The Passport Necklace

And, what we can learn from Martin Luther King, Jr. today in Minneapolis

I’ve lived in the Twin Cities for my entire adult life. I raised my kids here. I built a company in downtown Minneapolis. I love Minneapolis so much, I moved from the suburbs into Minneapolis recently. This city is fully my home.

So when I watch what’s been unfolding over the past few weeks, it’s not abstract to me. Renee Good was killed 3 miles from my home. Our local neighborhood high school, Roosevelt High, was surrounded and ambushed by ICE agents at the end of a school day. I see the fear in the faces of parents. I hear about directly impacted individuals in conversations at church.

This is happening in my city. And it’s happening in the midst of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which feels like it should mean something.

Here’s the thing that’s been nagging at me for a while: In 1966, two-thirds of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Martin Luther King, Jr. By the time he was assassinated in 1968, a Harris Poll found his disapproval rating had climbed to 75 percent. Nearly a third of Americans said he brought his death upon himself.

Today, his approval rating sits at 94 percent. We name schools after him. Many take a day off work in his honor. Politicians across the spectrum invoke his words to justify their positions.

This transformation should unsettle us.

It’s easy to honor a prophet once he’s dead and safely confined to history. It’s much harder to recognize one in your own time, especially when his message disrupts your comfort, challenges your assumptions, or asks something of you.

The Americans who despised King in 1966 weren’t monsters. Many were churchgoers. Many believed in law and order. Many thought King was moving too fast, too recklessly, too disruptively. Many agreed with his goals but objected to his methods.

They were, in King’s words, “white moderates.” And he considered them a greater obstacle to justice than the Ku Klux Klan.

So here’s the question I can’t escape this week: If you’re certain you would have stood with King in 1963, what does that certainty require of you in 2026?

The Irrelevant Social Club

King’s most searing critique wasn’t aimed at avowed racists. It was aimed at the church.

In April 1963, eight white Birmingham clergymen (Baptists, Methodists, a Presbyterian, a Rabbi) published an open letter urging King to slow down. They called his demonstrations “unwise and untimely.” They urged patience. They praised the local police for maintaining order.

King’s response, written on scraps of paper smuggled into his jail cell, became one of the most important documents in American history. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he wrote:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

King reserved particular disappointment for the white church. He had hoped, he wrote, that white ministers would be among his strongest allies. Instead, some had been outright opponents. Others had remained silent behind “the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.”

He warned that if the church did not reclaim its prophetic voice, it would “be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”

I think about that warning often. Especially this week.

Two Things Can Be True

I want to be careful here, because I think this is where people stop listening to each other.

Two things can be true at once.

Violent criminals should face consequences. That’s not the debate. And some of the people detained in recent operations are genuinely dangerous.

At the same time, what’s happening in Minneapolis doesn’t seem to be primarily about public safety.

When reporters at MPR News examined the 13 people on DHS’s January 10 list of “dangerous criminals arrested in Minnesota,” they found that most had been transferred to ICE custody before Operation Metro Surge even began. Some transfers dated back to the Obama and Bush administrations. Five were simply picked up from Minnesota state prisons months earlier through routine coordination.

The Minnesota Department of Corrections called DHS’s numbers “categorically false,” noting that the state has always cooperated with ICE on detainers. “Public safety depends on facts, not fear,” a spokesperson said. “When federal agencies make claims that are demonstrably false, it undermines trust.”

According to DHS’s own data reported by CBS News, roughly 47 percent of ICE detainees have criminal charges or convictions. The rest are classified as “immigration violators,” held solely for civil violations, not crimes. And nationally, over a third of all ICE arrests in the past year have been people with no criminal record at all.

Meanwhile, multiple news sources (including CBS and Fox) have documented multiple instances of U.S. citizens being detained and physically harmed by ICE agents. In one case, two young Hispanic men working at a Target in Richfield were tackled to the ground while pleading “We’re U.S. citizens” and “We work here.” A state representative confirmed both were Americans.

Other cases cite a variety of detainments for individuals with protected legal status (e.g., green card or refugee) being detained. Reportedly, their documentation is ignored, no access is allowed to legal representation / due process, and they are shipped to Texas before their families know where they are.

Even a white real estate agent who is a U.S. Citizen was detained in the affluent neighborhood of Woodbury simply because he had the audacity to film the movements of ICE agents driving around his cul-de-sac. His wife had to search long and hard to figure out where he had been taken to.

In another case documented by the ACLU, a U.S. citizen named Hussen was walking to lunch when masked ICE agents stopped him. He repeated “I’m a citizen” over and over, but agents refused to look at his ID. They shackled him, took his fingerprints, and only released him after he showed a photo of his passport. “At no time did any officer ask me whether I was a citizen,” Hussen said.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re a pattern.

The Boy with the Passport Necklace

Two moments from a firsthand account by a Minneapolis resident have stayed with me.

A pastor (peacefully protesting, as King himself did) was pepper-sprayed and detained by ICE agents. When they released him because he’s a citizen, an agent told him: “You’re white anyway. You wouldn’t be any fun.”

