Article for the Rockford Squire Newspaper 11/6/2025
by Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
On Saturday, November 1 st 2025, I stood in the drizzle outside the ICE offices at 517 Ottawa in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The tears of rain were appropriate. I was there for the Día de los Muertos service, in remembrance and in protest for the 25 known lives who have died so far in ICE detention centers in 2025.
With marigolds and music, in English and Spanish, the names and the stories of those who lost their lives were lifted up. Their places of birth were varied, including Ukraine, China, Vietnam, Mexico. They died in ICE detention centers in diverse places, including Arizona, Florida, Texas and California. The number of these deaths has dramatically increased since Trump’s second Inauguration. At the newly opened, North Lake Detention Center in Baldwin, Michigan, there are reports that the guards only speak English, and that the detainees are fed food that makes them sick. The inmates are treated with cruelty and with curses, and the GEO group who owns the for-profit facility, carelessly and constantly loses paperwork.
One man, who was released after 47 days in detention, in grief and gratitude declared he was, “detained for no crime, simply for being here.” Another message, from a man who has now been detained for seven months, brought the crowd to tears: “I ask you to search your hearts, gentlemen of ICE. You are people, you are human beings, you are children of God too, but please have reason and have good sense in the face of the actions you are taking against all of us, who are human beings, who come here to do good.”
This man had come to the USA for asylum, a political refugee fleeing for his life. He had taken seriously Emma Lazarus’ welcoming poem engraved at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
But instead of finding a golden door of opportunity in our country which was built by immigrant backs and hands, we have now barricaded our bureaucratic doors. We have demonized ALL immigrants, even the ones who are here legally, and we are snatching them up outside of their courthouse asylum hearings in order to attain arbitrary arrest quotas.
This is not the way of Jesus. We are commanded in Deuteronomy 10:19 to “Love immigrants, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt.” (CEB) Instead of building community, we are building cages. Instead of lovingly seeing foreigners as family, we fear immigrants and we are treating them as foes. As a nation founded on the promise of liberty, we have broken the light of Lady Liberty’s lamp and we have lost our way in dismal darkness. Our prayers for peace, our protest songs of the people’s power are our laments for the land we once thought we knew. For our gathering on Saturday was not only for the detainees who are still
crying out from detention: “Help us, don’t leave us here, and please pray for us.” It was a funeral for the death of American liberty. It was a memorial for the precious idea of America that we once commonly shared. And it was a service of hope that one day, someday, we will be able to again return that flame to Lady Liberty’s torch.
–May the spark of her compassion ignite in our hearts. May the
flame of her love for the tempest-tost, compel us to action today. And may we soon regain the lost light of God’s justice and mercy in these United States.