Home Is Where the Heart Is: A Benefit Concert to Support New Sanctuary Coalition
Two Choruses Uniting to Help Keep Families Together

An intergenerational duo of vocal ensembles join forces to support the work of a grassroots anti-deportation organization.

March 10, 2026 | 6:30pm doors, 7pm show
First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn (119 Pierrepont St)
$25 adults (18-74), $15 for kids and seniors
PURCHASE TICKETS

Performances by
Brooklyn Youth Chorus nurtures and develops young singers of diverse backgrounds through artistic excellence and innovation in choral music performance, training, and the creation of new works.

Founded in 1992 by Artistic Director Dianne Berkun Menaker, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus is dedicated to nurturing empathy, resilience, and self-expression, preparing young artists to become future leaders through music.

Apart from performing at Madison Square Garden, Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), they have appeared on recordings by Beyoncé, Grizzly Bear, The National, and Barbara Streisand. In 2020, they were featured heavily on Wye Oak’s No Horizon EP, and in October 25, they performed with David Byrne (Talking Heads) for a special “Back To Brooklyn” episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

Dianne Berkun Menaker, Founder and Artistic Director, conductor; Bass Ensemble conducted by Scott Semanski; Aleeza Meir, piano

Young@Heart NYC is New York’s satellite group of the celebrated chorus of 75-and-older Young@Heart chorus, known for concerts all over the world and an acclaimed eponymous 2007 documentary, available to stream on Netflix. The benefit for the New Sanctuary Coalition will be Young@Heart NYC’s debut live performance.

Ranging in age from 75-93 years old, Young@Heart’s singers prove you can grow old without growing boring. What started out in 1982 at a Western Massachusetts elderly housing has developed into the stereotype-defying, generation-crossing musical extravaganza. They have toured worldwide, including at The R Festival in Rotterdam, London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), Singapore Arts Festival, Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, and the National Theater in Oslo. The Young@Heart documentary took home the Rose d'Or for Best Art Documentary, as well as Audience Awards at the Lose Angeles, Atlanta, and Warsaw Film Festivals.

The NYC installment of Young@Heart was started in 2025 and is run in partnership with the Henry Street Settlement.

Bob Cilman, Chorus Director; David Nagler, Music Director, piano; David Chalfant, acoustic, electric, and bass guitars; Konrad Meissner, drums and percussion

with guest speaker Brad Lander
Mr. Lander served as New York City’s 45h Comptroller from 2022–2025, spending the prior 12 years as a City Councilmember serving Brooklyn’s 39th District (Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, South Slope and Cobble Hil). As co-founder of the Progressive Caucus in the New York City Council, Lander is perhaps best known for his leadership on issues like paid sick leave, housing. He has been a staunch ally in the fight against deportation, taking arrest in 2018 while protesting the detention of New Sanctuary Coalition Executive Director Ravi Ragbir, and again in 2025 while taking a stand against ICE kidnappings at Federal Plaza.

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by Ravi Ragbir, Executive Director of the New Sanctuary Coalition

The response to two of the largest public-funding scandals in recent history reveals an appalling and heinous double standard.

In Mississippi, NFL legend Brett Favre stands at the center of a scheme that siphoned millions of dollars from the state’s poorest residents to build a luxury volleyball stadium and fund private business ventures. Yet, as of January 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has shown a startling lack of motivation to act. He has not faced a single criminal charge, allowing years to pass and statutes of limitations to dwindle while treating the Hall of Famer with a level of deference reserved for the "untouchable" white elite.

Contrast this with the federal government's response to the Minnesota child care and food-aid scandals. There, the administration has weaponized the actions of a few to launch an all-out assault on an entire diaspora and the broader Black community, including U.S. citizens. By labeling these communities a "hub of money laundering" and a "national security threat," the government has taken the draconian step of freezing over $129 million in vital child care funds, effectively punishing thousands of innocent children while simultaneously mobilizing 2,000 ICE agents for violent "strike team" raids in Minneapolis.

