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.

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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.

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