Today is Human Rights Day. Eleanor Roosevelt said, "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world..."
Today, I went to someplace close to home--the Broadview Immigrant Detention and Processing Center. Up until a few years ago, this was invisible to me. There is a weekly Friday prayer vigil held there at 7:15 in the morning, when undocumented immigrant detainees from all over the Midwest are "processed" (note the industrial language; the center is located also in an industrial zone): handcuffed, shackled, tied together at the waist, and "loaded" onto buses and vans to transport them to the airport to be deported. Today, 90 people were deported. People are deported every Tuesday and Friday from Broadview. I went, because I wanted an Advent discipline that was related to some aspect of the current reality we are living in, that would help me articulate what it is we are waiting for during Advent.
There was a woman, 8 months pregnant, who was praying with us today. Her husband was being deported to Mexico. He'd lived and worked here for 17 years. Denise Griebler, who was able to go onto one of the buses, told us of a 31 year old from El Salvador who came here with his parents as a 3 year old. His entire family system is now in the U.S. He knows no one in El Salvador. He primarily speaks English. He will be escorted across the U.S.-Mexican border with everyone else on that bus and left off in Mexico with $20 in his pocket.
The vigil is centered around praying the rosary, which means nothing to my Protestant sensibilities but means a lot to the primarily Catholic detainees and their family members present. I can see how "...pray for us now and in the hour of our death..." might have a lot of significance for someone who had made the harrowing journey across the border once and who might be facing a different kind of harrowing journey now.
Some impressions from today: since I last went, religious leaders are now allowed inside the detention center to minister to people in the hours before they are deported (of course, they are only allowed in 4-6 am on Fridays). Even though there has been a law on the books in Illinois since June 2009 that allows undocumented immigrant detainees access to religious ministry, Broadview chose not to recognize that right in practice for over a year.
People who are in power can be arbitrary. They don't need to have a reason. During Advent, we are waiting to celebrate the birth of someone who came as a baby without power, dependent on the love of others to sustain him and who later sustained others with his love (and apparently scared a lot of people in power). Maybe during Advent, we walk around in the darkness to make sure we know why we don't want to stay in it.
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