The New YorkerModify

This past week in New York City, fifteen inches of snow fell and more than twenty-two hundred snowplows pushed it away. Twelve thousand miles of sidewalk were shovelled. Two hundred and nine million pounds of salt were spread, and, after it got really bad, two hundred thousand gallons of calcium chloride, a chemical ice melt, were deployed. Sometimes the work you do leaves its mark; sometimes it doesn’t. With snow, the evidence has a tendency to melt. But, this year, as the temperature refused to rise above freezing, what remained hardened into ice, and settled. In the streets, these conditions have brought attention to something called a sneckdown.

“Sneckdown” is a portmanteau of “snow” and “neckdown,” a term for a part of the sidewalk, also known as a curb extension, that juts into the street, to protect pedestrians. The sneckdown is the snow that builds up on parts of the street that cars don’t use, acting as a natural curb extension. At intersections, it can be found mostly on corners, as the city pushes it one way and property owners push it the other. The sneckdown is also what people awkwardly have to step through as a result. Recently, I have encountered sneckdowns while going to work, going to the gym, popping to the store, hurrying for the bus, and on the way to a hard-to-get dinner reservation that a friend made, perhaps unwisely, weeks before the snowstorm. Almost any New Yorker who has to cross the street has become familiar with the sneckdown, often at a level just between the sock and the waterproof shoe.

I saw my first sneckdown of the year on a corner of Gates Avenue, in Clinton Hill, a few yards from my apartment. The snow had stopped falling, and a plow had come through. My neighbors had shovelled their stoops. But there remained a solid mound of ice, curving out across the road, like a bumper on one side of a pool table. I walked out and tried to avoid becoming a billiard ball. Sneckdowns are something of a gray area, as they live partly on the sidewalk and partly on the street. They are where the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the state meet. It gets slippery.

To some urbanists, a sneckdown offers a vision of a better world. The term was popularized by Clarence Eckerson, Jr., a documentarian who started filming sneckdowns in the early twenty-tens, for the pro-transit website Streetsblog. “It’s the space that is revealed that we could take back for other things,” Eckerson told me recently. Sneckdowns slow cars as they turn, and make pedestrians more visible. Ahead of the storm, Streetsblog called on readers to send photos of sneckdowns to the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to show him where the city could make more room for pedestrians. This past Tuesday, Eckerson ran around City Hall and his home, in Jackson Heights, hunting for the best sneckdowns, for a new video. He had a full shoulder-replacement surgery scheduled for the next day. That morning, he shot some pickups; an anesthesiologist fitted him with a mask a few hours later. “I’m very dedicated,” he told me over Zoom, his arm in a padded black sling. Out on the street, he’d seen a huge eighteen-wheeler truck, hauling Goya beans, bend around a sneckdown in Jackson Heights—and nail the turn with five or six feet of snow to spare. “You could take back some of it at the very least,” he said.

The other day, at the intersection of 174th Street and Broadway, in Washington Heights, I met Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Sanitation, to watch the destruction of a few sneckdowns. It was the sixth day in a row below freezing, and Goodman wore a green D.S.N.Y. jacket, a gray beanie, and duck boots. Together, we watched a skid steer, a maneuverable miniature excavator, attack a sneckdown that had built up on a street corner, near a gas station. Conditions were tough. Handheld tools sometimes broke. “These are one of the only things that can break an ice boulder,” Goodman told me.

Not every pile of ice is a sneckdown. There is a complex taxonomy. (It helps to know your enemy.) Sanitation workers call sneckdowns corner caps. The narrow path through a sneckdown that lets people cross the street is known as a “curb cut.” A blocked-off bus stop is not a sneckdown. “I’ve seen people post their own photos and I’ll be, like, ‘Well that’s not a sneckdown,’ ” Eckerson told me. One helpful heuristic: if you can see tire tracks, it’s not a sneckdown—the cars have been using it. Whether the furrow of snow in a lane of parked cars is a sneckdown depends on your philosophical opinion of what the street is for.

Most of the time, when people complain about lingering, no-man’s-land snow, they are complaining about something called the curbline. This is the snow that piles up between the cleared path of the sidewalk and the street, often against parked cars, maybe crowned with trash. Property owners don’t have to clear more than a four-foot-wide path, enough for a stroller or a wheelchair; the city doesn’t have to, either.

Goodman told me it’s simple: if snow is on the street, it’s the city’s responsibility. If it’s on the sidewalk, it’s the property owner’s. But there are complications; the snow around a parked car is the responsibility of the driver—even though it’s on the street. If a bus stop is sheltered, the Department of Transportation is on the hook. A regular bus stop is the responsibility of the property owner whose place abuts the stop, but the city must insure that the bus can pull up to the curb. Previous mayors, Goodman told me, thought it was fine as long as the bus door could open. This year, Mamdani insisted to Sanitation that there be pedestrian access at every stop.

