Found on the front page of Sunday’s Chicago Tribune is the story about two Catholic Sisters dedicated to helping immigrants.
Included is what they did at the McHenry County Jail.
From the article:
They met with the Midwest director for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who recommended they go to McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, which at the time was housing 200 immigrant detainees.
Again, they were told no. [As they had been at a deportation center in Broadview.]
“That’s where we got our motto. We do things peacefully and respectfully,” Persch said. “But we never take no for an answer.”
When asking didn’t work, they pushed for legislation. The sisters worked with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to successfully pass a bill allowing religious workers to enter immigrant detention centers. As a result, teams of volunteers from all different faith backgrounds — Jewish Muslim, Baptist, Christian, Buddhist — began joining them in 2010 in the McHenry jail library each Tuesday to have conversations with the jailed immigrants. They brought prayer books and holy cards.
McHenry County Jail
For 12 years straight, the sisters worked as volunteers in McHenry County Jail listening to stories and praying. They would pray that ICE would treat them with respect. They would pray for the elected officials making decisions that would trickle down and affect progress. They would pray to always have immigration lawyers…
A few years ago, Persch remembers meeting a Muslim man at the McHenry jail who had been detained at O’Hare International Airport because of a misunderstanding with ICE about who paid for his college scholarship. ICE agents thought he was lying about how he got to the U.S. so they put him in the county jail.
He had all of his paperwork ready to go to Valparaiso University, and the university staff didn’t know why he never showed up.
With their connections to ICE in Washington, D.C., and help finding an attorney, Persch said he was able to get out of jail. He was able to register for a city college.
“Ironically, he now works with an airline at O’Hare,” Persch said with a laugh.
After the sisters spent some time at the jail, the guards started warming up to them. At first, Persch and Murphy said, officers would patrol the library, walking around the edges of the room.
But the officers got used to the homemade cookies and wrapped candy canes they would bring in around the holidays. Sometimes, they would come out to pray with the sisters. Eventually, they left the sisters and the detainees alone. Persch said they sometimes couldn’t find an officer even if they needed something.
When the pandemic came, the sisters were no longer allowed inside McHenry jail. They started holding Zoom visits and online prayer sessions. Immigration detention in county jails was outlawed in Illinois in 2022 with the Illinois Way Forward Act.
