For people in the city's Latino communities—particularly those without documents and their families—this has been a season of dry-mouthed terror. Trump began his campaign referring to Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists; since, his inauguration rumors of ICE raids have run through neighborhoods. Some people skip work and keep their kids home from school for days at a time, worried that they might be snatched up on the streets. Things weren't easy even in the Obama years, but now ICE's official orders are to bring in everyone they can, no matter how harmless.

For the white people who make up 80 percent of the population of the small New Hampshire city of Manchester, life since Donald Trump took office has gone on mostly as normal. Despite the constant rumble of weird news from CNN, white residents get out of bed, put their kids on the bus to school, and drive in to work, just like always.

Looking for help, the Rejino and Gutierrez families turned to a man known to almost everyone as Father Joe. The brown-robed, white-bearded Capuchin friar, full name Reverend Joseph Gurdak, is the pastor of Rejino and Gutierez's parish, Saint Anne-Saint Augustin. He grew up in Yonkers, New York, in the years after World War II. His family was part of a parish led by Capuchins, priests who commit themselves to serving the poor and living in poverty themselves. By the time he decided he would become one of them, it was the 1960s, and he quickly joined with his fellow seminary students protesting the war in Vietnam and supporting the United Farm Workers' grape boycott.

In May, Manchester residents Oscar and Mirna Gutierrez and their four-year-old son were at the beach when Oscar was stopped for fishing without a license. ICE was called, and he was locked up. Mirna was nine months pregnant. She's an American-born citizen, but her epilepsy makes it impossible for her to drive or hold a job. The family lives on Oscar's income as a construction worker. Without him, she didn't know what she'd do. She wasn't even sure how she'd get to her doctor's appointments.

"He doesn't have a way of expressing 'Hey, what's going on?' or 'Where's mom?'" Karen Rejino said. "How do you explain that to someone who doesn't talk?"

When her mom went to jail, 22-year-old Karen took a leave of absence to be there for the baby, her father, and her three younger brothers. The youngest is a four-year-old with a global developmental language disorder.

Within Trump's first 100 days, the agency said it detained 58 percent more "suspected illegal immigrants" in New England than it had over the same part of 2016. One of them was Josefina Rejino. She and her husband had lived and worked in Manchester for more than 20 years. Their kids went to the local schools and played on the soccer teams. Before she was detained, Rejino had been spending her days cooking, cleaning, and caring for her kids and her five-month-old granddaughter while her daughter Karen worked.

"It was a very hard time because we never learned any of this stuff in the seminary," Father Joe said. "We were trying to teach people things like human rights… and several of them died because of their stances. People that I knew. Not only knew, but I loved."

Starting in 1975, Father Joe spent two decades in Honduras. That was when Catholic churches espousing care for the poor and hope for democracy in Latin America became targets for military and paramilitary forces, sometimes backed by the US government.

Sandy Proulx is a no-nonsense middle-aged white woman who has been a member of Saint Anne's since 1966. She didn't know any immigrants before they started coming to her church. But she quickly made friends among the Latinos, and then the Vietnamese and Africans who began joining the church a few years later. Proulx also jumped into citywide efforts to support their communities. Over the years, she's helped the church hold meetings with the local police chief to curb racial profiling and worked to help free parishioners detained by ICE. Though she didn't really know Rejino and Gutierrez personally, after they were detained, she joined the rallies and protests organized by immigrant rights groups calling for undocumented people like them to be reunited with their families. (Disclosure: I'm involved in an interfaith group that Proulx is part of.)

Before he got there, others at the church had begun the slow, hard work of bridging the gap. Deacon Ramón Andrade, a short, dark-skinned, impeccably dressed man from Puerto Rico, was among the first Latinos to join what was then an overwhelmingly white Saint Anne parish in the 1990s. "We were not very welcome," Andrade recalls. "It's normal. They didn't know about us."

When Father Joe got to Manchester in 2006, he found himself leading a parish occupying the gap between the city's immigrant and refugee communities and its white natives. Formed from two churches that had served Irish and French Canadian communities since the middle of the 19th century, Saint Anne-Saint Augustin now holds masses in Spanish, English, and Vietnamese each week, as well as a monthly African mass with drumming and prayers in Arabic.

I asked her why she is so involved in these causes and her answer was simple. "I didn't do it as a political thing," she said. "Jesus told us to love our neighbors. These are our neighbors."

In his time in Manchester, Father Joe has accompanied many undocumented parishioners to court dates and supported families whose loved ones had been detained. But after the election, he decided he needed to do more.

After the detentions of Rejino and Gutierrez, he began telling their stories all the time, at rallies, in conversations with authorities, from the pulpit. In April, with the approval of a majority of the church's white members and overwhelming support from the Latino parishioners, he declared Saint Anne-Saint Augustin a sanctuary church, willing to take in undocumented people to protect them from unjust deportation.

But Bishop Peter Libasci of the Diocese of Manchester, like his counterparts in many other parts of the country, rejected the idea of sanctuary. He quickly sent a letter to his clergy expressing support for undocumented immigrants, but insisting that they could not take refuge in the Catholic churches. Father Joe obediently rescinded the declaration of sanctuary, but he kept talking about immigrant rights, despite pushback from some of his white parishioners. A few sent him letters complaining he was becoming too political.

"It was because I was saying what Pope Francis said, that we shouldn't be building walls, we should be building bridges and connecting with each other," he said. "That really struck them as if I was talking against Trump. I knew that was a possible interpretation, but it was the orientation that I think the Holy Father gave us."

The difference between the two sides of Manchester, the two sides of the church, is vast. For many white American Catholics, undocumented immigrants' rights are not a priority issue. Nationwide, white Catholics voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Manchester as a city backed Hillary Clinton, but even at Saint Anne-Saint Augustin, Sandy Proulx's enthusiastic embrace of immigrant rights work is the exception, not the rule. The total number of white parishioners at the church has declined over the years.