On Broadway, a crew of emergency shovellers, whom the city pays a starting rate of $19.14 an hour, were deployed to another corner, outside a radiologist’s office. One shoveller, Anthony Gutierrez, who is normally a truck driver, was hacking away at a sneckdown with an ice scraper. Next to him, Daniel Johannes wore a bright orange vest that said “laborer” and an ushanka hat. “I have shovelling experience—I once excavated a big hole,” he told me. Johannes lives locally and usually works in construction. This was his third twelve-hour shift. “Our neighbors need to pass these streets,” he said, undeterred.

Before the recent snowstorm, the city activated PlowNYC, a real-time map showing when every street in the city was last plowed. The computer program that tracks the snowplows is called Blade Runner. When it isn’t snowing, Sanitation uses it to track trash collection. This is because the vast majority of New York City’s snowplows are regular garbage trucks with a plow attached.

The snowstorm presented an outlet for Mamdani’s embrace of “sewer socialism,” which focusses on everyday municipal problems. (It could also be a trip wire: the former mayor John Lindsay was pelted for poorly handling a blizzard in the sixties.) During the storm, Mamdani was shovelling out a car trapped near public housing in Bed-Stuy. The Governor, Kathy Hochul, told him to put on a hat. Javier Lojan, the acting commissioner of sanitation, told me that Mamdani was at morning roll call with the workers on the first day of the storm. (He said, of the mayor’s shovelling form, “He’s got to bend his knees a little more, maybe.”)

Despite the murkiness of sneckdowns, sanitation workers often end up taking care of them. Back on Broadway, the ice on the corner was, technically, the business’s responsibility. “The fact that it’s on the corner doesn’t change the fact that it’s sidewalk,” Goodman told me. “But we’re doing it—we can’t leave it there.”

Arguing about snow in subfreezing temperatures can remind you of the first law of thermodynamics—that snow can’t be created or destroyed. It has to go somewhere. The curbline may be ugly, but it is where property owners are supposed to put the snow—it’s out of the way. The city also doesn’t clear every sneckdown. “Not all sneckdowns are created equal,” Goodman said. “Some of them are not obstructing anything at all. They can just stay there.” Anyway, the sun usually deals with it for us. We’re only vexed by the sneckdowns now because it’s still freezing. “There is a Foucaultian aspect to it,” Goodman told me. “What’s public and what’s private isn’t inherent. It’s socially constructed. It’s shaped by cultural factors and the fact that it is below thirty-two degrees.”

One way out could be simply to heat the ice. In New York, the city has snow melters, which are just slightly warm trucks, but are commonly called hot tubs. The melter sits over a sewer line, idling while heating the snow to thirty-eight degrees, barely above freezing, and drips the water directly into a drain. The city is running twelve melters; I visited one in Inwood, by the Harlem River, that handles all the snow in Manhattan above Fifty-ninth Street. When I arrived, the melter was surrounded by a pool of water, a few inches deep, which gently lapped against my shoes. Three twelve-foot-tall orange excavators took bites out of a mound of snow and ferried it to the hot tub. It had been so long since I had seen snow melt that it was almost intoxicating. The trucks hauling the snow frolicked in the water, sending dirty gray ripples toward me. I resisted the urge to run my hand through the slush.

Usually, a sneckdown is a fleeting thing. But this year’s never-ending freeze showed that cars could still get around without the extra space. Do we want to live in a world carved out by the sneckdown? “I don’t want the snow there permanently,” Eckerson said. But, he asked, could we imagine the space where the ice sits transforming into concrete and trees, somewhere to rest, or a spot for children to safely cross the street? “You can make them pretty,” he said. “Bushes, trees, seating, if there’s a big enough street.”

Earlier, in Washington Heights, I’d asked the shovellers whether they could imagine the sneckdown before them as something else. “I think that New York City is a pedestrian and transit city, so I’m a hundred per cent behind that,” Johannes, the construction worker, said. “But that takes up the space for the cars,” his fellow-shoveller, Gutierrez, said. “The traffic is a nightmare. It’s not good. You don’t get anywhere to park.” Gutierrez continued, “You fix one thing, you mess up the other stuff.”

Over the days, I saw my local sneckdown more than I saw my friends and family. I watched it yellow slightly, like the fingers of a smoker. But on Monday I walked to Gates Avenue, and my sneckdown was gone. The curb showed evidence of scraping. I sailed through the intersection. It felt slightly unfair to me that it hadn’t been given an honest chance to melt. But the air was still frigid, and there was plenty of snow to step around. ♦

Last week, the top federal judge in Minnesota accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of violating nearly a hundred court orders in the month of January. In a ruling that was part of a contempt case involving Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, the judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, wrote, “ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this Court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.” ICE, Schiltz added, “is not a law unto itself.” The ruling marks perhaps the most serious turn in an ongoing battle between federal courts and the White House, with the Trump Administration often appearing to blatantly ignore court orders, or to comply with them only after being repeatedly warned to do so.

