It was just this past winter that the world watched Empire’s henchmen invade Minneapolis, break car windows, drag, beat, murder people, and then lie about it. Straight-up lie. No, you did not just see us killing people with your own eyes. Like in my neighborhood long ago, paramilitary thugs acted with utter impunity.

When I saw videos of citizens gathering by the hundreds in below-freezing weather on the streets of Minneapolis, to sing to their neighbors locked inside: “Hold on, hold on, my dear ones, here comes the dawn…” I wept. I played Instagram reels of the singers over and over, and each time, great, bittersweet tears washed over my face like rain, melting the stone in my chest.

“Singing Resistance,” the healing grassroots phenomenon born in the snowy streets of Minneapolis, was medicine we needed then and now. The group’s songs for and about community have spread across the U.S. The local Tucson chapter of Singing Resistance leads us in song at monthly vigils organized by the Good Neighbor Interfaith Coalition (GNIC) as we hold space for our neighbors kidnapped in the streets, in stores, at court, and in their homes in the old Pueblo.

Good Neighbor Interfaith Vigil, May, 2026

On a day-to-day basis, most people in Tucson are not aware that masked officers in unmarked cars stalk our neighborhoods. Hundreds of encounters and multiple kidnappings have been reported in the first half of 2026. We fear that this is only the beginning.

At the June GNIC Vigil, in the blazing sun, students, elders, and clerics gathered on the West side of town outside of a restaurant where 49 people were taken in a raid. As a group, we prayed in silence that felt thick with their absence. Together, we chanted the time-honored Presente. Here, in Tucson, in the vast Sonoran Desert so many have died crossing, paying with their lives for the opportunity to be in the U.S., we never forget.

How do we now, as allies, stand up for our neighbors over the long haul? How do we sustain our own moral hearts and souls?

When I decided to go on retreat to a monastery earlier this year, I had reached a point of overwhelm. Like so many of us, I felt assaulted by the cruelty porn playing out non-stop on screens. My daily contemplative practice, a long-time saving grace, felt distant and unattainable. At random times in the day, I caught myself holding my breath.

The first few days on a silent retreat with no Internet onsite, my tangled thoughts felt like yarn wrapped too tightly around a spindle. I took long walks in the foothills surrounding the high desert monastery, redolent with the scent of juniper and pine. At the gloaming of the day, I joined the Sisters to chant the Liturgy of the Hours. Slowly, the world’s grip on my soul began to soften.

As each day faded into night, the Sisters’ voices, sweet and mournful in equal measure, ushered in a palpable sense of peace and safety. The Sisters singing the Psalms in an ancient call-and-response felt the same as community using song to reassure their frightened neighbors.

During GNIC vigils, we harmonize in collective devotion. We attune to each other’s voices and into agape, the lifting up of our neighbor’s dignity as our own. Resistance as a leaning into Reverence. Reverence: a most powerful antidote to the politics of inhumanity. Reverence ultimately trumps Evil.

GNIC June Vigil

One of the books I read during my monastery retreat was How to be Brave, by Marian Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., who is famous for standing up to President Trump in 2025 and calling on him to show mercy to immigrants. In the book, Budde writes about the necessity of spiritual retreat. Her soft-spoken, steady manner, the Marion way she speaks truth to power, helps steady my resolve. Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, and many others, an ancestral cloud of witnesses, have prepared the way for this era’s non-violent civil disobedience.

At the vigil, the crowd is quiet and thoughtful as we wrap handmade crepe paper flowers around a light pole. Las flores están presentes, but our community members are not. The simple makeshift ofrenda is an ache of beauty.

We close with the lead voices of Singing Resistance singing us out. Just as gospel and folk music have sustained the Civil Rights movement, and liturgy amplifies the ongoing struggle for the soul of humanity, Good Neighbor Vigils transmute our collective heartbreak, revive our spirits, and restore an unbreakable chain of truth and remembrance that cannot be disappeared.

