Good God

Chicago and Los Angeles were making headlines for ICE enforcement. Dallas wasn’t, and a friend told Noemi Rios why: nobody was observing immigration court, so nobody was reporting on what happened there. Noemi had a six-month sabbatical and decided to start watching. She wasn’t sure she was allowed in on her first day. She was, since observing hearings is the public’s right. The group that grew from those weeks, Vecinos Unidos DFW, now guides people through a confusing federal courthouse, distributes know-your-rights information in English and Spanish, and supports families after a loved one is detained.

In this conversation, Noemi and George Mason talk about what she saw in those courtrooms, how asylum seekers are being denied the chance to tell their stories, and how ICE’s tactics at the courthouse have changed from last year to this one. She also explains why she believes voting alone will not change the culture, how her religious upbringing taught her to build community person to person, and what she tells new volunteers who want to help without causing harm.

Noemi Rios is a co-founder of Vecinos Unidos DFW, a volunteer-led group formed in 2025 to support immigrant neighbors in Dallas-Fort Worth.

When Chanda Parbhoo was a teenager in Tyler, Texas, a football coach counting students by race in the school gym had no category for her. “You’re just other,” he said. Decades later, she founded SAAVETX Education Fund to make sure South Asian Texans are seen, counted, and heard.

In this conversation, Chanda and George Mason talk about what being othered has looked like across 48 years in Texas, from the Iran hostage crisis to the political rhetoric aimed at South Asians today. She explains how five moms registering voters grew into a statewide network, why her team teaches civics in temples and mosques, and what it meant when an estimated 8,000 South Asian voters turned out for a Frisco mayoral runoff. Chanda also reflects on her Hindu faith as a sense of duty, the debate within her community over staying quiet or speaking up, and what assimilation should actually mean.

Chanda Parbhoo is the Founder and Executive Director of SAAVETX Education Fund, Texas’s largest South Asian civic engagement group. Born in apartheid-era South Africa, her early experiences with injustice shaped a lifelong commitment to equal representation. Through SAAVETX, she has mobilized hundreds of South Asians across Texas, helping build political power and ensure the community’s voice is heard where decisions are made.

Lee Michaels was already helping families outside the Dallas ICE field office with hugs, diapers, and rent checks when she decided to reactivate her law license. After years away from practice, she began filing habeas petitions for detained immigrants, only to watch the law change four times in a single case.

In this conversation, she and George Mason talk about what she has witnessed at the weekly vigil and the respite tent, why immigration courts are failing to deliver due process, and how a video call between a detained father and his daughter felt like ministry. Lee also explains how the Holocaust museum’s call to be an upstander became her moral compass, and why she believes anyone can be one, including parents who want their children to learn it.

Lee Michaels is a retired Dallas corporate attorney and former board chair of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. She now handles immigration habeas cases and volunteers at the respite tent behind the Dallas ICE field office, supporting the work led by La Colectiva.

Hadi Jawad's path into activism began with a phone call. In the late 1990s, his sister in Pakistan told him that relatives from Iraq had shown up at her door, having walked the distance to escape the suffering caused by US and UN sanctions. That call set him on a path that led him to the old Dallas Peace Center and eventually to co-founding Human Rights Dallas, an organization built around a simple conviction: dignity is the foundation everything else rests on.

In this conversation, Hadi and George Mason talk about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the long push to get Dallas designated a Human Rights City, and why Hadi believes denying people basic rights is ultimately a judgment on their humanity. The conversation turns to the death penalty in Texas, where Hadi lays out the statistics on executions and racial disparities on death row, and closes with a reminder that one person, like Rosa Parks, can shift the world.

Hadi Jawad is a Dallas-based human rights activist and community leader with decades of experience advancing peace and justice. He co-founded the Crawford Peace House during the Iraq War and helped establish the North Texas Civil Rights Project, now part of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He is the co-founder and president of Human Rights Dallas.

Robin Lederer's path into voting rights work started with a letter. When her husband received notice from county elections claiming he'd moved, and he hadn't, Robin realized how little she understood about how voter rolls are actually managed, despite years of voting herself. That discovery led her to co-found the National Coalition for Voting Rights with Dr. Andrea Barrero, a gerrymandering researcher at Southern Methodist University, focused on the overlooked mechanics of "voter list maintenance."

