Religion News Service reports:

Last Friday (Oct. 17), the Rev. Hannah Kardon, a United Methodist minister in the Chicago area, stood alongside other protesters demonstrating outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Broadview, Illinois. As a line of Illinois State Police began marching toward her and other demonstrators, gripping wooden batons, footage shows the pastor with her hands raised in prayer.

Officers then pushed into the protesters, forcing them back. One officer shifted his stance, reared back and began shoving his baton like a battering ram — jamming it repeatedly, Kardon says, into her leg. A few seconds later, the pastor was pulled from the crowd and thrown to the ground.

All the while, Kardon says, she never stopped praying. When officers began to arrest her, they tied her arms behind her back and placed her along the curb.

“I said, ‘God, please help these people to know that what they’re doing is wrong, and help them to turn around,’” Kardon, who leads United Church of Rogers Park in Chicago, said in an interview. Her leg, she said, has developed visible bruises.

The incident, most of which was captured on film by a journalist with the independent outlet Unraveled, is the latest example in a growing list of Chicago-area clergy who have been met with violence after confronting state and federal agents to protest the actions of ICE. As President Donald Trump’s ongoing immigration crackdown in Chicago continues, a diverse array of faith leaders from across the region are speaking out against the government’s treatment of immigrants — with many voicing willingness to risk arrest and physical harm to protect migrants.

Kardon is among the more than 210 signers of a letter signed by mostly Chicago-area Christian clergy. Titled “Jesus is Being Tear Gassed at Broadview,” the letter railed against ICE and agents “hunting and terrorizing of immigrant communities” in the city. The letter was made public the same day Kardon was arrested and has accrued more than 100 additional signatures since then.

The letter referenced multiple efforts to provide Communion to immigrants detained in the facility — both of which were denied by the Department of Homeland Security — as well as a recent viral video of the Rev. David Black, a Presbyterian minister, being shot with pepper balls by agents as he prayed outside the facility.

“We come offering bread and prayer, hope for justice and healing — we leave washing pepper spray out of each other’s eyes,” the letter reads.

But the letter, citing the example of civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., argues clergy are nonetheless compelled by their faith to advocate for immigrants, even amid threats of violence. [Continue reading…]