The language used by those in power further cements this disparity. In Mississippi, Brett Favre’s actions are frequently softened by a vocabulary of "mistakes" and "regret." Even as evidence of his direct involvement grew, he remained a "misguided" legend, a hometown hero who simply got caught in the "complexities" of state bureaucracy. There are no calls from the White House to label his family "garbage" or to revoke his right to live in this country. In contrast, the rhetoric directed at the Black Somali communities in Minnesota has been explicitly dehumanizing. Since late 2025, the President has branded these residents "lowlifes" and "garbage," claiming "90% of the fraud" is caused by people who "hate our country."

By baselessly linking child care fraud to international terrorism, the administration has shifted the narrative from white-collar crime to a matter of national security. This "terrorist" label justifies the collective punishment of thousands of families, where spurious claims trigger a federal freeze, while years of Favre’s documented text messages are met with a shrug.

The disparity in these cases reveals a chilling goal: one seeks to recover money, while the other seeks to erase a people. In Mississippi, the judicial system treats Favre as a permanent fixture of the American fabric; his lawsuits are mere financial disputes.

In Minnesota, however, the fraud cases serve as a pretext for a radical escalation of state violence. The administration has implemented a "reverse migration" policy, deploying ICE agents to pull residents off the streets and question their status, even in neighborhoods where the vast majority are U.S. citizens. This mobilization is paired with a systematic effort to strip the community of its legal standing to an unprecedented directive for USCIS to meet monthly denaturalization quotas. By threatening to revoke the citizenship of naturalized Americans based on spurious allegations, the government is sending a clear message: for a person of color, "justice" is the threat of exile.

The disparity is perhaps most visible in whose voices are amplified by the state. The Mississippi welfare scandal was unearthed by Anna Wolfe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent five years painstakingly sifting through public records. Despite her rigorous work and the mounting evidence of federal crimes, the DOJ remained largely paralyzed, choosing to treat the theft of $77 million as a slow-moving civil matter rather than a criminal emergency.

Contrast this with Minnesota, where federal policy has been outsourced to racist conspiracists like Nick Shirley. In late 2025, Shirley posted viral videos claiming Somali-run daycares were "empty scams." While local news quickly debunked these claims by showing children at the centers, the federal government bypassed fact-checking entirely. They used these unsubstantiated allegations as the primary justification to deploy "strike teams" into Minnesota and the Somali community, treating the theater of a conspiracist as more credible than years of documented systemic corruption involving a white icon.

Ultimately, the divergence between the Mississippi and Minnesota scandals serves a singular political endgame: the systematic demonization of Black and Brown communities to justify the destruction of the social safety net and a return to an ethno-centric past. While the "good old boy" network in Mississippi is allowed to treat public funds as a private piggy bank with little more than a civil slap on the wrist, the Somali-American and broader Black communities are being used as a convenient scapegoat for an agenda of exclusion. By branding an entire diaspora as "terrorists" and "garbage," the administration is seeking to dehumanize these populations and create a blueprint for collective punishment that targets both citizens and non-citizens alike.

These policies, built on a foundation of dehumanization, violent ICE mobilization, and the threat of denaturalization, reveal the true objective behind the rhetoric of "law and order": a desperate, state-sponsored attempt to "Make America White Again." In this theater of cruelty, the protection of white celebrity and the persecution of the vulnerable are two sides of the same coin, leaving thousands of children to pay the price for a nation’s refusal to face its own systemic racism.

The Architects of Precarity, Ruin, Destruction; and the Thieves of Human Dignity

During research into the problems facing vulnerable communities, one conclusion becomes inescapable: many of the deepest social ills are not accidents of fate, but features of a system designed to maximize profit. This is the realm of corporate complicity, where powerful entities do not merely tolerate suffering, but actively architect it. The modern corporation operates under a non-negotiable legal and economic mandate: maximizing shareholder value above all else. This isn't a moral position; it's a legal requirement. When a corporation must always prioritize profit, the needs of communities become secondary, or even a direct obstacle. This mandate is the engine that manufactures the condition we call precarity.

