Rev. Dr. Allen Ewing-Merrill serves as executive director of The BTS Center. He lives in Portland.

On a recent winter day, I stood outside the Cumberland County Jail with other religious leaders from across Greater Portland. Weekly, this multifaith group keeps vigil in solidarity with immigrants held in cinderblock cells just beyond our view — children of God who have been detained by masked ICE agents and likely transported hundreds of miles from their homes to this detention center.

We sing our prayers — songs of faith, songs of peace, freedom songs. Some of us wear clergy stoles, yarmulkes and prayer shawls. One woman holds an imposing image of Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother Mary, who weeps for her children who suffer.

Recently, more than 500 young people marched from Monument Square to City Hall in
downtown Portland, in solidarity with their beloved friends and classmates, 16-year-old Joel and 14-year-old Estefania, who have been abducted by ICE, along with their mother and their 19-year-old sister, and shipped 2,000 miles away to a detention center in Texas.

These teenagers have donated their babysitting wages and allowance to help secure legal
assistance for a beloved family behind bars. As a parent of one of these teens raising her own voice, my heart breaks. I am outraged. Our children grieve as their friends are being disappeared by violent, masked thugs. Our communities are being terrorized. Our neighbors live in fear that they or their parents will be next.

Through my work as executive director of The BTS Center, I talk every day with spiritual leaders seeking faithful responses to the climate crisis, and I find that they are also persistent supporters of immigrants’ rights. They embody a “yes-and” posture to compassion.

Migrants only sometimes cite climate concerns as a primary reason for their emigration, but in a time of accelerating global climate devastation, one only needs to peel back the onion a layer or two to find that a climate-related cause will surface — sometimes never stated explicitly, but almost always a part of the root cause for displacement.

And here’s the truth: those of us who live in the wealthiest country on Earth, who have access to abundant resources and who consume the most, have contributed the most to the very conditions that cause others to seek refuge. We must reckon with the tragic truth that those who have contributed the least to human-caused climate change almost always experience the worst impacts and bear the biggest burden.

According to the leaders of the humanitarian organization Oxfam, climate-fueled disasters force about 20 million people to leave their homes each year — that is, about one every two seconds. When sea levels rise and wildfires scorch, when flooding destroys homes and communities, and when drought causes crops to fail, people will pull up stakes and leave their homelands in search of safety and security.

When ecological conditions change and crops that have sustained communities for generations no longer grow, people will experience hunger and deprivation, and economies will suffer and fail. When people are hungry and deprived, and when economies suffer and fail, desperation will cause violent conflict to erupt. When desperation surges and violent conflict erupts, people will flee.

Anytime we act in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors, anytime we advocate for the rights and the protection and the well-being of the refugee or the asylum seeker or the undocumented in our communities, we are doing the work of climate justice.

As 2026 begins, many of us feel the heaviness of grief and suffering. When it comes
to compassion overwhelm, it may help us to acknowledge the common roots of injustices, even while we cultivate local, interconnected responses.

Justice is intersectional — always. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously observed, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He might likewise affirm this positive footnote: and the work of justice anywhere elevates the cause of justice everywhere.