where a stroll down Church Avenue can take one from Bangladeshi grocers to Hasidic bakeries in a few blocks. She is among the city council’s rare Muslim voices, elected—and keen—to model the sort of interfaith pragmatism often more lauded than practiced. For her, and for her neighbours, such coalitions are not a luxury, but a bulwark against the erosive effects of “fascist” threat, as she bluntly puts it.

What distinguishes this summit is its operational focus. The day’s agenda included rapid-response planning, domestic employer trainings, and community-building sessions, all framed by “Know Your Rights” primers. The point is less rhetorical solidarity and more muscular neighbourliness: preparing congregations to accompany immigrants to court, offering sanctuary from ICE roundups, and, crucially, teaching families how to respond safely during raids. Civil society may appear diffuse, but, as Rev. Dr. Chloe Breyer of ICNY stressed, it often discovers unexpected sinew in moments of crisis.

For New York City, this organising is not novel—but its stakes are renewed. The metropolis is home to more than 3.1m immigrants—over a third of its total population. Many reside in mixed-status households, their livelihoods and legal fates yoked to ever-shifting Washington winds. ICE’s stepped-up activity, particularly in the city’s outer boroughs, bodes ill for civic trust and social cohesion. The result: a familiar citywide dance of anxiety, advocacy, and improvisation.

Yet for all its echoes of past episodes—from the DREAMers of a decade ago to the “sanctuary city” battles of recent years—the current moment is quietly different. Immigration enforcement now operates not solely as a legal matter but as a proxy for wider political identity and community belonging. Where once clerics and activists traded notes mainly on scripture and protest choreography, they increasingly share intelligence and emergency plans. The summit’s modest turnout belied a swelling sense among attendees that only broad-based, faith-rooted alliances can counterbalance the sprawling dragnet of federal enforcement.

The economic ramifications, though less visible, are potent. New York’s small businesses—many immigrant-owned—worry that ICE’s presence will throttle consumer confidence and discourage entrepreneurship. Domestic workers, nannies and cleaners—people the city’s upper crust relies on—find themselves ever more vulnerable. Employers, facing legal ambiguities and moral dilemmas, turn to summits like this one for guidance. For politicians, the political calculus is fraught: city officials must champion their patchwork constituencies while wary of sparking federal retaliation or jeopardising federal funding.

New Yorkers, pragmatic as ever, do not wait for Washington to deliver. The summit’s toolkit (Know Your Rights cards, pro bono legal hotlines) is homegrown, dog-eared, and redeployed as headlines dictate. What emerges is an understated but distinctly urban resilience. Where the law instils fear, social capital—here, in the form of interfaith solidarity—picks up the slack.

The city’s approach stands in contrast to that of many peer metropolises. While Los Angeles and Chicago have their own menu of sanctuary policies and rapid-response teams, the uniquely dense layering of New York’s civil society—its religious infrastructure, ethnic associations, and activist ecosystem—has proved singularly nimble. No other American city can claim such a dense overlapping of synagogues, mosques, and churches, or such a seasoned cadre of faith leaders turned civic mediators. For all the talk of urban anomie, New York’s polyglot secularism still leaves room for robust interreligious action.

Bracing for another federal crackdown

Nationally, the summit presages likely scenarios in the event of a change in administration or a further tightening of immigration enforcement. Should new mass deportations or draconian immigration edicts return to the fore, New York’s interfaith model might become a template—albeit one with local quirks—for urban resistance across the republic. Yet the strain on city resources, and on the patience of less sympathetic New Yorkers, could test the durability of such coalitions.

We reckon the broader implication is not just local— nor is it merely political. Urban America is quietly redrawing the boundaries of civic engagement under pressure, leaning on traditional sources of authority and mutual aid at a moment when many other pillars seem brittle. The prevalence of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and related hatreds, as Ms Hanif reminds us, threatens to atomize. But the city’s answer, by fits and starts, has been a slightly weary but determined reaching across those divides. There are no illusions about easy unity; instead, New Yorkers appear to prefer improvisational solidarity to studied abstraction.

For now, the summit’s work will not trouble the mighty in Washington, nor will it wholly thwart the machinery of ICE. But it signals a stubborn intent to preserve the city’s pluralist character, even as federal winds blow cold. The more that local leaders and faith groups can knit together disparate immigrant and native-born communities, the better the prospects that New York’s neighborhoods remain resilient, if anxious, in the face of official turbulence.

In a city known for both its relentless churn and capacious heart, such experiments in cross-faith organising may seem almost quaint. Yet in the calculus of urban survival, what some dismiss as “soft” resistance may in fact prove far more enduring than the thunder of federal policy. Summit by summit, card by card, New York is writing its own understated answer to the politics of fear. ■