Nothing in my life or training prepared me for what it feels like to sit across from someone who is begging for their life.

Our pastoral care team of four had been alone together in the holding room for nearly an hour and a half. This is good and worthwhile time. We ask gentle questions of each other. We hear one another’s stories. We ruminate together on questions that have no answers. We laugh a little, and I wonder at the power of these basic human qualities to fill even the iciest of rooms with a warmth and camaraderie that often takes years to build. Around 3:00, Raúl goes out to talk to one of the agents. He asks whether we should expect the arrival of another van today. When he comes back, he tells us in Spanish with a shoulder shrug that he received “pues, una respuesta…burocrática” – a bureaucratic response. “They said they can’t say for sure but that maybe there would be another van coming in, and that possibly it could arrive sometime between 3:15 and 3:45, but there’s no way to say for sure.”

We cheerily said we would wait.

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We heard the telltale sound of the shackles before we could see the people wearing them, metal scraping the speckled beige institutional tile with each vulnerable step. We had positioned ourselves in the holding room chairs that allowed us the best line of sight into the collection of desks around which young agents talked and joked and laughed, sometimes typing a few characters into a perpetually open laptop, sometimes sitting on top of a desk to heckle a nearby coworker. Behind them, five shackled people came into view, four men and one woman. As their chains clank open, each in turn is directed to face the nearest wall with hands up and legs spread. I wonder to myself what kind of dangerous material they could possibly have acquired while locked into the back of an ICE vehicle, but it feels in line with the deepening spiral of dehumanization so characteristic of this place. Each detainee is then subjected to a brief medical clearance process before being released into gender-specific holding rooms.

Within minutes, a young man is escorted into the room with us. He is hysterical, tears and snot pouring down his face as he throws his long, sinewy body against the wall, limbs flailing with a desperation uncontained by words. Lucia, a trained Catholic lay woman in her late 60s experiencing her first pastoral visit inside the facility, says to him gently, “Hijo, respire. Respire. ¿Qué necesitas?” Those simple words, “What do you need?” call forth anguished shrieks of “¡NECESITO SEGURIDAD! ¡SEGURIDAD! ¡SOLO QUIERO SEGURIDAD!”

All I need, all I want, is safety.

Raúl guides the young man to sit down. He finds a chair directly across from me. At Lucia’s gentle direction he takes a sip of water in shaking hands that then become a cradle for his own head. He continues to weep in sobs so deep they seem to shake the entire room. I reach out a hand and place it on his trembling shoulder. I close my eyes and try to breathe in the peace of a promised Spirit I am struggling desperately to keep believing in. Tears begin to trace their way down my own cheeks. They are not only tears of empathy. They are also tears of frustration at how ill-equipped I feel for this moment. I draw a deep breath that rattles its way into my chest with a heave, hoping that it qualifies as one of those “sighs too deep for words” the Bible talks about, and try to settle more deeply into my own body. I beg my mind to settle along with it, because the person in front of me is drowning and somebody needs to be a buoy.

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We stay like this for many moments until he raises his head and our eyes meet. Raging deep in the recesses of those dark brown pools is an abject terror the likes of which I have never witnessed in my life. Eyes trained on mine, he begins to beg, “Pastora, por favor. Por favor. No me pueden mandar pa’ Venezuela. Cualquier lugar menos Venezuela. A Venezuela no, por Dios. Si me devuelvan a Venezuela matan primero a mi mamá y luego me matan a mí. Por favor, pastora, por favor a Venezuela no.”

Please, don’t let them send me back to Venezuela. Please. If they send me back to Venezuela they will kill my mom first, and then they will kill me.

We learn that the young man’s name is Andrés. His story comes tumbling out in fragments. He was a police officer in Venezuela. He fled his country when he and his family began receiving death threats. He carries scars from the violence that drove him out, old wounds in places a bullet-proof vest would not have covered. There is nowhere in Latin America safe for him to go. Even here in Chicago, he fears being found by people connected to the threats that chased him away. He rarely leaves his apartment. He asks why God has punished him so severely as to never have had a moment of safety in his life – not in Venezuela, not in the secondary country where he initially tried to make a home, not on the arduously dangerous walk through a jungle and multiple additional countries that eventually brought him to the United States.

He has followed all of our laws and processes. He arrived at the border years ago. He turned himself in to the authorities. He claimed asylum, as is his right. He was put onto buses and joined the tens of thousands of other Venezuelans shipped to Chicago from Texas during that period. When they issued him an ankle monitor he wore it, never missing a mandatory check-in with ICE. When they scheduled court appearances, he went. He was detained just that morning, at his last court check-in. He cannot afford an attorney. His pending asylum case has not been heard. It has not been denied. But neither was it enough to shield him from the federal agents who grabbed him. One of the agents whispered cruel slurs into his ear as they handcuffed him. “Nobody wants trash like you here. We’re sending you back.” His wrists are raw and bruised from the steel scraping against his skin as he was pulled into the vehicle.

