How we lose our democracy one arrest at a time

I live in New York City, where the streets have become laboratories for state violence. Here in October, on Canal Street in Chinatown, masked federal agents descended in military-style trucks to arrest street vendors selling knockoff handbags. Four U.S. citizens were arrested and held for nearly 24 hours without charges, their families filing missing persons reports before they were released. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons announced that New York City would see “an increase in ICE arrests,” promising operations that were “intelligence driven” and “not random,” even as bystanders watched agents use batons and pepper spray on vendors and protesters alike.

The Canal Street raid was not an aberration. In early June, ICE’s New York office arrested more than 110 people on each of two consecutive days—the highest single-day totals in nearly two years. Agents have been staking out immigration courthouses, arresting people attending regular hearings in hallways, lobbies, and even bathrooms. The scenes are surreal: federal agents in tactical gear blocking streets, protesters tackled to the ground, New Yorkers shouting at masked officers who refuse to identify themselves.

Among those swept up in this machinery of detention was a student across the street from where I work at Union Theological Seminary, Mohsen Mahdawi, a Buddhist Palestinian who served as president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association. On April 14, Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident in the final stage of U.S. naturalization, was arrested by plainclothes officers during his citizenship interview in Vermont. He had prepared for this possibility—he knew he was being targeted for his advocacy for Palestinian human rights—creating a Signal chat called “Just in case—Mohsen” to communicate with friends if arrested. When he was about to sign a document saying he was willing to take the Pledge of Allegiance, masked agents suddenly arrested him.

The petition for his release described him as “a committed Buddhist who believes in non-violence and empathy as a central tenet of his religion.” In reflecting on his practice, Mahdawi explained: “Buddhism has helped me to center, to calm my emotions and to be able to connect with the other, even my oppressors, even people who cause me harm.” After two weeks in detention, a federal judge ordered his release, but his case—and the message it sends—remains.

Shocked, But Not Surprised

When the Episcopal Diocese of Texas announced that one of its priests had been detained by ICE, I felt that same sickening recognition. A Kenyan clergy member, legally employed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice with proper work authorization, was picked up while returning home from work and transferred to a detention center. No explanation. No clear cause. Just the reality that even documented workers with legal status can disappear into detention.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect is not these individual arrests—it’s how unsurprised we’ve become.

As Buddhists, we take vows to refrain from harm and to recognize the Buddha nature in all beings. These aren’t abstract principles but urgent ethical demands that require us to see the inherent dignity in every person. The current immigration enforcement tactics represent a fundamental violation of these commitments, and our acceptance of them signals a dangerous erosion of both our democratic institutions and our moral imagination.

These detentions are not isolated incidents but part of a systematic pattern. More than 170 U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained by immigration agents this year, kicked, dragged, tased, and held for days without contact with the outside world. George Retes, an American combat veteran, was detained for three days after being caught in a raid at his workplace and missed his daughter’s third birthday. His family found him only after spotting a TikTok video of his arrest.

This is the face of extrajudicial enforcement: arrests without warrants, without due process, increasingly without regard for legal status or evidence of wrongdoing. When ICE conducted its largest single-site workplace raid in history at a Hyundai battery plant construction site in Georgia on September 4, approximately 475 people were arrested—including around 300 South Korean nationals who lawyers and advocates say were lawfully authorized to work. The machinery of detention doesn’t distinguish between documented and undocumented; it sweeps up human beings and sorts them out later, if at all.

In addition to the ongoing mass sweeps of Latino neighborhoods throughout New York City and the nation, these targeted policies also affect Buddhists directly as a majority live in communities that are threatened by these often indiscriminate raids. I think of the many Sri Lankan, Burmese, Thai, Nepali, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, and Cambodian communities who are living in fear of the current climate.

On the Violence of Fear, Uncertainty, and Separatoin

From a Buddhist perspective, this violence extends beyond physical harm. The Buddha taught about the suffering caused by fear, uncertainty, and severed human connections. When federal agents conduct military-style raids in Los Angeles, often without identifying clothing and wearing face coverings, advocates describe “an oppressive and vile paramilitary operation.” Clergy members attempting to minister to their communities have been shot with pepper balls and pepper rounds. ICE has conducted enforcement activities on or near church property at least ten times this year, violating longstanding protections for sensitive locations.

The normalization of these tactics should alarm every person of conscience. What we’re witnessing is the acceptance of a principle that should terrify us: that state agents can detain people without cause, oversight, or accountability. Once we accept this for one group, history teaches us with brutal clarity that it will expand to others.

This is not speculation. We’ve already accepted terrorizing voters at polling places to discourage turnout among communities of color. We’ve accepted masked state terror policies around immigration. Now we watch as the President occupies cities with the National Guard for no apparent reason, ignores court orders, bullies universities into acquiescence, and dismisses those who protest as “Anti-American.” When citizens exercise their First Amendment rights to peacefully protest ICE operations, they’re met with rubber bullets, tear gas, and arrests for “obstruction”—charges that often prove baseless but serve their purpose of intimidation.

