Tom Florek, a Jesuit for 40 years, stood on the top of three cement steps leading to the plywood sheathed front door of the ICE Detention Center in Broadview early Saturday afternoon.
He knocked. There was no answer. And so he stood there for a time.
He’s been here many times, he told me. Part of a group of Chicago area clergy, about 50 people. Women and men. Catholics and many not Catholics. They organize themselves to typically get three or four religious leaders to the detention center on weekdays. That’s since a court injunction forced ICE, the Department of Justice and the Trump administration to allow those detained inside this bleak place to see lawyers, to see clergy.
Saturday was the first time Florek had come to Broadview on a weekend. He’s always been admitted on weekdays, he says. Florek was just back from the Carolinas where he worked with farmworkers, a key target of the Trump crackdown on Brown people. Florek has spent his Jesuit career working with farmworkers across America.
This current crisis is different though.
He told me about what happens when he is inside the center. He described a large room with plastic chairs, cells housing multiple people. Mainly he said the center houses men though there is a growing percentage of women being detained. Recently he met a mother and her pregnant daughter.
“These are mostly dads, spouses, working people,” he said.
While they are given a phone call, usually to a family member to tell them they’ve been picked up and where they are at that moment, Florek said ICE staff “strongly encourage them to self-deport.” But, he said, after 18 months of these tactics more people detained know they have other options even though there is great uncertainty.
He says clergy is normally let in about 1 p.m. Transports arrive to move the men out, usually to somewhere near Indianapolis, around 2 p.m. They are in leg chains, a waist chain and handcuffs as they are moved out.
I asked Florek if he spent his time offering practical advice or a spiritual message. “I don’t separate the spiritual,” he said. “I’m not a lawyer but we do have information we share.” The spiritual message, he said, is “that they know they are not abandoned. It’s listening. They value that. They value that.”
As we push toward two years of this assault on American values, I asked Florek how he has come to see this moment. It is, he said, “a legal issue, a political issue, more and more a moral issue.” But now he sees it increasingly as an economic issue.
“There is a lot of money in this. It’s clear someone is making a lot of money on this,’ he said pointing to ICE jobs, mainly for younger white men, to the private concerns running the facilities.
“And we still have a president who invokes God. Whose God? There is still a strong enough base of Christians backing this. But what theology is being shared?” asked Florek.
He cited lots of chatter about “chosen people” and worries over the talk of “end times.”
Florek takes solace in the united message of U.S. Catholic bishops, of popes, both Francis and Leo, with the singular warning against the “dehumanization of people.”