I recently spoke by phone with Ryan Goodman, who is a law professor at N.Y.U., the co-editor-in-chief of the law-and-policy journal Just Security, and a former special counsel at the Department of Defense during the Obama Administration. He and his colleagues at Just Security have been cataloguing examples of the Trump Administration’s defiance of court orders since the start of the President’s second term. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what the Trump Administration is trying to accomplish with its disregard for the judiciary, the emergence of an alternative legal system for ICE detainees, and the Supreme Court’s reluctance to rein in Trump.

What stuck out to you most about the Minnesota judge’s ruling?

The part that stuck out the most to me is that Schiltz is a Republican-appointed judge, and he is systematically documenting noncompliance with federal district-court orders—in the immigration context, and especially when it comes to habeas corpus. He’s calling out the gravity of the situation, in which, as he says, there are likely more violations of court orders on ICE’s part in one month than in some agencies during their entire lifetime. Stephen Miller suggested, in May, that the Administration was “looking at” suspending habeas corpus. Now, lo and behold, what Judge Schiltz is describing is a form of effectively suspending habeas corpus. And Schlitz is certainly not alone in this judgment. There are other judges in Minnesota who have called attention to this phenomenon in very similar terms, describing it not just at the individual-case level, but at the system-wide level.

What, specifically, is Judge Schiltz accusing ICE of doing? Can you give an example?

What he is calling out, in his particular case, is that the court is ordering someone to be released from ICE detention, and the government’s not releasing them. It’s that significant—fundamental liberty is at stake. And then he is referring to seventy-three other cases that all include possible habeas-corpus violations, i.e., very similar patterns of either the court ordering the government to release somebody and them not being released, or the court ordering the government to present the person to the court physically, and them not being allowed to leave detention, or the court ordering someone not to be taken out of its jurisdiction. That’s the very definition of habeas corpus—to bring the body to the court. And they haven’t been doing that. There’s another very pernicious pattern that arises in these cases, which is that the court orders the government not to transfer the individual out of their jurisdiction, and the government goes ahead and transfers them out of their jurisdiction anyway, often to Texas, where there’s a more favorable judicial climate, which can effectively deny the person their real rights before the court in Minnesota.

Does the sheer frequency with which this is happening suggest that ignoring court orders has become an ICE policy of sorts?

It can’t just be happenstance. They’re carrying it out in a way that makes it a policy by default. I should also note that there are multiple judges who have found that the government’s actions are “willful,” and “willful” is a trigger word because it means it’s deliberate, and that’s what could lead to charges of criminal contempt. And multiple judges are, in fact, saying that they might hold the government in criminal contempt. One of the judges who flagged this in particular is Judge Mary McElroy, who is a Trump-appointed district judge. And last week, she issued a ruling that said she has no way to avoid concluding that the government is willfully violating her orders.

But in Schiltz’s ruling, he rescinded an order that had called the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, to appear in court and explain why he should not be held in contempt. Why?

I think judges are being very careful. If they hold the government in contempt, and the government still doesn’t abide by the court orders, we might very well be in a constitutional crisis. The judges appear to be hoping upon hope that if they threaten contempt, the government will come into line, either in the individual case before the judge or across the board.

So they do not want a constitutional crisis, but what is the alternative? You tiptoe around it and hope that the government comes into compliance by baby steps?

That’s right. It’s a very sensitive interaction. And, in some of these cases, with the threats, the government has come into compliance. But, at a certain point, it does seem as though the courts are going to have to take that next step, which is civil or criminal contempt against individuals. They also have the capacity to refer individuals for disciplinary measures, and they can disqualify particular Justice Department attorneys from handling certain cases before their courts—reputational hits for some of these individuals. I think that will be the next escalation.

There was a lot of discussion last year about the Trump Administration ignoring the courts. My own feeling from following the issue had been that they would walk up to the line in most instances, and then, in the rare cases where the Supreme Court ruled against them, they would comply. It seems like the Trump Administration wants to show that it can be uncompliant, but it doesn’t want to actually spark something that would create a huge drama or constitutional crisis, pitting it against the Supreme Court. Is that your understanding?

I do think they are playing a game of pushing it as close to the line as they can. I also think, in some instances, it is actually just gross incompetence or internal miscommunications. For instance, the Department of Justice lawyers might tell D.H.S. not to transfer somebody to another jurisdiction, but the communication doesn’t reach them in a timely fashion.

