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This county is the most religiously diverse in the U.S.
Spencerville Seventh-day Adventist Church in Montgomery County, Maryland is currently meeting at the Lutheran Church of St. Andrew, after their building suffered a fire. It is one example of interfaith cooperation in the most religiously diverse county in the country.
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Sarah Ventre/NPR
SILVER SPRING, Md. — About 30 miles north of Washington, D.C. is a winding road surrounded by leafy trees and lots of churches. But not just churches.
There’s a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Cambodian Buddhist Society, Muslim Community Center, the Maryland Hindu Milan Mandir, and even a home with a sign out front advertising psychic readings.
This stretch of New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland is so packed with houses of worship, it’s been called the Embassy Row of Religions. But locals know it as the Highway to Heaven.
The Highway to Heaven sits on the eastern part of Montgomery County, Maryland, which was determined to be the most religiously diverse county in the country, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). The U.S. Census does not collect data about religious affiliation, so the PRRI Census of American Religion is considered to be one of the most reliable sources of data on the topic.
Melissa Deckman is the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, which conducted the survey. She said the counties with the most religious diversity have some common denominators.
“[They are] the most populated counties in the country, but they’re also the most racially and ethnically diverse,” said Deckman.
Just 40% of residents in Montgomery County are white, another 20% are Hispanic. The county also has larger populations of African-Americans and Asian-Americans, said Deckman. “There are higher percentages of residents who are Hindu, who are Buddhist, who are Muslim.”
Other counties at the top of PRRI’s diversity list included Kings County, New York, which includes Brooklyn; Suffolk County, Massachusetts; and San Francisco County, California. Counties with the least religious diversity included Holmes County, Mississippi; Macon County, Alabama; and Appling County, Georgia
A wall in an exterior corridor of the Muslim Community Center on the Highway to Heaven in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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Interfaith cooperation
On a sunny Saturday morning, families from the Spencerville Seventh-day Adventist Church gather for worship. (For Seventh-day Adventists, the sabbath is Saturday as opposed to Sunday as in most Christian denominations.)
But the congregation isn’t actually meeting at their own church. Instead, men in suits greet worshippers at the door of the Lutheran Church of St. Andrew — about a mile and a half up the road.
In August, Spencerville Seventh-day Adventist Church suffered a fire, and the congregation is still unable to use the building.Crystal E. Ward, the church’s executive pastor, said it’s been a positive experience to have supportive communities of faith nearby.
“The Lutheran church and the pastor here [have] been so welcoming and gracious to us to allow us a space where we can worship. So we’re here worshiping every Saturday.”
These kinds of interfaith partnerships are often the goal, but the geographic closeness on the Highway to Heaven may make them more possible.
“There’s a mosque, the Muslim Community Center, which are amazing interfaith partners and do a lot in the community,” said Kate Chance, the Faith Community Outreach Manager for the Office of Community Partnerships in Montgomery County.
“They have a health clinic to support folks, and right next to it is the Ukrainian church. And so they share parking lots. They’re very good friends. But when the Ukrainian church was supporting Ukrainian newcomers, they’re taking the newcomers to the MCC’s health clinic.”
Communities with deep roots
Two miles north of the Muslim Community Center and St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Church is Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church. It’s a striking building — tall, wooden, and topped with a polygonal pyramid that can be seen from the road. It would look out of place anywhere else in Silver Spring. But on the Highway to Heaven, the log construction (typical in the Carpathian Mountains) is just one of many thoughtfully built houses of worship.
Holy Trinity Particular Ukrainian Catholic Church follows the Byzantine Rite and sits on the “Highway to Heaven” in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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“This is the church that I grew up in. I had my first communion. I was a part of this congregation before the church was even built, we had our first church in Washington, DC in a house,” said Lila Johnson. She drives with her family around an hour and fifteen minutes each way to come to this church.
She enjoys celebrating the mass entirely in Ukrainian — just like her parents and grandparents did.
“The mass is just moving and beautiful, and I couldn’t imagine going anywhere else,” said Johnson
On the Highway to Heaven, there are enough options that most people don’t have to.
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Kennedy Center will close for 2 years for renovations in July, Trump says, after performers backlash
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he will move to close Washington’s Kennedy Center performing arts venue for two years starting in July for construction.
Trump’s announcement on social media Sunday night follows a wave of cancellations since Trump ousted the previous leadership and added his name to the building.
Trump announced his plan days after the premiere of “Melania” a documentary of the first lady was shown at the storied venue. The proposal, he said, is subject to approval by the board of the Kennedy Center, which has been stocked with his hand-picked allies. Trump himself chairs the center’s board of trustees.
“This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment,” Trump wrote in his post.
Leading performing arts groups have pulled out of appearances, most recently, composer Philip Glass, who announced his decision to withdraw his Symphony No. 15 “Lincoln” because he said the values of the center today are in “direct conflict” with the message of the piece.
Earlier this month, the Washington National Opera announced that it will move performances away from the Kennedy Center in another high-profile departure following Trump’s takeover of the U.S. capital’s leading performing arts venue.
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Minnesota citizens detained by ICE are left rattled, even weeks later
Aliya Rahman is detained by federal agents near the scene where Renee Macklin Good was fatally shot by an ICE officer on Jan. 13 in Minneapolis.
Adam Gray/AP
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It’s a video many saw on social media soon after it happened: Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, dragging a woman out of her car and forcing her to the ground.
The woman in the video is Aliya Rahman, a Bangladeshi-American and a U.S. citizen. The day she was arrested, Rahman was on her way to the doctor, when she came across an ICE operation and a group of people protesting. She said the ICE officers told her to move her car, but the scene was chaotic and she received multiple instructions at once.
The Department of Homeland Security said in an earlier statement they arrested Rahman because she “ignored multiple commands.” But Rahman, who is autistic and also recovering from a traumatic brain injury, says it sometimes takes her a moment to understand auditory commands. Before she knew it, the officers were carrying her away by her limbs.