Precarity: A Manufactured Crisis

Many people confuse the term precarity with its root, precarious, which means merely uncertain. However, precarity is much deeper; it is an active state of being that is systematically manufactured. It is an existence characterized by a pervasive lack of predictability, security, and material or psychological welfare.

“Am I complicit?” is the question I ask myself every time I advocate or help someone. Complicity is not defined by those who actively build the cages, but by those whose necessary and good-hearted work creates the social tolerance for the cages to remain. I want to explore this topic of complicity and the paradox of service.

We live in an age of abundant resources. We have built global supply chains that ensure any product is available anywhere on Earth, instant communication technology that connects billions of people, and the capacity for rapid travel across any continent. Yet, the world’s most fundamental cruelties, poverty, political instability, and forced migration do not abate.

In the midst of this paradox, we look to crises like the border. We see desperate families, the surge of human need, and our immediate, correct moral response: service. Organizations, from church groups to international NGOs mobilize to provide food, shelter, legal counsel, and medical care. This is a profound and necessary act of human compassion. But what if this critical humanitarian work is not just alleviating the problem, but is structurally enabling its persistence?

The core question of this series is not about malice, but about complicity.

We explore the great, unspoken dilemma of all modern social intervention: The Paradox of Service vs. Change.

On August 14, 2025, New Sanctuary Coalition executive director Ravi Ragbir reported to an Application Support Center operated by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, a subsidiary of the Department of Homeland Security or DHS) located at a strip mall in Brooklyn. There, he was photographed and submitted fingerprints, a required step to replacing his green card.

Before receiving a pardon in January for a conviction that resulted in two years in immigration detention and a two-decade fight against deportation, Ragbir had to attend biometrics appointments on a regular basis as his status hung in the balance. Last week's appointment in Brooklyn may well be the last time he needs to attend one.

“Even though I don’t expect anything to happen and this is just one part of the process, I am anxious,” said Ragbir before entering the storefront. “Nothing is normal anymore, so you’re not sure what’s going to happen. The anxiety is there. You can see that in the people going in.”

In attendance were faith leaders the Rev. Dr. Robert Foltz-Morris, the Rev. Thia Reggio, the Rev. Adriene Thorne, and the Rev. Elizabeth G. Maxwell, and Aaron Miner. When entering the facility, only the Rev. Thorne and attorney Stephen Kelley were allowed to enter with Ragbir. Thankfully, he emerged from the facility within a few minutes and exited the building without incident.

The Rev. Thorne provides a first-hand account of what happened within those few minutes:

As of May 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies are swarming the hallways and lobbies of immigration courthouses, striking fear into people who wish to fight deportation through legal channels.

Remember: People in deportation proceedings can request that their hearings be online rather than in person. 

Non-citizens with legal representation can have their lawyers make a motion to move their hearings online. Those without lawyers can do it themselves by filing a pro se Motion to Change format.

pro se: Representing oneself (in court); without an attorney.

Filing a Pro Se Motion to Change format

WHAT TO SUBMIT
The motion is a legal filing with an explanation for why attending court in person is not possible along with evidence (or exhibits), a form for the judge to fill out, and a “proof of service” page. You can find a full set of instructions and a template at bit.ly/nipmotion. Download a fill-in-the-blank Word document at bit.ly/psmworddoc. The motion must be filled out in English.

In your motion, you can cite travel distance or expenses, lack of childcare, the need to care for a loved one who can not care for themselves, special school events, or other practical obstacles to attending in person.

It is ultimately up to the judge to decide whether or not to grant your motion. Judges have widely varying personalities, so more thorough explanations are more likely to be accepted.