In another account, a youth group leader describes a student, a Black immigrant who is a U.S. citizen with a passport, who now wears his passport around his neck everywhere he goes. His mother joked it was “like a trendy necklace,” but the heartbreak in her eyes told a different story.

These aren’t stories about violent criminals being brought to justice. They’re stories about what happens when enforcement becomes, in the agent’s own words, about “fun.”

King wrote in Birmingham about explaining to his six-year-old daughter why she couldn’t go to the public amusement park. The psychological wound of being told you don’t belong in your own country. That boy with his passport necklace is a 2026 version of a similar wound.

The Violence of the Spirit

King’s nonviolence is often sanitized into a kind of passive gentleness. This misunderstands him completely.

“Nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards,” he wrote. “It does resist.”

But King’s nonviolence extended beyond refusing to throw punches. It required refusing to hate, what he called avoiding “internal violence of spirit.” The nonviolent resister, he wrote, “not only refuses to shoot his opponent but also refuses to hate him.”

This is where King’s teaching cuts in multiple directions at once.

At the center of King’s philosophy was agape, the Greek word for unconditional, redemptive love. Not sentimentality. Not affection. A principled commitment to recognizing the humanity of others, even those who oppose you.

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him,” King said.

In a sermon that still stops me cold, he said:

“Do to us what you will, and we will still love you... Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we will still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win freedom for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process.”

This is not weakness. It is the hardest thing King ever asked of anyone.

It means those who resist injustice must resist the temptation to dehumanize the agents carrying it out. And it means those watching from the sidelines cannot dehumanize the immigrants caught in the crossfire.

If you cannot see the humanity in both a federal agent and in an undocumented mother hiding in a closet, you have not yet grasped what King was asking of us.

What King Would Ask

If King were writing a letter from Minneapolis today, I believe he would pose questions. Not to conservatives or progressives specifically, but to all of us.

Would you have stood with me in 1963? Most Americans today say yes. But most Americans in 1963 said no. If you believe you would have been in the righteous minority then, what evidence exists in your life today? Whom are you standing with now, when it’s costly and unpopular?

Do you love order more than justice? King’s sharpest words were for those who agreed with his goals but not his methods, who preferred “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” If you find yourself more troubled by protest disruptions than by the injustice being protested, ask yourself why.

Is your church a prophetic voice or an irrelevant social club? This cuts across the political spectrum. Churches that speak boldly on social media but won’t look after their neighbors. Churches that preach personal morality but remain silent when federal agents terrorize their communities. King warned that the church risked irrelevance. In many cases, that risk has become reality.

When the moment demanded something of you, did you show up? King built coalitions that included latecomers. He welcomed people from a broad coalition who arrived late to the cause.

King’s coalition was messy. The March on Washington was organized by Bayard Rustin, a gay man some members wanted to exclude. One of their white allies, Walter Reuther, had been asked by the Kennedy White House to infiltrate the march and moderate its message. The civil rights leaders knew this. They included him anyway. When disagreements threatened to tear them apart, the elder A. Philip Randolph would remind them: “Brothers, let’s stay together.” It’s not too late to stand together now.

We need a broad coalition of individuals from all walks of life (conservative, progressive, atheist, Christian, etc.) to speak against the darkness that’s happening right now. It’s not too late to show up. As a Minneapolis resident, I ask you to show up.

Where Do We Go From Here?

In Minneapolis, that question is being answered in real time.

It’s being answered by churches distributing thousands of boxes of food to families in hiding. By pastors planting memorial signs in the snow where neighbors were taken. By parents volunteering for shifts of “ICE watch duty” at schools. By youth group kids asking their leaders, “Isn’t the government supposed to be protecting us, not threatening us?”

It’s also being answered by silence. By those who avert their eyes. By those who say they oppose cruelty but won’t risk anything to stop it. By the ones King called “people of good will” whose “shallow understanding” is “more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

King believed the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends toward justice. What he didn’t say (but lived) is that the arc doesn’t bend itself. It bends because people bend it. Because they show up when it costs them something. Because they choose justice over order, love over hate, and courage over comfort.

Today we celebrate a man that very few celebrated when he was alive. We honor a prophet many of us probably would have rejected.

The question isn’t whether we would have stood with King in 1963.

The question is whether we’ll stand with our neighbors in 2026.

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If you feel grief or anger over what’s happening, make your voice heard, call your representatives (5calls.org) and vote. If you’re a person of faith, pray for Minneapolis: for wisdom, love, truth, justice, and solidarity with neighbors in the way of Jesus.

And if you don’t want this to become the story of your city, speak now. Because if you wait until it arrives in your town, it is already too late.

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I especially want to acknowledge a recent sermon I heard from Minister Amber Z. Jones entitled “From Mercy to Movement” for influencing the ideas expressed in the post. Her reminder that Dr. King’s call to nonviolence included nonviolence of spirit was instrumental, instructive, and impactful to me.