“I thought I might well die,” Rahman said. She was placed in an SUV with three ICE officers.
“I heard the laughing driver radio in, ‘we’re bringing in a body,’” she recalled. It took her a second to realize they meant her.
In recent days, federal officials have signaled a willingness to reduce the large number of immigration agents in Minnesota, though they say any decrease will depend on state and local cooperation. Even if a draw-down occurs, they’ll leave behind a changed community, including many citizens questioned and detained by immigration officers in recent weeks.
Rahman was taken to the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, where immigration agents have brought detainees before releasing them or sending them out of state. While at Whipple, Rahman experienced a severe headache, and asked for medical care for more than an hour. Eventually, she passed out. She says she woke up in a downtown hospital, where doctors told her she had suffered a concussion.
Her arrest was more than two weeks ago, but she can’t shake the fear.
“I do not feel safe being in my own home, driving these streets,” she said. “And even then, I am in a significantly better place than a lot of the other folks who have been detained.”

Rahman is far from the only U.S. citizen in Minnesota with such a story.
ChongLy Scott Thao, a Hmong man and U.S. citizen, was pulled from his home wearing only sandals, underwear and a blanket around his shoulders. Thao said the immigration agents drove him “to the middle of nowhere” and photographed him. He told reporters he feared they would beat him. They later brought him back to his house.
Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a Somali-American and U.S. citizen, also was detained by ICE.
“I wasn’t even outside for mere seconds before I seen a masked person running at me full speed,” Hussen said at a news conference last month. “He tackled me. I told him, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen.’ He didn’t seem to care. He dragged me outside to the snow while I was handcuffed, restrained, helpless and he pushed me to the ground.”
Hussen is now suing the Trump administration as part of a class action lawsuit, accusing it of racial profiling. According to the lawsuit, ICE eventually released Hussen outside the Whipple building, telling him to walk the seven miles back to where they detained him.
In a statement to NPR, the Department of Homeland Security said “allegations that ICE engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.”

But Walter Olson, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says many legal experts are coming to a different conclusion.
“This is no longer just a series of accidents that could have been due to someone being badly trained or being a bad apple. This is a systematic assault on constitutional rights,” he said.
The Fourth Amendment protects people from being stopped without reasonable suspicion and arresting without probable cause, a higher standard. Courts in the U.S. have decided skin color alone does not meet either bar.
Last fall, however, the Supreme court ruled that “apparent ethnicity” could be used to determine reasonable suspicion, as long as there were other factors too. Legal experts say the decision may give ICE more discretion.
Olson says even if the Minnesota immigration crackdown eases, these same concerns could arise elsewhere. He noted that judges ruled against the federal government during its crackdowns in Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland.
“And they were not led to call off or rethink the campaign. They just regrouped and came back to another state,” Olson said.
Even citizens who were not arrested but still questioned are rattled after run-ins with immigration officers. Luis Escoto, the owner of El Taquito Taco Shop in West St. Paul, said immigration agents surrounded his wife Irma’s car in their restaurant’s alley when she went out to get more lettuce before the dinner hour. Escoto ran outside.
Luis Escoto poses for a portrait inside of his restaurant, El Taquito in West St. Paul, Minnesota.
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“I said, ‘Hey, hold on. That’s just my wife,’” Escoto said. “They said, ‘We need proof of U.S. citizenship,’ and I said, ‘She’s a U.S. citizen.’”
Luis and Irma Escoto are both citizens. Escoto showed one of the officers their passport cards, which he still had in his wallet after a recent trip to Mexico.
“He said, ‘Well, next time she should carry that all the time, because if she doesn’t have proof of citizenship we’re going to arrest her,’” Escoto recalled.
The immigration agents left. But weeks later, Escoto is still shaken and angry. Some of his customers are now escorting him and his wife home each night when the restaurant closes.
When he became a citizen 35 years ago, Escoto said he was nervous because the government took away his green card. He asked the judge about it.
Irma Escoto poses for a portrait inside of her restaurant, El Taquito in West St. Paul, Minnesota.
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“I said, ‘Sir, what happens if the immigration officers stop me?’ And he said ‘Well, today you’re proud to be a United States citizen,’” Escoto said.
The judge told him you don’t need documentation when you’re a citizen. But now, Escoto said, that doesn’t seem so true anymore.
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