On Easter Sunday of this year, Pastor Heidi Torgerson spent her morning in joyous celebration with her congregation at Grace Lutheran Church of La Grange.
A holiday that, to her, is about “the forces of goodness that I identify as God shaking the foundations of all of this that we take as a given, shakes the power of empire in ways that fundamentally change the world.”
Just a few hours later, the Oak Park resident stood outside of the Broadview ICE detention facility waiting to walk through the doors so few had been allowed to before and meet those whose worlds were in the process of being shaken and fundamentally changed in a completely opposite way. What awaited her beyond those doors was not joy or celebration; there was fear, responsibility and the unknown.
Torgerson was a part of one of the first groups of religious leaders to be allowed inside after a court ruling mandated federal authorities had to grant access for pastoral and spiritual care.
Recalling that day still makes her heart race and the feeling remains overwhelming and indescribable to her.
They had only been allowed into the entryway where they sat and received the stories of two men, one who lived in the United States almost all of his life and the other “genuinely terrified” of what he would endure once he was deported.
“Our government keeps telling these stories that these are the worst of the worst. They’re rapists, they’re drug dealers, they’re murderers, they’re stealing our women, they’re stealing our jobs, whatever all other kind of BS our current administration wants to spew that so much of our culture has picked up,” said Torgerson. “It’s just flat out not true.”
“It seems very, very clear to me that the primary crime that any of these folks have committed is the crime of being poor. They’re stuck in a shitty system that they were sort of born on the underside of our economic structures globally speaking and have ended up in this situation over which they have almost no control,” she said.
She has continued to meet with people inside the facility, listening to their stories and making sure they know someone is there and someone cares. Torgerson said the care, empathy, and resilience she has witnessed with “universally every single person I’ve met in there” is “deeply humbling.”
Religious leaders are now able to move beyond the entryway and into various holding rooms. The inside of Broadview largely remains a mystery to most, but Torgerson described her walk to the rooms to offer insight.
She said the entrance feels a bit like airport security and beyond there is the typical decoration of a federal building with an American flag, pictures of the President and Vice President and slogans that “extol the virtues of our Americanness.” Something she said has always felt a little ironic.
The American Dream so many chase is proclaimed on walls that are mainly seen only by those being taken from it.
Then comes the “beige institutional hallway” lined with tall, metal shelves full of plastic bags of people’s belongings labeled “alien property” and assigned numbers. She said she often hears people inside the facility referred to as “aliens” or “bodies.”
“I pray genuinely that that language never stops feeling shocking to me,” said Torgerson.
She also highlighted how the use of that language forces immigration officers to disconnect from their own humanity in “a way that is deeply damaging to their own souls.”
She said she has met federal agents that are doing the work for ideological reasons, but also those who are working there because it is a stable job with benefits and they are just trying to provide for their own families.
“Liberation for our immigrant friends also has to include liberation for those folks from the tyranny of oppressiveness that is also requiring them to disconnect from their own humanity in order to be engaged in all of this,” said Torgerson. “It’s a broken system, and we’re all broken within it.”
Once inside a holding room where they will meet, she waits for people to be brought in. The chains of their shackles clang the entire way, so she hears them long before they arrive.
The politicized noise falls away, and she is with real people with real names and real stories.
“Most of the people we’ve seen have been detained within the last couple of hours, so it’s in a very acute moment of trauma that folks are experiencing, and to be entrusted with those stories in that kind of a moment, it is emotionally challenging which is why it’s important that we go in as teams,” said Torgerson.
She said the first mother she met almost broke her.
The mother and her child had been detained at an airport in another state. She had an active asylum application and had been in the United States for many years. Those factors were not enough to protect her.
Another story that stood out to her was a man who begged for his life. He told her that when he returned to his home country, they would kill his mother first, and then him.
“The political and economic and social kinds of terrors and oppressions that people are fleeing are real. They are real,” said Torgerson.
She said she feels a deeper sense of anger and a kind of powerlessness she is not accustomed to that are a driving force behind her action.
“We’ve been living in this political milieu in our country that is now taking shape in these really gross policies. We’ve been living this for so long that we forget it’s not normal, and I feel a growing sense of exhaustion that I pray keeps getting connected to the desire to act,” said Torgerson.
Through everything, it is the phrase “We keep us safe,” that Torgerson keeps in her mind. She recognized the importance of legislative advocacy, but ultimately, it is continued community involvement and “civil uprising” that she feels are most influential. She hopes the momentum continues outside of just moments of crisis.
“Our police are not coming for us. Our governor is not coming for us. Our legislators are not, our electeds, our president, nobody’s coming for us. We are the ones who keep us safe.”