In this conversation, Robin walks George Mason through how voters end up in "suspense" status, how to check your registration before the October 5th deadline, and why Texas has ranked at or near the bottom of the Cost of Voting Index for decades. They discuss the data on voter fraud, which Robin's research puts at just 150 cases out of 127 million ballots over 20 years, the mid-decade congressional redistricting that cut Dallas-Tarrant County representation from six seats to three, and what voters should know heading into early voting on October 19th.

Robin Lederer is a Dallas-based executive, consultant, and civic advocate. She co-founded the National Coalition for Voter Rights in September 2023 and currently serves as CEO of UniBeacon Group LLC.

Every Monday morning, Kim Verriere shows up outside the Dallas ICE field office to pray and organize a public vigil, a role she never expected to play. In this conversation, she and George Mason talk about how her conviction that love of neighbor must extend to the marginalized led her from first-time attendee to central organizer, and how prayer and action work together rather than as substitutes for each other. The conversation turns to Kim's work as a spiritual director, where she describes her role as following the movement of the spirit rather than offering advice, and closes with her encouragement to take one small step outside your comfort zone.

Kim Verriere holds an English degree with a minor in religion from Auburn University and a certificate in spiritual direction from SMU Perkins School of Theology. Based in Richardson, Texas, she serves on the board of Spiritual Ministries Institute and the advisory board of Retreat House Spirituality Center, and she founded and led Greater Love Collective, an organization for women, for nine years before stepping away to focus on spiritual direction and retreat leading.

Every time a deportation flight lands at Dallas Love Field, John Putnam is there watching. In this conversation, he tells George Mason how a campaign to stop Avelo Airlines from running ICE flights led him and a small coalition of neighbors to start tracking ICE operations through Love Field, where flights have jumped from 15 in 2024 to 178 so far this year. John and George discuss the racial disparities in who is being detained, the case of pregnant women shackled and moved across state lines, and why John believes resistance is not the work of extraordinary people but of ordinary ones who simply refuse to look away.

John Putnam is a therapist by profession and a co-founder of the No Love for ICE Air coalition, a group of neighbors, labor organizers, and faith leaders documenting and resisting ICE deportation flights out of Dallas.

As the nation marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, George Mason sits down with Imam Azhar Subedar, author of "I Am the Other: Debating the Role of Islam in a Divided America," to talk about what that anniversary means for Muslim Americans today. They discuss the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Texas politics, what Sharia actually means and how it functions for practicing Muslims, and why Azhar believes the Muslim community must stop explaining who they are not and start showing who they are.

Imam Subedar was born and raised in Canada and completed ten years of Islamic studies in the U.K., graduating in 2000. He holds a Master's in Islamic Sciences and Arabic Literature and has served as an imam and educator at mosques and Islamic centers across the United States since 2002. Known for his commitment to interfaith dialogue, he has worked with state legislatures, governors, and presidents as an ambassador of Islam to the non-Muslim world.

What does it take to turn ordinary people into dissenters?

In this conversation, George Mason sits down with his Faith Commons co-founder Rabbi Nancy Kasten to kick off Faithful Dissent, a new series featuring people who never expected to find themselves at a vigil or a protest but have been activated by this political moment. Nancy argues that nonviolent movements against authoritarian rule have always depended on average citizens refusing to comply, and she and George trace how their own religious traditions moved away from that legacy once they became custodians of the status quo rather than critics of it.

They talk about what happens when injustice gets close enough to touch, when a neighbor's housekeeper or longtime lawn crew member is suddenly gone, and why that proximity does more to move people than any headline can. The episode closes with George invoking Martin Niemöller's famous warning about the cost of silence, setting the tone for a series built around the conviction that faith should form people for resistance, not conformity.

Rabbi Nancy Kasten co-leads Faith Commons with Rev. Dr. George Mason, working at the intersection of interfaith relationships, immigration advocacy, and civic engagement in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Many American Christians want to understand Israel–Palestine but feel overwhelmed by history, headlines, and competing narratives. In this conversation, George Mason and John Munayer cut through that noise with a grounded, deeply human look at the lived experience of Palestinian Christians, the shifts happening in Palestinian theology, and why humility and attentive listening are essential for anyone seeking clarity right now. They explore everyday metaphors like the olive tree and olive oil, the weight of Holy Saturday after Gaza, and how a theology that truly blesses one’s neighbor can guide faithful engagement.

John Munayer is the Director of International Engagement at the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue and a Jerusalem-born Palestinian Christian theologian engaged in peace-building, research, and interreligious work.