Opinion: How This 91-Year-Old Nun’s Battle with ICE Shamed ‘Catholic’ JD Vance
...But, even an errant Catholic convert could redeem himself by following an example Persch has long set at the Broadview ICE facility. She and fellow Sister of Mercy Pat Murphy first stood outside the brick building in the early morning darkness of Friday, January 5, 2007. Friday was deportation day there and an immigration lawyer had asked them to join him in praying for a group of migrants being sent off despite all his best efforts.
“It was literally 20 below zero, not just wind chill.” Persch told The Daily Beast this week. “We were out there in a bitter cold, watching families just being torn apart because their loved ones were being ripped from their lives.”
Persch and Murphy saw the deportees being loaded onto buses and vans for the ride to the airport.
“What struck me is they’re being moved like pieces on a chess board.” Persch recalled. “They have no control over their lives.”
The nuns returned to their car.
Sister Patricia Murphy. / legacy.com
“We looked at each other, and we said, ‘We have to be here every week,” she remembered. “And so we have for 19 years. We’ve been there in rain and snow and ice and freezing and boiling hot.”
They began what Persch calls a “hug ministry” outside the facility,
“Families were traumatized, and they’d come up to us and what could we say, but just hold them and let them express their grief,” she remembered.
The nuns then decided they also needed to comfort those still being held inside. They strode up to the entrance.
“So we’re pretty naive,” Persch recalled. ”We went up and rang the bell and said we’d like to come in and talk to those being deported. And they just looked at us like, ‘What planet are you from? You can’t come in here’.”
The nuns called the ICE field office and left messages asking to speak to the midwest director. They got no response, so they wrote a letter.
“Then some officer called us and said, ‘Go out to McHenry County Jail, where we have 200 immigrants,” she remembers.
The nuns made an appointment and drove two hours to one of the local correctional facilities that ICE used for detention.
“They said, ‘Oh, no, we don’t need any help’.”
But the nuns, who earned the nickname Rabble and Rouser, were nothing if not persistent.
“Peacefully and respectfully, we never take no for an answer,” she says.
They enlisted the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to help them with the state legislature.
“We got (a) law passed unanimously, by both the Illinois House and Senate, that gave access to religious workers to the immigrants for pastoral care,” Persch remembered.
But the ICE processing center in Broadview was a federal facility not subject to the new state law. And the nuns still wanted to see the immigrants who were briefly held there either just after they were grabbed, but before they were shipped out. They presented ICE with a possibility Persch describes as “two spry elderly nuns” lying down in front of the buses.
“So, I got a call from the field director and he said they wanted to negotiate,” Persch says.
The nuns were granted a tour inside the Broadview Facility, which they saw was only a depot equipped for a few hours of detention. They also got permission to visit deportees on the buses and vans before their departures for the airport.
“Talk with the people and pray with them,” Persch says. “They were shackled, behind Plexiglass, metal grating, but they were so grateful. They’d clap and shout out, ‘Thank you!’”
The nuns were able to achieve their immediate goal.
“Just to let them know that there are people that cared about them that saw them as human beings,” Persch says.
The nuns kept coming back every Friday and slowly reached an understanding with ICE.
“We trusted each other, and we built a relationship,” Pesch says. “And even though they had to stay on their side of the table, and we had to stay on ours, we could come close to the center and that’s how we were able to do what we could do.”
That all ended with the second Trump Administration, which included the self described “newbie” Catholic JD Vance.
“To see what’s going on now, the officers with riot gear and masks on,” Persch says. “People have asked me, ‘Can you help us?’ I have no idea who’s behind those masks. I’m sure it’s not the men and women that I know. They would talk like rational human beings.”
On July 21, Persch’s holy sidekick Murphy died at 96. Persch was continuing their decades-long immigration mission when ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz on September 9, conducting sweeps across Chicago. Broadview became a detention facility even though it was still only equipped for processing.
“They’re keeping hundreds of people there,” Persch said. “There no beds, no showers, They’re sleeping on the floor, sitting up on plastic chairs. There’s no big kitchen.”
Persch is now with the Coalition for Spiritual & Public Leadership, which organized the All Saints Day Mass that concluded with the miracle of silence.
“That really touched my soul,” she told The Daily Beast this week.
Some material progress came on Wednesday, when a federal judge ordered ICE to improve conditions at Broadview. ICE now has to give inmates bedding and toilet articles, access to showers and three meals a day.
“People shouldn’t be sleeping next to overflowing toilets,” U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman ruled. “They should not be sleeping on top of each other.”
Meanwhile, JD Vance persists in turning silence into deepening shame. Persch was asked if she had any thoughts about the newbie Catholic who persists in turning silence into deepening shame.
“Pray, I guess,” she said.
Read more at The Daily Beast. |
