It's difficult to report on Kingston Episcopal Priest Frank Alagna without the spectre of Archbishop Romero coming into view. Alagna, co-founder president of the Ulster Immigrant Defense Network (UIDN) knows the bloody history, how Romero was shot down by U.S.-backed right-wing assassins for speaking out against social injustice in El Salvador in the '80s.

The United States is not yet in the realm of death squads. But we are a violent nation with no shortage of lone wolves. Just months ago, ill-founded rumors and misinformation about migrant communities in American cities prompted death threats and school closures. Yet Alagna persists.

A trim and modestly dressed figure, youthful and energetic, Alagna last week greeted Kingston Wire in his office at Holy Cross/Santa Cruz Episcopal Church, a bilingual congregation in Midtown Kingston, to discuss Trump II and the president-elect's proposed migrant sweep: the detection, detention and deportation of the nation's estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. Alagna spoke evenly and emphatically, laughing frequently.

“Right now we expect the worst because the worst has been promised,” Alagna said. “And we're beginning to have conversations with our various partners and among ourselves at UIDN as to how to anticipate what will most probably begin to unfold after the inauguration. ... Our focus is going to be the safety and protection of our undocumented and asylum-seeking neighbors. How we do that, how we step up to that, we're trying to figure that out right now. but that's our primary focus: safety and protection.”

Those “various partners,” according to Alagna, include the progressive activists at For the Many and Indivisible and, more broadly, local political leaders who've supported sanctuary and, lately, Gov. Kathy Hochul for “beginning to speak about how we put up some barriers and safeguards against the intrusion of the federal government in a way that endangers so many of our current residents.”

Prominent among Alagna's allies is a coalition of 19 Ulster County churches who advocate “audacious hospitality” and cite Leviticus 19:33: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

This is in contrast to many conservative Christians who are solidly behind mass deportation. They want to consider themselves people of faith. But a simple reading of the Judeo-Christian scriptures would tell them, your faith is not authentic the way you're expressing it. You know, Jesus said, If you care for the least among you, you care for me. Couldn't be clearer. And if you don't care for the least among you, you're not caring for me."

A Brooklyn boy, Alagna grew up in the “125 percent Italian” Bensonhurst neighborhood, now largely Asian, where his neighbors included the families of epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci and mobsters Joseph Profaci and Albert Anastasia.

“One of the first funerals I served was the funeral of Joseph Profaci and the church was filled with people, men with dark glasses on, and going up and down the side aisles were obviously FBI agents taking the names of who was there.”

“So I sometimes I think, you know, I've learned that there was organized crime, and now we have disorganized crime that is just as organized and that is the people, you know, the criminals who are these people who claim to be our elected representatives.”

Alagna entered the priesthood in his teens, at Roman Catholic Maryknoll Seminary in Ossining. He went on to work among refugees in Hong Kong, then returned to the U.S. to take a degree in psychology at the University of Connecticut. Ten years along he left Catholicism for the Episcopal Church where over 45 years he served several New York State congregations including Beacon's St. Andrews, an African American church.

“It was wonderful,” Alagna said. “I had the grace and the pleasure and the joy of being there on the day that Barack Obama was elected. Oh, my goodness, that was an awesome Sunday. I was standing at the office thinking, there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be.”

“New York State is not officially declared but we have a sense of being a sanctuary state,” Alagna said. “We've provided driver's licenses to undocumented people. We have access to health care for all children, regardless of their status. So, you know, this is a blue state. It's not a red state, and it historically has expressed itself in ways that are caring and protective of this population, which is coming to be among us from a place of sheer desperation ... People of faith and people who don't identify as people of faith, are coming to terms with the basic requirements of our humanity to care for the searcher, as the Scriptures say, 'Who comes to be among us?'”

Alagna said the conservative narrative of emphasizing the presence of criminals among undocumented immigrants is both wrong and unfair. "[It's a lie, just a flat out lie. The reality is - and you can research this - the percentage of criminals coming from the citizen population is huge when compared to the percentage of migrants and immigrants."

What does he see as coming next?

“I don't know what's going to happen,” Alagna said. “How far they'll get. ... The picture doesn't look good moving into the future.”

Alagna told Kingston Wire he'll be meeting Dec. 2 with local citizens’ groups, elected officials and law enforcement “to engage in a shared conversation,” praising them all for their past support.

“This part of the world is appreciative of the contribution that migrants and undocumented brothers and sisters make,” he said. “We respect their basic humanity and try to live in a way that advances the common good.”