The Climate is Changing, and the Wrong Ice is Melting Away.
History will surely look back on the weekend of Jan. 24, 2026, as the weekend of two ice storms. One arrived with freezing rain, falling trees, and power outages, most likely exacerbated by human-caused climate change, and the other in the form of violence and death—an authoritarian government once again testing its reach under cover of fear, crisis, and control.
At first glance, these storms may appear unrelated. One meteorological and the other political. Yet, as a United Methodist clergyperson who now works in environmental justice and studied immigrant rights in graduate school, both are more closely linked than one might think. Both are born from the same hardening of hearts and apathy.
Climate migration is no longer a hypothetical, future concern; it is present reality. People are being forced to flee their homes because areas that once sustained life are no longer habitable. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and blizzards, as well as drought, decreasing crop yields, and rising sea levels, are eroding livelihoods. Movement in these cases is no longer a choice, but an act of survival.
According to a 2021 report by the World Bank, climate change in Latin America alone could displace as many as 17 million individuals within the region by 2050. This becomes even more stark when you consider culpability.
South and Central America produce only a small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions and yet bear a disproportionate share of the impact. Meanwhile, reporting by U.K. think tank Carbon Brief shows that since 1850, the United States has been responsible for more than a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide—more than any other country.
And yet, rather than reckoning with this reality, the United States government continues to create conditions for forced migration and then criminalizes individuals for moving. It is gaslighting at its finest; destabilize regions with toxic emissions, then punish people crossing borders only to seek safety and honest work.
This also doesn't consider social and economic factors to which the U.S. has contributed—trade policies and political interventions that have weakened local leadership in smaller countries and wreaked havoc on local economies, as well as corporate practices that go unchecked and extract wealth from already vulnerable communities.
For people of faith, this all should be deeply unsettling.
Scripture is unambiguous about the moral importance of caring for neighbor, stranger, immigrant, and our common land. Yet, we have allowed avarice to blind us to what is sacred. We have normalized a system that treats both people and planet as expendable. We have learned to look away, lie to ourselves and others, and dismiss the warnings written on the Earth and the faces of our dead.
The ICE accumulating in our streets and melting in the Arctic are both symptoms of the same spiritual malady: distance from one another, Creation, and the Creator that sustains us all.
The prescription for such an illness is not increased separation. We are not called to run away from political opponents or the agents of terror. We are called to a ministry of presence and truth-telling; to meet the other in the streets with compassion and love, and to say, as Christ did to the demonic spirit in Mark 1, “Silence” and be gone!
A society that values life will stand firmly against all policies that devalue it, whether that be in neglect of our Common Home or unjust force against her people.
Friends, I invite us not to let our hearts grow cold. The time is now to work together to build a world where both ICE and ice storms are eliminated. The solution to both is the same.