Anguished words continue to pour out through tears. I stop him.

“Andrés, necesito que me escuches.” I need you to listen to me.

I remind him that he is made in the Divine image.

“Amén,” he says.

I tell him that is true no matter what that ICE agent said to him or how this terrible system is treating him.

“Amén.”

I tell him that he is surrounded by a Love more powerful than all of this chaos and that, no matter what happens next, this Love will never leave him.

“Amén.”

Fresh tears spill down his cheeks. He looks me dead in the eye and begins to plead again. “Pastora, por favor. Pastora, te lo ruego.”

Pastor, please. Pastor, I am begging you. Tell them they cannot send me back to Venezuela. I was a cop. I am one of them. Tell them I am one of them. Tell them to give me a uniform and I’ll do what they’re doing. I’ll help them. Tell them I’ll live in this building for the rest of my life. I’ll mop the floor and then sleep on it, I don’t care. Please. You have to tell them they cannot send me back to Venezuela. They will kill me. I would rather die now than wait for what they will do to me. If I had a way to end my life right now I swear to you I will do it. If I could throw myself against that wall hard enough for it to kill me I’d do it this instant. I have siblings and a mom. I can’t let them suffer. Please, pastor. Please.

Lucia notices my helpless silence and speaks softly from a few chairs down, not as a pastor or a theologian, but as a mom. “¿Hijo, tú crees en Dios?”

Son, do you believe in God?

“Sí, madre.”

And do you think God intends for you to take that kind of decision into your own hands? The sum of your life is not yours to decide, hijo. You must be strong. Strong for yourself. Strong for your mother. Strong for your siblings. This is not what God wants for you.

The tears continue, and so does the tormented begging. “Pastora, por favor diles. Tienes que decirles.” Pastor, please tell them. You have to tell them.

I am not accustomed to this depth of powerlessness. I tell him the truth. There is nothing I can do to make this different for him. All I can do is be present to his suffering. Remind him that he is not and will never be alone. Tell him that no matter what happens from here, he is loved and will not be forgotten.

An agent comes in and tells us our time is almost up. I ask Andrés if we can pray for him. I hold his hand and beckon Lucia toward us. She joins the circle, holding one of our hands in each of hers. We bow our heads. I ask Lucia if she would pray. She whispers, in English, “I can’t.” So, I begin to pray, barely able to find words in my second language for something so unspeakable. We ask God’s protection over Andrés. We acknowledge before God the profound brokenness of this world.

An agent comes in and gruffly tells us we are past time. We do not raise our eyes to meet his. Instead, we keep our heads bowed and squeeze each other’s hands. I think of the Hebrew word ruah, which means breath, spirit, wind. I wish that my words could take flight on the wind of our collective breath – three of us together, a Trinity of lament and supplication – and be strong enough to lift Andrés out of that room.

We pray that a Spirit of peace and wholeness would find a way to settle into even the smallest crevices of Andrés’ terrified heart. We pray that he would remember, no matter what comes next, that he is a child of God, loved beyond measure. After the final “amén” we stand up. I ask Andrés if I can hug him. He nods through tears. We embrace. I hold his trembling body for as long as they allow me to, trying with all that I have to embody God’s presence in this God-forsaken place. I tell him again, “No estarás olvidado, amado de Dios.” You will not be forgotten, beloved one of God.

We are escorted out of the room. My brain is a fog of thick, disorienting grief, pressing against the inside of my skull. My hands won’t stop shaking. We walk down the hallway lined with those “Alien Property” metal shelving units, the label itself a small indignity in a building full of them. I fix my eyes on a small scuff mark at the far wall and let silent tears replace the sobs I choke back. We turn the corner, exit through the massive steel security door, and write our departure time next to our names in the sign-in book. I am barely able to keep my hands steady enough to form the letters.

Finally outside, the four of us walk thirty paces down the sidewalk before stopping. We all hug each other. I cannot stop crying. The only words I can find are, “It is all so fucked up.” Raúl gently says, “Yes.” It is the only appropriate response. Anything more would sound like platitude.

Lucia is in tears next to me. An immigrant herself, she says quietly, “I don’t think I can do this again. That was more than I can bear.” I tell her that her presence was the only reason I could bear any of what we just experienced.

A few afternoons a month, I put on my clergy collar, greet the other ministers joining that day’s small spiritual care team, and knock on the boarded-up doors of the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. The door rattles open and a uniformed guard steps out onto the steps, an armed colleague standing right behind him. They greet us with practiced courtesy, ask for identification, and inquire about whether we are carrying any weapons. The heavy door clicks shut behind us as we are ushered into the small waiting area. I pull two small, silver vessels out of my pocket – one filled with sacred oil for blessing people, the other carrying holy communion wafers. I place them into the brown plastic bin alongside my car keys, a few sheets of scrap paper, and a tiny golf pencil, the kind you might find next to a scorecard. The bin travels the length of the conveyor belt leading to the security scanner as I walk through the metal detector.

