About 1,000 people followed the Eucharist from St. Eulalia Church in Maywood to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Broadview on Oct. 11, singing and praying the rosary in English and Spanish.

They set off from the church with Father Larry Dowling, a retired pastor and a member of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Life’s clergy council, carrying the monstrance, followed by priests carrying ciboria full of consecrated hosts contributed by parishes from across the area.

The coalition organized the procession, which traveled more than a mile west of the church, escorted by troopers from the Illinois State Police and officers from the Cook County Sheriff’s Police and Maywood and Broadview police.

When they reached the center, a delegation of priests, women religious and laypeople who wanted to enter so that they could give Communion to the detainees were denied entry and they were denied the opportunity to speak with any of the federal agents there.

The message that they could not enter was relayed by the Illinois State Police.

“What we expected to do was an attempt to bring God’s love and the presence of Christ to the detainees,” Dowling said after the procession. “Just the presence of Christ was rejected.”

The group held its own Communion service and distributed Communion to protestors gathered outside the center.

Before the procession, Jesuit Father David Inczauskis welcomed the congregation to a prayer service inside St. Eulalia.

“We are one with the Lord,” Inczauskis said.  “Our faith brings us together. We are living in a time of great darkness, we are living in a time of despair, and we are trying to bring light and hope. God stands with the oppressed. … We want to bring our Lord’s peace and solidarity to this situation.”

In walking with the Eucharist, participants were walking with Christ himself, he said.

“The Eucharist is the Body of Christ, and when we receive Communion, we become the Body of Christ,” Inczauskis said.

The goal, he said, was to bring Communion to “members of the Body of Christ who are suffering behind the walls of the Broadview detention center. The church has not forgotten them, because God has not forgotten them.”

“It’s really in the hearts of all of us what goes on in the detention center,” said Anthony Williams, president of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership’s board. “You don’t have to treat people that way. We are bringing the Body of Christ into this situation.”

The Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership was founded in 2017 to promote justice based on Catholic social teaching, he said. The coalition has more than 50 institutional members, including parishes, religious communities, schools and businesses, as well as individual members.

Williams, a member of Our Lady of Africa Parish in Bronzeville, said the coalition was born in the basement of St. Eulalia Church, and seeing the injustice happening in Broadview — “right in our backyard” — added urgency to the need to stand up.

“It’s unbelievable,” Williams said.

The Broadview center is where people taken off the street by federal agents, who are often masked and without visible identification, are brought to be processed for deportation. It was designed to hold people for no more than 12 hours, but some have reported being held there for several days.

It also has been the site of frequent violent confrontations in which federal agents have fired pepper balls, rubber bullets and other less-lethal munitions as well as tear gas or similar chemical agents at protestors and at journalists attempting to report on the situation.

In the week before the Oct. 11 procession, a federal district court issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from firing at, arresting or using violence against journalists or people praying.

Joyce Lane, a board member of CSPL, said she has been horrified by images and videos of federal agents taking people from the streets of Chicago. Lane, who has a doctorate in social policy, said the procession was one way to stand against what is happening, although she was not sure she would make the whole mile-plus walk with her walker.

“We don’t have to hide our faith,” Lane said. “We should be proud of our faith. This is praying in public.”

Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, spoke about the Sept. 30 middle-of-the-night raid on an apartment building in South Shore, in which agents rappelled down from military Blackhawk helicopters, pulled families from their beds and zip-tied the hands of men, women and children, leaving them outside for hours.

“This was an effort by ICE and other organizations to spread fear in the community,” Durbin said. “It’s working. It’s hard to imagine in a country this great.”

Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson urged participants to stand in solidarity with one another.

“This is not just a social struggle,” she said. “This is a spiritual battle. United we stand and divided we fall.”

Before setting off, the coalition’s executive director, Michael Okinczyc-Cruz, went over safety rules, and reminded participants of their commitment to non-violence.

“We are people of non-violence,” he said. “We are followers of Jesus. “We confront injustice with love and courage, not hate.”

Participants in the procession were welcomed to St. Eulalia with bright yellow T-shirts emblazoned with an image of Mary and the words “God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly” in Spanish and in English. The passage is from the Canticle of Mary in the first chapter of Gospel of Luke (1:52).

Among those welcoming people was Joaquín Martínez, who carried a banner from the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines. He said he has been among the people gathering outside the Broadview facility to pray for those detained or about to be deported every Friday for the past 19 years.

“The reason we are gathering is to see if we can stop all deportations from the state of Illinois,” Martínez said. “We are asking our God for immigration reform.”

Maya Bensett and Jalen Hill said they heard about the procession from Bensett’s mother, a parishioner at St. James (Wabash Avenue).

“For me, it’s about community,” Bensett said. “I went to Catholic schools all the way through, and they taught us to treat our neighbors a certain kind of way.”

“We want everybody to be treated fairly,” Hill said.