Matt DeMateo, the chief executive of New Life Centers of Chicagoland, described the impact of Operation Midway Blitz on the immigrant community he serves succinctly: “I’ve been doing this work for 25 years and I’ve never seen such fear.”
When ICE arrived in force in Chicago, the immigrant community was plunged into a state of panic. Kids stayed home from school. Parents stayed home from work. Families were afraid to go to church. For New Life Centers, the crisis was a call to action. As DeMateo told me over the phone, at New Life, they asked one another, “How do we come together and take care of our neighbors no matter what?”
New Life Centers was born 20 years ago from the New Life Community Church, an nondenominational church with more than two dozen locations across the Chicago area. It began as a nonprofit aimed at addressing the acute needs of people in the church’s neighborhood, and from that beginning it grew, and it kept growing — as neighbors asked New Life Centers to respond to more needs, New Life Centers created new programs.
As DeMateo told me, its mentoring programs reach 600 kids. There’s also an athletic program that reaches 2,500 young people who play basketball, softball, baseball and more. Many of these kids live in the city’s most dangerous communities.
New Life also dedicated itself to peacemaking. Volunteers patrol the streets to try to build relationships, provide support for people without jobs, and prevent violence. DeMateo told WGN News that they’ve seen an 80 percent drop in shootings and homicides, year to date, in Little Village, a neighborhood in Chicago.
The ministry also feeds thousands — 10,000 people per month, according to DeMateo. Many of them come to New Life’s Pan de Vida Fresh Market. Families can come twice per month to pick up fresh food and produce for free at a place that is set up to look like a grocery store, not a food bank. The Fresh Market provides a welcoming, dignified place for distressed families to shop.
When the migrants began to arrive by the thousands by bus in 2022, New Life responded. As DeMateo told me, buses full of migrants would arrive from Texas, dropping off people in random spots around the city. New Life opened a warehouse for emergency supplies, created a “landing zone” to welcome new arrivals, and helped put 6,000 people in furnished apartments.
In the book of Leviticus, God says to his people, “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
Providing care for immigrants is one of scripture’s clearest commands. It is one of the great tragedies of our time that millions of Christians are cheering and applauding the administration’s brutal crackdown on immigrants.
But not all Christians. There are believers, Catholic and Protestant alike, who are rallying to treat migrants with dignity, compassion and respect. New Life gets government funding for parts of its work, but DeMateo told me that when it began to support immigrant families during Operation Midway Blitz, it did so entirely on its own.
New Life has also lost staff members to ICE. It saw, in DeMateo’s words, people who represented the “heartbeat and lifeblood of the immigrant community” taken away, with some families separated from loved ones, desperate to find out where they were.
And so New Life went to migrants’ homes. It brought them food. It brought them diapers. It helped them try to find their loved ones.
The story of America is far from perfect, but if there is one constant in our history it’s that American darkness is always answered by American light.
The masked agents of ICE make headlines with their aggression. But it’s important to answer those headlines with a different story, of volunteers who fulfill God’s command to love their neighbor — with their time, their money and their friendship.
My family lives in Chicago now — we relocated to be close to our children and grandchildren — and we can see that it’s a city in distress. But the people of Chicago give us hope, and New Life Centers helped give us that hope. They deserve our unstinting support.
This article is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2025. The author has no direct connection to the organizations mentioned. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in the guide, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.
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