In the higher-stakes cases, the Justice Department is doing something more egregious. They do appear to be defying court orders to effectuate a policy. The key case for that is the Alien Enemies Act case, which came before Judge Boasberg. This happened within the first several hours of the President’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, in March. It’s about the flights that took off to El Salvador to bring those people alleged to be Venezuelan gang members to the CECOT torture prison.

Erez Reuveni, a D.O.J. lawyer and whistle-blower, revealed what happened behind the scenes, including text messages that corroborate his account. He alleges, with strong evidence, that it was a deliberate policy to, no matter what, get those people to El Salvador, even if there were court orders preventing their deportation. According to Reuveni, Emil Bove, a Trump loyalist at the D.O.J., had said in a meeting before the hearings that they would have to consider telling the courts, “Fuck you.” And then there’s contemporaneous text messaging between the D.O.J. attorneys during the oral hearing, in which they say that this is the “fuck you” moment. [Bove has testified that he does not recall saying this.] It’s just very clear, based on these allegations, what happened there. So I think that, to me, that would be the constitutional-crisis moment, that a case would get to the Supreme Court and they would do that to a Supreme Court order. They think they can get away with it more when it’s in district courts.

This feels like one area among many where, even if we aren’t yet in a worst-case scenario, or we convince ourselves that we are not, if you told someone ten years ago what was going on, they would think, Oh, well, that is a worst-case scenario.

Absolutely, yes, I think that’s right. Coming into this Administration, I was worried about some of the things that this Administration could do that would constitute crossing the red line. That would include open defiance of a court order. And here we are in the dozens. So I do think we’re in a new normal, and I do worry that the public has been desensitized to how concerning this is. But, going back to the subject of immigration, the defiance of these court orders is creating a lawless situation that I think judges are rightly concerned about. Another district court judge in Minnesota, Michael Davis, accused the government of attempting to undermine the regulatory and statutory authority of the immigration courts to coerce perpetual, infinite detention. So I think it really is setting up a parallel system of immigration detention that exists in defiance of the courts.

Do you mean that they’re essentially normalizing a practice where detainees do not get their time in court?

I’m definitely concerned about that. I think the reason the system is still holding is that we have instances in which the courts, by threatening civil and criminal contempt, are able to bring the government back into line. [The Times reported last weekend that hundreds of detainees have now been released from immigration detention after habeas petitions began filling up the federal-court dockets.] We have a court concluding that a government’s in flagrant violation of its orders, while still being able to coerce the government back into place. That’s the kind of knife’s edge we’re on right now.

What’s happening in the courtroom is part of a broader slide towards lawlessness, because defiance of court orders is connected to another ICE policy: the agency repeatedly states that its entire system of arrest is based on reasonable suspicion. And that is legally invalid because arrests have to be based on probable cause. A D.C. district-court judge, Beryl Howell, chastised the agency for this in December, summarizing several instances in which D.H.S. had repeatedly said that ICE arrests were based on reasonable suspicion, and they continue to do it. They’ve done it as recently as the past couple of weeks.

What’s the difference between reasonable suspicion and probable cause?

Reasonable suspicion is similar to stop-and-frisk policies, in which a law-enforcement officer can stop somebody very briefly and ask them questions on the basis of a low threshold of evidence. But actually arresting somebody and putting them in custody requires a much higher level of proof, which is probable cause. In the immigration context, to apprehend and detain someone for a long time, they’d need to have more than a reasonable suspicion, meaning much greater evidence indicating that the person is in the country unlawfully. So, for them to state and restate again and again that they’re basing their arrests on reasonable suspicion is like a failing answer on the bar exam. And they’re doing that continually, despite the court calling them out for it.

It is also important to note that D.H.S. has authorized ICE agents to enter homes without a judicial warrant. To me, these two policies are putting ICE operations on the road to a very different form of legal system than the one we’re used to. They’re breaking rules.

Probable cause is from the Fourth Amendment, right? Where does reasonable suspicion come from?

Both of them are straight out of Supreme Court interpretations of the Fourth Amendment. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his recent opinion in Trump v. Illinois, goes out of his way in a footnote to reiterate that an arrest has to be based on probable cause. And he’s specifically talking about ICE operations.

You said the country would be at risk of a constitutional crisis if the White House ignored a Supreme Court order. Is there a reason that an Administration ignoring Supreme Court orders is worse than ignoring lower court orders?

I one-hundred-per-cent think that ignoring lower-court orders breaks the system. Having independent judges is crucial to the design of our system of checks and balances. If the lower courts are ignored, then the system cannot work. And that leads to the accumulation of enormous power in one branch of government.

Is there a way that the Supreme Court can support lower courts without actually presiding over these immigration cases? It seems like this would be going differently if, after the Administration ignored these rulings, the Supreme Court were there to enforce them. But my understanding is that this isn’t how it works.

