[1] In August, my daughter and I flew into Boston for a brief vacation in Western Massachusetts before I drove her to a university in Rhode Island. We spent one night in a town called Revere, not far from the airport. The next day, we began our journey to a vacation village in Hancock, a town in the Berkshires named for John Hancock, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.
[2] The three-hour drive carried us through towns bearing the names of the early founders, etched into the map as reminders of democracy’s promise.
[3] They imagined a new experiment in freedom. But today we live under a president who bends the Constitution rather than upholds it, with the highest court in the land too often enabling that undoing. Those names along the road are not just markers of geography. They are warnings of what could be lost.
[4] And so the name Revere lingered with me. Paul Revere—the hero of grade-school history books, galloping through the night with his lantern, crying out, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” That story has been stitched into America’s imagination. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made sure of it in 1860: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear. Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
[5] As a child, I was told he was brave, a patriot risking his life to warn his people. But standing in Revere, Massachusetts, decades later, I found myself asking: who exactly were “his people”? Who was protected by his warning—and who was erased? While Revere rode through colonial towns, Indigenous nations—the Wampanoag, the Massachusett, the Pawtucket—were being forced from their homelands, their stories buried beneath the march of settlers. That same impulse toward erasure now threatens immigrant communities who have built our country, paid into it, and loved it.
[6] Undocumented immigrants are part of the backbone of this nation. They labor in kitchens, care for our children and elders, keep hospitals and schools running, and contribute billions in income and payroll taxes. Yet their removal isn’t just enforcement—it is disappearance. It is pretending that communities who have shaped America’s fabric were never here.
[7] That’s the source of my wake-up flash: the midnight rider still has power, but the cry needs to be recast. Today, the warning is not: “The British are coming.” It is: “The ICE is coming.”
[8] Imagine riders warning immigrant families that raids are imminent—neighbors might be shackled, detained, deported. Imagine that cry coursing through our streets—not to spread fear, but to stir courage so families are not caught unprepared.
[9] This is not fantasy. It is moral imagination. Longfellow’s poem summoned courage on the eve of national upheaval. We can use it to summon courage against today’s moral crisis. His poem, like our role now, is not history—it is a rallying cry.
[10] America remembers warnings that protect settlers, but silences the ones meant to protect the displaced. We recite poetry about liberty while immigrant families are erased; we cast statues in bronze, while raids carve away bodies and dreams.
[11] In Chicago itself, we saw how quickly that erasure can happen. This winter, as children were dropped off at school in Little Village, ICE agents arrested a man—captured on video moments later—sending a wave of immediate panic through families and schools. The wall between home and work shattered in the instant parents were taken in front of children.
[12] Here in our city, the urgency has sharpened. President Trump has pledged to flood Chicago with ICE agents, even deploying the National Guard. Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson have made it clear: We will not cooperate with ICE raids. We will not allow troops to patrol our neighborhoods. Yet if precedent holds, he may act anyway.
[13] Then, who rides for us? Who will tell undocumented residents in Little Village, Albany Park, and Back of the Yards that they must prepare? Who will alert children walking to school that their parents might vanish before they get home? This is our moral test.
[14] The danger is erasure. But there is another truth: even as forces of power try to erase, immigrant communities leave marks that cannot be rubbed out. Their food flavors our tables, their music fills our streets, their labor sustains our cities, their languages widen our imaginations. These stories are not marginal—they are central. The history of immigrants in America is one of resilience and renewal, and it is still being written in real time. It is a story strong enough to withstand raids and deportations—but only if the rest of us refuse to let silence bury it.
[15] Chicago knows quiet courage. Public schools pledge sanctuary. Rapid-response teams hand out “Know Your Rights” cards. Churches, neighbors, and volunteers stand watch at bus stops and answer midnight calls—even if the riders come on foot rather than horse.
[16] To honor Paul Revere is not to cling to myth but to repurpose the message. Let the hoofbeats echo again—not to protect the privileged from empire, but to shield the vulnerable from erasure.
[17] The ICE is coming. The ICE is coming. The question is: will we answer the call? Will we be the riders now—refusing silence, guarding our neighbors, refusing to let erasure win? If Longfellow’s poem will live again, let it live not as a nostalgic legend but as a prophetic summons.
Linda E. Thomas is Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.