To learn more about GNIC’s monthly Vigils and how to use the Tucson Migra Map – como usar el mapa de la Migra de Tucson to find the spots where people have been taken (private property excepted), to host your own neighborhood vigil, email goodneighbortucson@gmail.com . Find Tucson’s Singing Resistance on Instagram.

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Emigrants: Empire can try to deny your humanity, but no one can deny your story, your dignity, your incomparable truth. To migrate from peril to promise is a human instinct following in the footsteps of our ancestors.

Readers: This Substack explores humanity’s devotional arts through the arts of the marginalized, from art produced by women religious to emigrants in detention and citizens in prison, to the art of the streets, all informed by historical references e.g, retablos & ex-votos from the U.S.-Mexico border, Art from the Holocaust, and the visual stories of refugees and survivors of war.

In the current regime hostile to anyone deemed the other, I post less digitally largely to protect the artisan families we lift up, but the stories of the people will not be disappeared. In the midst of mass distractions and glittering screens, the still silent image; contemplative visual art allows us to stop, look, and feel. This work demands our attention and commands our presence, deepening our understanding and telling us what we need to know. Please seize the time to really see.

In the following piece about emigrant stories in stitch, we cherish these slow-stitch depictions of family migration, lest we ever lose our neighbors and, God forbid, forget what they go through to reach safety and freedom. After what went down in Minnesota and what’s happening now in communities, big and small, across the country, people are mobilizing, doing what they can behind the scenes to safeguard the families in their midst.

This series of embroideries was created by a woman we will call Ana to protect her identity. It pains me to be forced to use an alias for a woman who committed no crime. And not being able to publicly credit her as the fine artisan she is infuriates me. In the latter part of 2024, I discovered the remarkable embroideries at the bottom of a stack offered for donation by residents at the House of Mercy and All Nations shelter - la Casa de la Misericordia de Todas Naciones, in Nogales, Sonora. Shortly after our visit to the shelter, Ana and her family finally crossed the border legally, petitioned for asylum, and are now in a city somewhere in the U.S., trying to hold on.

Ana stitched the story of the violence her family experienced migrating through Mexico, where they were robbed of all they had, kidnapped at gunpoint, hurt, and desperate for food and water. Still, she said she never lost faith. Many Strangers helped them along the way.

Ana had never embroidered before coming to the shelter. She learned from other bordadoras at the shelter’s Bordadoras de Esperanza - Embroiderers of Hope program. Ana’s ability to convey, with her hands, so beautifully what she and her family experienced to make it to the shelter is extraordinary.

“It (the embroidery) healed me,” she said. I know this because I no longer cry when I tell my story.”

“Our trip from Colombia to the United States, Ana explains. We disembarked in Mexico and then had to find our way to shelter.”

“When we ran from the men who kidnapped us, we fled in an unknown direction through the mountains full of cacti, thorns, bones, and animals.

“We spent three nights sleeping on open ground. Tired, devastated, with wounds on our arms, thorns in our shoes and jackets, and torn bags, without a drop of water. With mixed feelings, we decided to go out on the road to look for water. Thank God, travelers showed up and helped us with water, food, and hydration drinks for the children.”

“It is as if it were a photograph, it reflects the last day in the mountains, when my son cried to his father, because he was very thirsty and could not continue.”

“One of the many wire fences that we passed while fleeing from the kidnappers who had weapons of all calibers, long and short range.”

“This is our gratitude to God and to the people who welcomed us here at the shelter because it was salvation, to feel that here we were no longer in danger like we had been in Altar, Sonora.”

“This was a visit we had to the wall and the deep emotion that we are going to fulfill our dreams, but we leave so much behind. I had to leave my mother.”

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For more writing exploring the Arts of Migration:

Eye of Witness, Hand of Faith: The Art of Asylum and New Retablos at the Border

For the Eyes of Babes: The Art of Asylum

Migrant Woman Fleeing Violence Find Beauty and Healing in Embroidery

For a recently published story on the power of transgressive Cultural arts in conflict zones:

THE MYSTIC MOTHER’S STAR IN STITCH AND SYMBOL: FROM PALESTINE TO MEXICO, FROM UKRAINE TO THE AMERICAS.