Right. Our system moves very slowly, and, by design, the Court will only take cases that are brought to it at a particular point with a particular dispute. So it doesn’t speak generally or in the abstract until a case makes it all the way up. That’s part of the problem. That said, there is one very significant tool it can use to signal its disapproval: the presumption of regularity. The courts give the executive branch the benefit of the doubt in many cases, including, for example, when prosecutions are accused of being selective or vindictive. The government benefits enormously from this presumption. At some point, the Supreme Court could do what judges in the lower courts have started to do, which is to hold that these kinds of flagrant violations of court orders mean that the Trump Administration is forfeiting its presumption. And the district courts have already started saying that, which is extraordinary.

I would summarize much of what the Supreme Court has done over the past year as treating the Trump Administration as if it were behaving like a normal Administration.

I think that’s exactly what the Supreme Court is doing. That’s why they have a card that they can still play, which is to no longer treat the Trump Administration normally. They could say, “We recognize these are extraordinary circumstances and that the government is behaving aberrantly, so the courts are going to have to respond.” And I think that’s one of the last things the Trump Administration wants. They want to win these cases, when they get to the Supreme Court, on the merits. So, that’s one of the signals that the Justices could start to send.

But you agree that they’ve certainly not sent that signal so far.

Absolutely not.

I know you’ve been keeping track of how often the Administration has been defying court orders. Are there other cases that we should be paying attention to?

Some of the cases that were most notable for me included ones where Republican-appointed judges called out the Administration for, say, destroying Voice of America against a judge’s orders. Judge Lamberth threatened to hold Kari Lake, who oversaw the network’s parent agency, in contempt for failing to turn over information to the court. Or when Judge Mary McElroy ruled similarly about the Administration’s flagrant disregard for her orders to unfreeze funds appropriated by the Inflation Reduction Act. She’s a Trump appointee. Those are the ones that seem to suggest that the system is under real threat.

Can you think of any previous Administration that has behaved similarly to the current Trump Administration?

I can think of other Administrations that skirted and failed to enforce the law. But it’s hard to think of specific examples in which a recent Administration engaged in flagrant violations of court orders.

We know Administrations have broken the law in the past. I don’t want to sound naïve. But, when they are called before a court and a judge tells them what they have to do, that’s where, broadly speaking, the rubber has met the road.

Yes, exactly. And I think that under other Administrations, the judge might say, “I want to have a hearing because the plaintiffs have proven that the Administration needs to show why it is not in contempt of court.” And normal Administrations would bring themselves into line to avoid a judicial determination that they’re actually acting in noncompliance. That seems to be the qualitative difference with the Trump Administration. They’ve broken through to the next line, which is very unusual on its own terms, but it’s also happening at a scale that’s truly extraordinary. And I think that’s why we have these judges sounding the alarm.

I should say that I did think this defiance was dying down to some degree. But in the past two months, amid this surge in ICE activity, that has changed. It’s even become very hard for us, as a research team, to catalogue all the times the Administration has defied court orders, because it is now happening at such a high number across the country. ♦

Every morning, in group chats that connect neighbors across the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, people count off the days since President Donald Trump ordered a surge of immigration agents into Minnesota in early December. It has been more than sixty days now, during which Minneapolis has borne witness to events that once might have been unthinkable. The Department of Homeland Security has said that the three thousand agents in Minnesota represent the largest domestic operation in the agency’s history. What that has looked like in the city is equally unprecedented: chemical irritants sprayed into the faces of observers, through the streets of residential neighborhoods, and on the grounds of a local high school; masked and armed men smashing the car windows of anti-ICE activists and taking them into detention; and three shootings of Minneapolis residents by federal agents in three weeks, two of them fatal.

Philip Cheung has covered the Russian invasion of Ukraine and last year’s fires in Los Angeles, where he lives. He also photographed the massive street protests that emerged in response to the surge of ICE agents in Los Angeles last June. In Minneapolis, he has captured local residents’ evolving resistance to the immigration agents in their midst. Following federal agents’ movements through the city and into Saint Paul and Maple Grove, Cheung has also watched the federal response evolve. At times, he told me, federal agents seemed to welcome photographic attention, as on a day when Gregory Bovino, then the commander-at-large of Customs and Border Patrol, who has since been ousted and transferred out of state, effectively led reporters and local observers on a daylong tour of the city, with stops for active confrontation along the way.

Over the course of their time in the city, the agents have adapted ways to disguise themselves, switching from large S.U.V.s with tinted windows to less conspicuous vehicles; they apparently used one convoy as a decoy to lure observers away from a location as other agents arrived to carry out an arrest. Cheung has also documented the haphazard quality of the operation, as in one photograph showing a gun magazine left in the snow after agents departed from a scene.