“Not to Act is to Act”

Thich Nhat Hanh understood this moment. During the Vietnam War, when speaking out against violence meant being denounced by both sides, when Buddhist monks were killed for their peace work, he refused to accept the normalization of atrocity. He founded the School of Youth for Social Service, training young people in nonviolent resistance despite enormous personal risk. He was exiled from his homeland for 39 years because he would not be silent about what he witnessed. While at Columbia and Union, Thich Nhat Hanh read Dietrich Bonhoeffer and drew strength from his example—Bonhoeffer, the Christian theologian who, watching the Nazi regime normalize persecution, famously wrote that “silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” Bonhoeffer insisted that “not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” He paid with his life for refusing complicity.

Both teach us that there are moments when we must act, when our practice demands we put our bodies between the vulnerable and the machinery of state violence. This is one of those moments.

The Dhammapada teaches: “All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.” This teaching demands empathy—that we recognize ourselves in the terror of the father pulled from his family, the worker seized at his job site, the priest detained on his way home, the Buddhist student arrested at his citizenship interview. The Buddha nature in each of us exists equally in every person targeted by these raids.

Buddhist practice calls us to clear seeing, to perceive reality without delusion or willful ignorance. The reality we must see clearly is this: Over 70 percent of immigrants currently held in ICE custody have no criminal record, and 93 percent have never been convicted of a violent crime. Federal data reveals that more than 75 percent of people booked into ICE custody in fiscal year 2025 had no criminal conviction other than immigration or traffic-related offenses. The raids target construction workers, farm laborers, and day laborers at Home Depot parking lots—not violent offenders.

When pressed about these discrepancies, Chicago ICE field office director Sam Olson acknowledged: “While we try to target the worst of the worst, there’s times that we won’t always be able to arrest the worst of the worst.” This is bureaucratic language for what’s actually happening: mass detention of vulnerable people, many of whom pose no threat and are contributing members of their communities.

The broader campaign extends beyond immigration. We’re being systematically conditioned to accept a world where we’re increasingly afraid to speak, disoriented about which institutions are reliable, numbed to the speed at which state institutions are collapsing and state violence is increasing. This is what scholars call “democratic backsliding”—not a sudden coup but a gradual erosion of norms, rights, and protections until we wake up one day in a country we no longer recognize. Other scholars, like Jan Rehman, have referred to this same process as “fascization, which does not make claims that the United States is somehow identical to fascist regimes of the past, “but rather draws attention to processes” that are moving us in a similar authoritarian direction.

Buddhist teachings emphasize interdependence—the truth that we’re all connected, that harm to one reverberates through the whole. When we accept the terrorizing of immigrant communities, we participate in creating a society built on fear rather than compassion. When we remain silent as peaceful immigrants and citizens are wrongfully arrested, we abandon our commitment to recognizing Buddha nature in all beings as well as our compassionate conviction to remove the causes of suffering for all beings.

The Buddha also taught about right action in the face of injustice. In the Kalama Sutta, he advised: “Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing, nor upon tradition, nor upon rumor… but when you know for yourselves that these things are good, these things are not blamable, these things are praised by the wise, undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness, enter on and abide in them.”

We know for ourselves that these tactics are not good. We know they’re blamable. We know they don’t lead to benefit and happiness but to suffering, separation, and fear. Our Buddhist practice demands we not only refuse to participate in this normalization but actively resist it.

A Call for Spiritual Activism

Like Thich Nhat Hanh, like Bonhoeffer, we’re called to act. This means supporting sanctuary movements, for example, I teach at a seminary that has declared itself a sanctuary and I hope an increasing number of Buddhist temples are doing the same. This also means attending protests, especially if we are not the populations at risk, providing resources to detained individuals and their families, using our voices to name what’s happening. It means calling our representatives, supporting legal challenges, refusing to accept the administration’s framing of these operations as necessary public safety measures. It means remembering, always, that the person being shackled and loaded onto a bus is someone’s parent, someone’s child, someone whose Buddha nature is as real and precious as our own. I know of many people and Buddhist practitioners already doing this work. The enormous turnout at the No Kings rallies speaks to the widespread support for resistance. Now we just have to keep going, keep expanding our efforts, keep speaking.

The Episcopal priest in Texas remains in custody as his diocese seeks answers. Mohsen Mahdawi’s case continues. Their stories are among thousands this year, and those thousands represent a fundamental test of our values. Will we accept that state agents can detain people without cause? Will we normalize these tactics until they feel routine? Or will we remember our vows—to refrain from harm, to recognize dignity in all beings—and act accordingly?

The Buddha taught that ignorance is the root of suffering. We can no longer claim ignorance. Thich Nhat Hanh and Bonhoeffer showed us that there are moments when silence becomes complicity. The only question now is whether we have the courage to see clearly and respond with the fierce compassion our practice demands. The normalization of extrajudicial terror begins with our acceptance. It ends with our refusal.

Featured Image Credit: Unsplash @sigmund

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