In 1657, New York Quakers were strangers in a strange land. We were considered foreign, heretical, and illegal. We were subject to arrest, brutality, and deportation by the Dutch Colonial Government. Heightening that religious intolerance, Governor Peter Stuyvesant issued an ordinance making it a punishable crime to aid or harbor a Quaker seeking shelter.

In defiance of this oppressive order, the inhabitants of the town of Flushing (all Dutch Reformed Christians) presented Stuyvesant with a scathing letter of protest called the Flushing Remonstrance. Its defense of religious liberty would echo down the centuries to inspire Jefferson and the U.S. Bill of Rights. Those early Americans stood up to power and refused to act as puppets of oppression. They affirmed human equality and held to their Christian duty to offer shelter and hospitality to all people in need.

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Today, most American Quakers enjoy the safety of citizenship, but noncitizen residents of the United States are living under constant threat from a hostile government. Despite our constitutional commitments to due process, free expression, limited policing, and equality before the law, folks are being targeted by a campaign of illegal imprisonment and deportation. This reign of terror has extended beyond undocumented immigrants, affecting green-card holders and international students, who have been arrested for protesting, in clear violation of their God-given rights to free speech and dissent.

Beyond our citizenship, Quakers enjoy a cultural safety that comes with three centuries of U.S. history. We are a faith community so deeply entwined with America’s founding that no one can deny we belong here. With that safety comes a responsibility to act - to speak up for the human rights of our imperiled neighbors, just as our neighbors spoke up for us in 1657.

This is why we walked 300 miles to Washington: to prove our commitment to an equal voice for those who this authoritarian administration would push underground. We walked to to gather the messages of American Quakers and noncitizen friends, to carry them on to the halls of Congress. Inspired by the 1657 remonstrance, we condensed these messages into our own statement of faith and defiance, the 2025 Walker’s Remonstrance, which we presented to congressional offices with the help of FCNL and AFSC.

We hope this action will be the first of many. The human rights of our neighbors remain in urgent peril.

We are proud to have contributed a small piece to the lineage of American spiritual activism that made our own community possible, nearly four centuries ago.