Cheung said that security was on his mind to an unusual degree for a domestic project. “We haven’t really seen anything like this happen before in the U.S., where peaceful protesters were murdered on the street by federal agents,” he said. “I went into the situation with the mind-set of going into a conflict zone.” He and other photographers checked in regularly with one another. “You’re often on your own, so it was nice to be able to form our safety nets.”

Many immigrant families in Minnesota are in hiding right now, regardless of their legal status, for fear that they will be detained or deported without a chance to prove their cases. Local media has reported that off-duty police, government workers, and teen-agers have been stopped by agents demanding proof of citizenship. Congressional observers who have tried to get inside the interior of the Whipple Federal Building, where immigration agents hold the people they’ve arrested before sending them to a network of jails and detention centers in Minnesota and out of state, were told that they needed to give seven days’ notice to be allowed in. (A February 2nd court opinion has ordered the D.H.S. to fully restore congressional oversight.)

Outside the building, activists collect the license plates of federal vehicles moving in and out into a database that is widely shared; they shout their anger and discontent. Cast by the Trump Administration as agitators—or “insurrectionists,” or “domestic terrorists” or “paid professionals”—they see themselves as concerned citizens. Every day, for eight weeks and counting, they have continued to show up.

American morality has never been uniform, but it is now perhaps as fractured as it has ever been. Still, there are moments when all the atomized outrage can condense and roll, together, in one direction. Such unifying events, these days, tend to require video that can be shared on social media. A horrifying act is caught on camera, and then, in the millions of posts that follow, we clumsily try to work out what feels like a consensus. Outside of the Super Bowl, these shaky cellphone videos are the only thing the entire country watches together. Somehow, we have become a nation that defines its morality through the interpretations of snuff films.

I’ve been thinking lately about how we react to these videos, and what they suggest about the value of life. In particular, I’ve been struck by a refrain that has been repeated, in some form, thousands of times on social media: that because “leftists” celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, the right no longer has a responsibility to care when someone like Renee Good or Alex Pretti gets shot dead in the street. This is crude, reactive, and memetic, of course, but, what’s more, it suggests that the fundamental belief that all human beings were created in the image of God and are worthy of dignity is conditional on what one’s political opponents say.

I started this series on religion and its role in organized dissent in part because I have been struggling with the question of how we value life at a time when so many of our interactions with our fellow human beings take place on screens. This floating and isolated existence has made it far easier, I believe, to forget or ignore the dignity of human life. Although I understand that it sounds obvious and even trite to point that out, I also believe that we will not climb out of the current political nightmare without a forceful reconnection with that basic principle. The politics of abject cruelty we now see—such as five-year-old children in cubbie hats being left out in the snow and then shipped off to faraway detention centers—will not otherwise be repudiated. A revival of faith, whether it takes place in a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque, seems like the only cultural force powerful enough to get people off their screens and into an actual space with other human beings who, whether through song or ritual, are at least gesturing toward a better, unmediated vision of humanity.

These thoughts and the current battle over immigration brought me to the work of the Reverend Dan Groody, a Catholic priest and a professor of theology at Notre Dame, who spent years working in Latin America. In 2009, Groody published a paper titled “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” in which he grappled with Imago Dei, the idea found throughout the Bible that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. “On the surface it may seem basic to ground a theology of migration on imago Dei, but the term is often ignored in public discourse,” Groody writes. “Defining the migrant and refugee first and foremost in terms of imago Dei roots such persons in the world very differently than if they are principally defined as social and political problems or as illegal aliens; the theological terms include a set of moral demands as well. Without adequate consideration of the humanity of the migrant, it is impossible to construct just policies ordered to the common good and to the benefit of society’s weakest members.”

Last week, I talked with the activist Wayne Hsiung about some of the practical assets—physical infrastructure, collective belief—that religious communities bring to progressive activism. The point Hsiung made was that we cannot actually build movements without institutional support, which, at least in this country, still has to come from faith. My conversation with Groody was more philosophical, focussed on how we think, in the most foundational way, about other people, and how essential this is to political change. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell me how you became involved in working with migrants?

I fell in love with the people I lived with in Latin America. I lived there during three dictatorships. When I came back, I worked in parishes. I was interested in the life of faith of the Hispanic community, but I also realized that many of the people that I was working with were immigrants themselves. And then I realized that I didn’t have a theological framework to really even understand some of what they were going through.

In “Crossing the Divide,” you write that migration has been addressed by economics and politics, but not really by theology. Why did you feel this needed to be addressed by theologians?

I knew instinctively, as a pastor, that something of God was interwoven in their stories. And as I began to look even more closely to the Scriptures and other places, I recognized that Jesus himself was a migrant. Jesus himself was a refugee. In fact, I use this almost as the organizing understanding of God, who migrated to our human race, who in turn reconciled us to God, so that we can migrate back to our homeland and become naturalized citizens again in God’s kingdom, if you will. So there’s a way in which migration frames and can frame the whole understanding of the Scriptures from beginning to end. We come from God. We’re called to return to God. Migration is a metaphor that can be used to understand what it means to be human in this world. If that be the case, none of us are fixed or stayed and none of us have a permanent residence here in this world.

