Freedom for Yeonsoo Go

And free them all – we're all interconnected

Yeonsoo Go is free.

The 20-year-old college student, daughter of Korean Episcopal priest the Rev. Kyrie Kim, was at a routine immigration hearing in NYC on July 31 to renew her visa, which was not set to expire until December. Upon leaving the building, she was abducted by ICE. She was subsequently taken to ICE’s Richwood Correction Center in Monroe, Louisiana. (I recommend this Korea Times story for more background).

The Episcopal Diocese of New York quickly rallied around Rev. Kim, calling for Go’s release. Legal resources were leveraged, including the Diocese’s own immigration attorney. Vigils were held, with clergy from across the city speaking and leading prayers, including the Bishop of New York, the Rt. Rev. Matthew Heyd. Media was summoned and reported on the story en masse. Social media was deployed by Episcopalians across the country to share the story of Go’s unlawful, immoral detention.

By the time Go was released five days later into her mother’s embrace, she had received national attention — Rachel Maddow even featured her story on primetime.

Go’s freedom is a huge win for faith-based organizing. There is certainly much to celebrate. There is also much to learn — particularly about whose stories are attended to, how they are amplified, and how this attention and amplification might be sustained over the long haul for the sake of just, material change.

You see, the same day Go was detained, so was Elizabeth “Ketty” De Los Santos. She showed up for a routine asylum hearing and was detained. She is still not free.

De Los Santos, a Peruvian Episcopalian from White Plains, New York, was taken to the airport on the same ICE bus as Go, which drove past the rally held on their behalf at Manhattan’s Federal Plaza. As far as I can gather, she remains imprisoned at the Louisiana detention center from which Go was released August 4.

(L) Yeonsoo Go speaks to press immediately following her release. (R) Ketty De Los Santos in a photo shared by her parish, St. Bartholomew’s White Plains.

In spite of the intention with which the Diocese of New York and its clergy linked both stories in their rallies and press interviews, the 59-year-old baker, who fled Peru for the US after her business was extorted, has not been in the news since last week.

De Los Santos’s story has effectively disappeared from the public conscientiousness, even as she remains disappeared.

Why has this happened, and what can we do about it?

1. Freeing our attention from algorithmic captivity

A significant reason for the disappearance of De Los Santos’s story is our infinitesimally short attention span as a society, and the interrelated rapid turnover of the media cycle. It is easy to inadvertently perpetuate inattentiveness by simply reposting what we see on social media without further engagement, because doing so can leave us feeling like we’ve completed our social obligations through simply sharing, without taking any further action.

I’ll confess the part I played in this: while I reposted everything I saw on social media about Go and De Los Santos, once Go was released and the stories subsided, I no longer continued posting about De Los Santos. Until writing this article, I didn’t seek out new information about her.

Keeping stories of injustice on the front burner requires that we resist solely riding the algorithmic waves of the next hot button story. That means paying attention — especially to those local stories that get far less (or even zero) media coverage. It means getting offline and into our communities to notice our neighbors — and then taking note when something is amiss in our neighborhood.

Folks in Los Angeles have become adept at this kind of paying attention, as they follow ICE vehicles around the city, and call attention to agents attempting to apprehend neighbors — often by yelling at them, recording them, and otherwise making their despicable work very difficult. They are exemplars for the rest of us about how to refuse to let acts of intimidation and violence go unnoticed or undocumented.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to co-host a conversation with Pastor Tanya Lopez of Downey Memorial Christian Church in Los Angeles County. She bravely confronted a large group of masked, armed men in her church’s parking lot while they were abducting a man who had simply been walking through the property. In her presentation, Pastor Lopez spoke to the ways in which paying loving attention to our neighbors contributes to clarity in the midst of crisis response. In the moment, Pastor Lopez was laser-focused on the abducted man’s well-being, and afterward, she knew whom to call upon to bring attention to the injustice that took place, as well as how to pastorally care for her congregation in their own trauma.

This sort of social attention is a spiritual practice. As Mary Oliver writes, “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.” To be a Soulful Revolutionary is to refuse to look away from injustice, to pay close attention to those who are crying out for support, and to notice the needs that are present and the resources with which we might respond. We wrest our attention from the algorithm’s grasp to ask, “Whose story is not being highlighted here?” and bring focus to these stories too.