Having cleared security, we sit stiffly in blue plastic chairs and wait for a federal agent to lead us through the heavy steel door on the other side of the screening room. We walk down a hallway lined with metal shelving units labeled “Alien Property” and past a cluster of desks where agents sit, lean, and drift between one another. We enter the large holding room – windowless except for the interior panes looking back out onto those desks – where we will spend the next several hours sitting with the detained, listening to the stories these walls were built to silence.

Those stories are the immediate occasion for this newsletter.

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A couple of weeks ago, two brothers were among the group of people we spent time with. They had been detained by a vehicle full of ICE agents just hours before, on their way to work. Like most of the people we meet, they spent a fair amount of time working through the anger and the grief and the deep injustice of this system in which they are entangled. But what struck me most about these two young men is how they couldn’t stop touching each other. Between the frustrated tears and the sharp words, they wrestled and elbowed each other, tousled each other’s hair, grabbed the backs of each other’s necks. Their razzing displayed all the ordinary, rough-and-tumble ways that brothers often touch each other. Except in that moment, their bodies seemed to be saying what they couldn’t find words for. I’m here with you. You’re not alone in this. We’re still connected. It was so tender.

I’m calling this newsletter Tender Resistance because those brothers taught me something I’m still learning: that resistance in the way of Jesus can be fueled by anger, but it doesn’t have to make us hard. Instead, it asks us to become more tender – to notice suffering, to grieve what is being done to people living on the precarious edges of our world, and to refuse the numbing that makes injustice easier to tolerate. But that kind of tenderness can’t be practiced in abstraction. It requires us to come close, to enter humbly into the suffering of real people and allow it to change us.

I grew up in a small North Dakota town whose population seemed to almost double every summer. Migrant farm workers came north to hoe the sugar beets and soybeans that remain staples of Red River Valley agriculture. They lived mostly in the trailer park on the edge of town. My own extended family hired multiple generations of the same migrant family over twenty-five years to do that same backbreaking work. A lot of words got thrown around in the summers that I didn’t learn were racial slurs until much later, and I recall among our small community a pervasive sense of suspicion about “The Mexicans” in town. I didn’t have language or analysis to make sense of much of that as a child, but I still remember the day my dad took me and one of my younger sisters out to one of the beet fields. He handed each of us a hoe and told us to get to work. We lasted less than one full row.

Those childhood experiences eventually followed me into the church. Ordained as a Lutheran pastor, I spent nearly fifteen years serving the global church, beginning as a missionary in Mexico. It was there that I learned – slowly and with a lot of missteps – the theology and practice of accompaniment. In that practice, I discovered the often-painful truth that building relationships of genuine mutuality and solidarity would require me to let go of so many of the socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural trappings I had learned to mistake for my identity. I learned how to really listen. I learned how to receive gracious welcome and extravagant hospitality from people-made-poor. I learned how to seek God’s presence in places I once would never have thought to look. I learned how to experience, time and again, the profound gift of being gently invited into the suffering and celebration and longings and joys of people I came to love, and from whom I would always remain, in some sense, very different. I learned how to let myself be changed by the crucified and risen Christ I met in the unlikeliest of faces.

Today, I serve as a Lutheran pastor in the near west suburbs of Chicago – less than fifteen minutes from Broadview – where our congregation has spent the last handful of years developing ministries that accompany our immigrant neighbors.

The work inside Broadview is beautiful. It is also very, very hard. This newsletter is my attempt to make sense not just of what’s happening inside that detention center holding room, but also of what’s happening inside me. You can expect reflections roughly every other week. Some will stay very close to Broadview, including anonymized stories of some of the people I meet inside. Others will be a bit more expansive, touching on life in my congregation, my own formation as a pastor and a person, and what it means to be the church in a time that is begging us to engage hard things with tender, disciplined courage.

Some of you who will find a home in this writing are already doing this work – in protest, in immigration advocacy, in detention centers near where you live, in your own congregations and spiritual lives – and are looking for a companion voice. Others of you have been watching what’s going on from a bit of a distance and are unsure of how to put your concern – or your faith – into meaningful action. Still others of you are church people (or at least, you were once upon a time) who regularly find yourself feeling a little restless, wondering why any of it matters. Whoever you are, welcome.

Before they were led away from us that day, one of the brothers asked if I would pray for them before whatever came next. I rested one of my hands on each of their shoulders as they put their arms around each other so that, for a few moments, all three of us were touching. I don’t know what happened to them after that room, but I still think about their hands resting gently on each other’s necks. Tenderness seems like such a flimsy resistance to the machinery of empire that keeps churning people through these dehumanizing systems. And on one level, it is. I don’t know how to fix something so utterly broken, but I do know how to keep showing up. As I sit across from these beloved people week after week, I’ve also come to know this: I’d rather be tender and uncertain than hard and sure.

Thank you for being here.

Pastor Heidi Torgerson

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