When I was working with refugees in Lebanon and Turkey and the Iraqi crisis, Rwanda, other places—you know, when everything’s taken away from you, God is all you have left. So we need a way to speak about who God is and who we are before God, and I think theology gives us a way of doing that.

I’ve noticed something similar in debates around homelessness and immigration: the church does enormous amounts of work on the ground, but theological questions seem to have been pushed out of the broader public discourse.

I did my graduate work at Berkeley, so when I was in California, I can remember one day I woke up and, literally, on the other side of the bed where I slept, outside the window, was a homeless person. And for me that began a long journey of trying to understand theology from the other side of the wall—not just from the perspective of a library or a room but from the streets and from the people who are living on the edge.

What you see in the church’s teachings called the seamless garment of life runs through homelessness, runs through immigration, runs through the elderly, runs through all other life issues. When I spend time speaking to migrants at borders around the world, I often ask them, What is it that you would want people to hear? Or if you could preach on Sunday, what would you want people to know? And often it’s about dignity. It’s about saying, We’re human beings here, and you’re treating us like we’re dogs.

The issue is these people have become nonpersons. I mean, they’re just not even seen. And I think part of the work of the church is saying, Actually, these people belong in a human community, and they belong to be seen, and therefore they belong in the discourse as well.

You make this core argument that all people are created in the image of God, Imago Dei. That’s something that many people would say they believe. But when you see the news right now, the horrific videos coming out, the responses to them—do you feel that idea is in crisis?

What we’ve also included in that understanding is that in the fall, we lost the likeness, but we never lose the image. There’s a deep core within us that’s indestructible—our worth and our value before God.

One of the things I often say is that if we can’t see in the immigrant or in the homeless or in people who are considered different from us something of ourselves, we’ve lost touch with our humanity. So I think that’s what’s at stake. We’ve deported our own soul, if we’ve really lost touch with our own humanity.

You argue that every person should have everything necessary for living a truly human life. What does that look like in practice if it’s not simply open borders?

The church recognizes that nations have the right to control their borders, but it’s not an absolute right. It’s subjugated to a larger sense of what’s called the universal destination of all goods. And what does the church mean by that? In practice, that everything belongs to God, and when we die, we’re gonna have to give up everything anyway. So there’s a way in which we’re, at best, stewards in this life, not owners of anything in an absolute way. And even our nationalities and our national identities have only a relative importance in light of a larger vision of what the kingdom of God is about.

The question is, what’s the narrative that shapes our consciousness on this? If the narrative is, This is my stuff, this is my country, this is where I belong, this is what I own, and I have to defend it and protect it—that’s one way of understanding it. But if the narrative is, Everything I have is a gift, and when I die, I’m going to give everything up, that I’m a steward and not an owner, and I can be judged by how I use what I’ve been given—that’s a different way of inhabiting the world. If the narrative is about how do we move closer to communion with God, and in closer connection with each other, with a life and a faith that does justice, in terms of caring for one another, that’s a very different way of inhabiting the world.

How do you turn an idea like that—this theological understanding of migration—into actual change in how the country thinks about migrants?

I remember, when I was about eight years old, I found this pamphlet on the floor of a rest area, and it said, “Did you realize you could actually miss Heaven by 18 inches?” And it went on to say that the distance between the head and the heart is only eighteen inches, and that God was more than a concept to understand, but someone to encounter in the depths of our hearts. Years later, I was giving a talk at the Mayo Clinic, and this nurse came to me and said, Actually, the carotid artery connects the head and the heart. And the point was, ideas have to move from the head to the heart—and Indigenous communities have said from the head to the heart to the feet and back again.

So how do we change the way we think about it? How do we change the way that we relate to it, in terms of our hearts, and how do we change the way we act in relation to that? One of the arguments I make in the theology of migration is that the dominant political discourse right now is from our oneness as a human community to otherness. These people are other, therefore we have to do X, Y, and Z. But the dominant theological narrative is really from our otherness to oneness. So in technical theological terms, what God is trying to do is to bring Humpty Dumpty back together again. And that’s really the fragmentation of society.

Have you seen the footage of clergy in Minneapolis praying or showing up at protests?

Yes, and I think it’s very much putting into practice the very things we’re talking about. It’s saying, This is where we stand. These are the people we serve. We believe God cares about these people. We believe what’s happening to them is not fair and it’s not just, and, therefore, I think they’re trying to express that through protest.

What about the role of the church in dissent about the policies being proposed or existing right now—five-year-old kids separated from their fathers, detention centers filling up? What do you see as the church’s role in any sort of movement of dissent against that?