2. Oppression invisibilizes, relationship brings visibility

The more privilege one possesses, the more access to power, and thus the greater one’s visibility. The converse is also true. The more layers of oppression a person faces, the less access to power they possess, which means less visibility.

In a society that pigeonholes people within a strict hierarchy of human worth, it’s vital to recognize that there are those who are so invisibilized by oppression that society will not even see them as a worthy victim, let alone the hero of their own story. We have to use the power of relationship to bring visibility to the inherent dignity and empowerment to the agency of those who have been disappeared.

While Go as an immigrant faces the heavy-handed oppression of a xenophobic, racist state and society, it is also true that her story likely garnered sympathy from a US public formed to see young people as more worthy of compassion than elders, educated people as more worthy of respect than the working class, and people of Asian descent through the mythology of the “model minority” — as contrasted with frequently scapegoated dark-skinned People of the Global Majority. The fact that she had a current visa also rendered her more sympathetic to those still operating within the noxious and dehumanizing framework of legality vs. illegality. Hearing about a college kid with a valid visa suddenly being locked up in a federal facility was surely unsettling to many people who haven’t been tracking ICE’s gross flouting of human and constitutional rights.

Moreover, Go’s proximity to institutional power as the daughter of an Episcopal priest meant that she had people able to advocate for her and leverage institutional resources on her behalf. Multiple bishops sounded the alarm about Go’s abduction, as well as clergy with significant platforms and access to media contacts. The mother of one of her close friends knew two of State Assemblywoman Amy Paulin's staff members very well, and the assemblywoman subsequently involved congressmembers on both sides of the aisle. All of this proximity added up to a lot of visibility.

Meanwhile, De Los Santos, while in the same diocese, wasn’t the family member of a clergy person. Her priest has fervently advocated for her, and the clergy advocating for Go have also have called justice for De Los Santos and all detained people. Amidst the emotional reunion with Go, Rev. Kim herself noted that her daughter’s experience of injustice is one of many like it. But De Los Santos’s story didn’t get the same traction with the media or on socials. She has been disappeared. And this has everything to do with where she is situated in our society’s racist, sexist, classist hierarchy of human worth.

Let me be clear: Go’s story absolutely deserved every ounce of attention and amplification it received. She shouldn’t have been detained in the first place. I am so relieved she is free, and grateful to all who advocated on her behalf.

And, De Los Santos shouldn’t have been detained either. Her story needs to continue to be amplified, and every lever of power applied on her behalf, until she is free.

Empowered to see one another get free

Both of these women’s stories are a reflection of the injustice of the system. They provide a crucial opening to talk about the intersecting crises of authoritarianism, white Christian nationalism, and state violence, and this opportunity must continue to be exploited by Soulful Revolutionaries everywhere.

In my tradition as an Episcopalian Christian, we speak of all believers as the family of faith and the very Body of Christ. What if every Christian abducted by ICE — or, to start small, every Episcopalian taken — received the same overwhelming support as Go did? What if each detained person was truly treated as a beloved family member, and we collectively advocated for them with the same ferocious energy with which we would for our own children, parents or siblings?

Immigrants and refugees have been so scapegoated and demonized within US society that many people do not see them as worthy of compassion, and an alarming number see them as less than human. By hearing and sharing their stories of why they left their countries, and what their reception has been like in the US, we can help restore visibility and humanity to invisibilized individuals and communities.

People power — rooted in relationships of mutual care and trust — is the most potent counter to people being disappeared. All of us can organize robust networks of neighbors, faith leaders, media, attorneys, front line activists and more. It’s a matter of knowing what people’s gifts are, building trust, planning together for various scenarios, and calling upon them when the moment arises.

We did it for Yeonsoo Go. We will do it for Ketty De Los Santos. And we will keep doing it until we all are free.

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Calling all Soulful Revolutionaries! I’m the next special guest at a monthly study of Serbian nonviolent revolutionary Srdja Popovic’s hilarious, pragmatic book Blueprint for Revolution on Tuesday, August 26, 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern. Mike Kinman is hosting this series of three conversations and Popovic himself will be the guest in September! These FREE conversations are vital opportunities to move from reaction to sustained strategic engagement for the sake of change. I’d love to see you there!