The following statement was delivered by Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman at the Feb. 8 Vigil for Solidarity with the People of Minneapolis, held outside First United Church of Oak Park:
You have brought us together today, with an intentional message of solidarity because something is deeply wrong, and Oak Park refuses to look away.
Our federal government has murdered people in broad daylight for the sole purpose to silence and intimidate those of us who choose love over hate. Beautiful people who believed in a better world. Our government has torn families apart in the dead of night, left children without parents, and deported neighbors for seeking the same dignity and stability every human being deserves. Our government suggests these actions are to keep America safe. This is not abstract policy. This is lived terror. This is trauma that echoes through generations. We must resist. When deportation is used as a weapon instead of due process, it is state violence.
And we reject the lie that this cruelty keeps anyone safe.
We are here because we believe something simple and powerful: everyone deserves safety, dignity, and a place to belong. Not some of us. Not only when it’s convenient. All of us. Especially when it’s hard.
We are living in a moment that asks us to choose between fear and courage, between isolation and solidarity, between looking away and showing up.
And we are choosing to show up.
It does not make our communities stronger to rip parents from children. It does not make us safer to criminalize poverty, migration, or survival. It does not honor our values to turn suffering into bureaucracy.
We are here because we believe in a different moral center.
We believe that no human being is illegal. We believe that borders should never matter more than lives. We believe that dignity is not something you earn — it is something you are born with.
Solidarity means more than outrage. It means showing up when our neighbors are targeted. It means defending each other in courtrooms, in schools, in churches, in workplaces, and in the streets. It means mutual aid, rapid response, sanctuary, and relentless pressure for change.
Oak Park is committed to change. I am committed to service where all people have a place to belong and needs met so that all can thrive, with dignity. I am committed to fighting back against our federal government and am grateful for the support and expertise of my colleagues and community. We make Oak Park better.
May we honor the dead by fighting for the living. May we turn remembrance into resolve. And may we build the future they deserved. History will tell their story as fighting and dying for what is right.
So let us embrace today and every day: courage over comfort, solidarity over fear, humanity over hate. Remembering those who were killed is not only an act of mourning, it is an act of responsibility. Their lives call us to action. They demand that we organize, protect one another, show up and refuse to let fear define our future.
We show up for immigrants and asylum seekers, for Black and Brown communities, for LGBTQ+ people, for our trans community, our neighbors and youth who are told to shrink themselves to survive.
Let us say this clearly together: an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. Solidarity is not a slogan. It is a practice. It is checking on your neighbor. It is learning each other’s names. It is sharing resources. It is taking care of each other and refusing to let anyone be disappeared into silence.
Resistance does not always look loud. Sometimes it looks like care. Sometimes it looks like mutual aid. Sometimes it looks like setting boundaries and saying, “Not here. Not in our community.”
We reject the lie that there isn’t enough to go around. There is enough love, enough safety, enough justice. Our power lives in our relationships, in our willingness to listen across our differences, in our courage to confront injustice without losing our humanity, in our commitment to nonviolence — not as passivity, but as a fierce and disciplined love for life.
So when they try to divide us, we link arms. When they try to intimidate us, we stand taller. When they try to tell us who belongs, we answer: we all do.
Let this community be known as a place of refuge and resistance, a place where neighbors are protected, not policed, where care is shared, not criminalized, where solidarity is sustained. We will keep loving. We will keep each other safe.
Because the future we are fighting for is one where no one is left behind — and that future begins right here, with us.
