Chicago priest alerts worshipers that ICE agents were monitoring the church and helps them leave

In the midst of tensions over deportations in the United States, a priest from the Archdiocese of Chicago activated mechanisms to prevent his faithful from being detained after notifying them that there were immigration agents outside the church.

It happened on Sunday, October 12, at St. Jerome Parish, in Rogers Park, during the 8:30 a.m. Mass. In videos shared on social networks, the priest is heard saying that “la migra is in the parking lot. There is a group here, in front of the church,” referring to the agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE).

NBC Chicago reported that, according to witnesses, “after the warning, several neighbors appeared and formed a human chain outside the church to guide the parishioners to their homes.”

“Those who have babies can also go out with them, they will accompany them to their homes, because I think it is a danger if you are going to take the car, if you are parked in the parking lot, if you have the documents or not,” said the priest in the video.

According to the Univision networkcommunity members also remained alert at the six o’clock Mass.

ACI Prensa contacted St. Jerome Parish for comment, but at the moment we have not received a response.

The episode at St. Jerome Parish occurred a day after a Eucharistic procession also held in Chicago, in which about a thousand people walked from St. Eulalia Church in Maywood to the ICE detention center in Broadview on Saturday.

According to the Archdiocese newspaper, Chicago Catholicthe objective was to enter the center “to give communion to the detainees.”

Leading the procession was Father Larry Dowling, retired priest and member of the clergy council of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Life, who was accompanied by other priests.

Father Dowling told Catholic News Agency, which like ACI Prensa belongs to the Catholic media group EWTN, that they previously notified the ICE center that they would go and give communion to detainees who wanted it.

He added that they never received a response and that when they arrived they were denied entry. Father Dowling and other priests who accompanied him distributed Communion to several people who had gathered in front of the ICE building, including several police officers.

According to Chicago Catholic, they were escorted during the tour by officers from the Illinois State Police, Cook County Sheriff’s Police, and Maywood and Broadview police.

“What we hoped was to try to bring the love of God and the presence of Christ to the detainees,” said Father Dowling after the procession. “The very presence of Christ was rejected,” he added.

The application of the federal government’s immigration policies has generated protests in Chicago, such as the one that occurred the last weekend of September in front of the ICE headquarters in Broadview. Before them, President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of some 300 members of the National Guard in early October to maintain security.

In a statement published on October 14 for the Archdiocese of Chicago, Cardinal Blase J. Cupich stated that “maintaining the security of the nation and respecting human dignity are not mutually exclusive.”

“The security of a nation,” he added, “cannot be achieved at the cost of violations of human dignity and, certainly, the dignity of the undocumented can never be violated by unnecessarily aggressive tactics that go far beyond the task of detaining people and that appear intended to cause fear and chaos, rather than fulfilling the noble call of law enforcement.”

The Archbishop of Chicago said that “no person working in this noble calling should be put in the position of acting in this way,” because “not only do they risk violating the dignity of others, but such activity is beneath their own dignity.”

With information from Madalaine Elhabbal