Monday morning, as the skies darkened and the wind picked up, two men and five women stood in front of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Stemmons Freeway, a flat, two-story brick building whose windows are tinted pitch-black. Signs warned, in English and Spanish, “U.S. Property NO Trespassing.” The locked doors along the driveway told visitors not to take photos, shoot video or bring their cellphones inside the building.
Behind the building, men, women and children — so many children, most tucked in strollers — waited outside beneath an awning. They sat in chairs and clutched folders full of papers, waiting for their names to be called.
Out front, four of the assembled wore clerical shirts and stoles in different colors; several wore crosses around their necks. One woman carried a blue sign upon which she’d written in black marker, “Due Process For All.”
They were members of the Interfaith Clergy Emergency Response League and Faith Commons, who gathered at ICE for a clergy vigil — the first, they vowed, of a weekly interfaith assembly that will take place every Monday from 10 a.m. until noon. Monday’s gathering was small, something of a dry run for the vigils to follow, with most of the attendees hailing from Methodist congregations.
“We have to do what we can,” Eric Folkerth, lead pastor of Kessler Park United Methodist Church, told me when I walked up.
I’d come to ask what their small group hoped to accomplish by praying in front of this grim, unwelcoming place for a couple of hours each week. I realized on the drive over that I probably already knew the answer: It’s better to do something than nothing at all.
“Everyone is called to different things,” said Folkerth, who was arrested at the White House in 2014 protesting the Obama administration’s immigration policies. “Some people are called on to put intense pressure on our representatives. But people should talk to their neighbors, too, and ask them: Is this who we really want to be?”
A few days ago, faith leaders from across this city gathered at his church for a media conference decrying the Trump administration’s deportations of migrants denied due process. They highlighted the case of 25-year-old asylum-seeker Neri Jose Alvarado Borges, one of 238 Venezuelan men the Trump administration disappeared to a gulag in El Salvador in mid-March.
I regularly get emails from people asking for updates on Alvarado’s case and wondering what they can do to help, including a local philanthropist of some renown who, just Tuesday morning, said he “would like to see if I can help with legal counsel and intervene with politicians.” But for weeks I haven’t been able to reach his friend and former boss to find out if Alvarado yet has a lawyer.
Prayer, it would seem, is as viable an option as any other at this point.
“That’s what they want you to feel — despair,” said the Rev. Ashley Anne Sipe, lead pastor at Vista Ridge United Methodist Church in Lewisville. The Austin native has a tattoo on her left wrist, a phrase she picked up from a 92-year-old missionary during time spent feeding the poor in Rio de Janeiro’s slums: fiel até o fim. It means, “Faithful until the end.”
“When you despair, you quit doing stuff like this,” Sipe said. “You quit showing up. You quit paying attention. And we are not letting this go unnoticed.”
Joining the vigil was Rocio Bamihe, the nursery coordinator at Lovers Lane Methodist Church, whose parents brought her from Mexico across the Rio Grande in 1992 when she was a young teenager.
“When my parents came to the United States, they were looking for a better opportunity for me,” said Bamihe, a naturalized citizen. She graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in East Dallas and dreamed of attending college. Her parents had to explain why she didn’t have the Social Security number needed for college and scholarship applications.
“I always tell people those who come here with their children are looking for the American dream,” Bamihe said. “My success is my parents’ dream. They weren’t able to do that back in our country.”
I also met on Monday the Rev. Laurie Anderson, senior minister at Midway Hills Christian Church in northwest Dallas. She said that a couple of years ago, the church began an “asylum hospitality” program for “people needing a place to land, to catch their breath.” The church has hosted some 130 asylum-seekers, most from Venezuela. She told me that one of them, a man named Ramon, texted her last week to say he’d been sent home after being held in a Texas detention center for more than a month.
On Monday there were no cameras or crowds in front of the ICE building, only the steady stream of cars and trucks filled with men, women and children trying to remain in this country for as long as possible. Some people honked and waved at the small gathering of clergy as they pulled in — the children, especially, smiles spread across their faces. More often than not, though, the people pulling in stared straight ahead, their heads down.
“They look sad and afraid,” Sipe said. “I’m trying to give them a kind face. But you start to think it’s the last friendly face they will see.” A long pause. “I hope not.”