Pope Benedict says this very well in one of his documents: the role of the church is not to replace the state. Our job is not to do the work that is legitimately in the hands of elected political leaders. But, at the same time, it’s not to stand on the sidelines when injustice is at stake. The church recognizes that there is a legitimate rule of law—in fact, some people are fleeing countries because the rule of law is not working there. So there is a legitimate exercise in the rule of law at the same time that law must constantly be examined. There are laws, but then there are deeper natural laws at stake as well.

I think the church is always trying to say, Is the life we’re living, the society we’re creating, really reflective of the God we believe in? And when it’s not, that’s when it protests and says, We can do a lot better.

What would be the ideal role of the church in a moment like this?

The ideal is that people don’t have to migrate. The ideal is that they actually have enough food, enough protection, enough space to work that they can create families in their homelands. At the same time, the role of the church is to build bridges and not walls, and to create connections instead of alienating people. So the role of the church is continually to proclaim a God of life and to build a civilization of love. That means caring for the vulnerable. That means recognizing that Christ is somehow present in a mysterious way among the least and last of society. So it’s standing in solidarity with them and, in some sense, standing with them, because God does. That’s what we believe.

How should people reconnect with the idea of Imago Dei right now? Many completely secular people are saying, “Maybe I should go to church—there’s got to be something else here that’s going to remind me of basic moral truths.” What would you suggest?

It’s a time for deeper reflection—to look at the society and say, Is the society that we’re becoming the society we want to become, and am I becoming the person I want to become? I teach this course called Heart’s Desire and Social Change, which tries to look at the deepest desires in the heart and the needs and challenges of the world. And probably one of the things in shortest supply of students and people today is taking the reflective space to say, Are the narratives that I’m being given in the world today consistent with the narrative I really want to develop in my own life? When you start going into that question, you say, Who am I? What is my identity? Where do I belong? What’s the purpose of my life? And, when it’s all said and done, what does a life well lived look like? That gives you a lot of space to say something is off course here. ♦

Your interest in television is true. Your interest in reality television is true. Your interest in true-crime television is true. However, your interest in gritty prestige crime dramas that expose the socioeconomic complexities and ethical ambiguities within the justice system? That’s where your interest lies.

Still, your interest in your fellow-humans is true. Your interest in their experiences, troubles, and innermost dreams is true. Your interest in alleviating their suffering wherever it arises is true. But your interest in nearly anyone’s genuine answer to the question “How are you?”—total lies.

Your interest in food is true. Your interest in getting the recipe from a friend who cooked you an incredible meal is true. But your interest in separating eggs, stirring continuously, sifting or spooning or levelling flour—in short, your interest in baking—is a lie, although your interest in baked goods remains very much true. To be perfectly honest, your interest in food, now that your mother-in-law has given you a five-hundred-page book on the history of saffron, has become a lie.

Your interest in going to a museum when you visit a new city is true, as long as you spend less than an hour there (including the gift shop). Your interest in becoming a sustaining member of a museum in your own city is true, because your interest in attending that museum’s member night where they serve free hors d’œuvres is true. But passing all of this off as an interest in fine art is a lie.

Your interest in fishing is true, in as much as it’s an interest in staring abstractedly over a body of water, mostly in silence. Literal fish are optional, true, but that doesn’t mean the interest lies.

Your interest in seeming well read is true. Your interest in being able to toss an Alexander Pope quotation or an offhand fact about the history of saffron into a conversation is true. But your interest in reading is a lie.

However, your interest in reading design magazines and scrolling feeds of beautiful homes is true. Your interest in planning the thoughtful details that would transform your home into a stylish, orderly oasis is true. But your interest in completing any aspect of a redecorating scheme that would require you to leave your couch is a lie.

After reading the design magazines, your interest in becoming a carpenter is true, but only to the extent that you’d be interested in modestly admitting, “Oh, actually, I built that,” about cool tables and cabinets. Otherwise, given your total lack of patience when assembling IKEA furniture, your interest in carpentry lies.

As a general rule, your interests lie in the same places where your strengths lie. If, for example, you tell yourself that you have an interest in gardening, you will discover that that’s an area in which your strengths are lying—you cannot keep plants alive. Where strengths are lying, interests can’t help but lie, too.

That’s why your interests lie so much at the gym. Yes, your interest in being fit and living to a ripe old age is true. Even your interest in wearing soft, stretchy clothes every day, as if you might, at any given moment, pop over to the gym, is true. But your interest in actually working out lies. Because, when faced with literal weights and the expectation that you might actually lift them, it quickly becomes clear that, at the gym, your will power lies.

Instead, try getting in a few extra reps of lifting the remote, since, as previously discussed, your interest in television remains very true. ♦