WOODSTOCK, ILL. -- The eight men in the orange jumpsuits were white, black, brown and Asian.
They filed into the classroom quietly for the weekly service, each one earnestly shaking the Rev. Jim McLoughlin’s hand on the way in.
McLoughlin handed out Bibles, in Spanish and English, as they sat in the blue plastic chairs tucked behind the metal folding tables. The prison guard shifted his weight by the door.
Six of the men in the jumpsuits came from different countries. Different continents even.
They did not all speak English or understand every word of McLoughlin’s sermon about Judas and Matthias, a gentle lecture on betrayal, redemption and the arduous path of following the Gospel.
They prayed with their heads bowed down to their chests. A few of them clutched their hands to their foreheads, rocking back and forth, their faces strained with emotion. Two of the men prayed out loud for mercy, justice and self-control.
In that small, stuffy prison classroom in Woodstock, Ill., those six men were a long way from home.
As of May 2008, around 260 of the McHenry County Correctional Facility’s 424 prisoners were immigrant detainees.
McHenry and the Tri-County Detention Center, in southern Illinois, are the state’s two jails to have such an arrangement with the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency. There are more than 300 state and county facilities in the country used by ICE for detention purposes.
Nationally, there are about 31,000 ICE detainees in custody, up from 18,500 in 2005, according to ICE spokeswoman Gail Montenegro.
They are a mix of criminals, asylum seekers and people who have spent much of their lives toiling on American soil and contributing to society.
They are Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Baha’i, Christians, Jews and more – people of many faiths and nations, locked away from their families for days, weeks and sometimes years until their citizenship status is determined.
“There’s a profound sense of isolation for the detainees,” McLoughlin said later in a phone interview, pointing out that most of them are much farther from their family and friends than the other inmates. “And spiritually, that is very hard on them.”
How to best spiritually comfort and counsel the detainees through their difficult time is a contentious issue in Illinois. Activists and religious groups have championed a bill, now in the state senate, that would allow ministers greater access to the detainees. Opponents of the bill argue that increased access would mean greater costs and higher security risks. There have been tense rallies and heated testimony from the opposing sides.
At McHenry, the division is more subtle. Jail officials, aid workers and clergymen are working together to meet the detainees’ religious needs – with or without the bill – within reason. But there are varying perceptions on the progress of that mission and what needs to change.
“Their needs are being met,” said the Rev. Michael Love, senior chaplain at McHenry since 2000 and pastor at Trinity Baptist Community Church in Crystal Lake.
The ministry provided to the detainees has evolved over the years, Love said, and will continue to progress as more people volunteer to help. The jail ministry offers outreach service to the detainees’ families and weekly opportunities for multi-faith worship. The detainees can receive spiritual counseling at any time, he said, and it does not count against their regular visitation time.
Though McLoughlin commends Love for his openness and commitment to improving the religious programs, his perception of the ministry’s progress was quite different.
“Our access has been very limited,” said McLoughlin, who pastors at St. Joseph’s Church in nearby Richmond and has been visiting the jail for eight years. “And that hasn’t changed much over the years – it’s been very stagnant.”
The sustenance of faith
Mohammad Azam Hussain, a 39-year-old Pakistani and devout Muslim, is a more impassioned detractor of McHenry’s ministerial efforts.
Having spent about seven months in McHenry, starting in late 2005, Hussain speaks from personal experience. He was detained in ICE facilities for nearly three years, including stints in Tri-County and McHenry in Illinois, and Kenosha and, most recently, Dodge County in Wisconsin.
Hussain was released from Dodge County in early June, according to his attorney, Geoffrey Heeren. No charges pend against him, though he must wear a bracelet for electronic monitoring.
He was arrested after allegedly concealing his involvement with a volatile political party in Pakistan on his naturalization papers. He was taken from his home in Des Plaines, Ill., where he lived with his wife and 7-year-old daughter, and languished in detention facilities for close to four years, according to Heeren.
Hussain's extended detention represents a recent trend, Heeren said, in which detainees are being kept longer and longer in the jails. They have to worry about the possibility of years of incarceration on top of the fear of deportation.
Immigrants who are detained for years are the exception rather than the rule, according to ICE statistics. In 2007, the average time ICE detainees spent in prison was 37.5 days.
In a phone interview in May while still detained, Hussain described McHenry as the least effective facility in meeting his religious needs. He repeatedly requested the Kosher diet, he said, because it was the closest option to the Halal diet of the Muslim faith. He was repeatedly denied, he said, despite filing more than 50 complaints.
“The food was horrible and the officials were ignorant,” Hussain said. He opted for the vegetarian diet because he was refused the Kosher, he said, which usually meant leftover mashed potatoes and sweet beans on a tray.
Though ICE’s policy regarding religious dietary needs states that facilities are required to provide detainees “reasonable and equitable opportunity to observe their religious dietary practice,” Montenegro said in an email response, the Kosher meals are provided only to Jewish detainees.
A Muslim detainee’s dietary options are the regular meals, which are pork-free, she said, and vegetarian.
“They already have the Kosher meal that they give to Jewish inmates,” said Heeren, who works for the Legal Assistance Foundation for Metropolitan Chicago. “Why not give it to the Muslims who have similar dietary beliefs?”
The food was not Hussain’s only qualm. He also had difficulty obtaining an Arabic Koran, he said, until a humanitarian aid worker from Chicago brought him one. Though Muslims were allowed to have congregational prayers once a week, there were no visiting Imams for religious counseling.
As a result, his time at McHenry was, by far, the worst of his recent years of incarceration, he said.
“My religion is all I have in here,” Hussain said, while locked up in Dodge. “It is what sustains me.”
Into the cellblock
Every other Tuesday, 80-year-old David Warren of Crystal Lake visits the immigrant detainees at McHenry, trying to reach out to people like Hussain.
His personal mission is to promote peace in the cellblocks and help ease the spiritual suffering of the detainees by providing religious materials and other humanitarian aid, such as ESL books and counseling. As a layperson of the Franciscan Order, he does not offer any sort of religious counseling but tries to put them in contact with ordained ministers of various faiths as requested.
He also gives each new detainee a $10 check to put into their accounts. Though they may have money when they are arrested, Warren said, their money and possessions are put into a repository until they are released. They usually spend the money he gives them to buy extra food or hygiene products at the commissary.
Continue in second column
His organization gives out about $18,000 a year, he said, money that is donated from various individuals and charities.
“Our mission is to supplement the care that the jail provides,” said Warren, who operates as the primary missionary at McHenry for his order, when not running his woodshop or taking care of his wife who has Alzheimer’s.
In May, he showed up at McHenry at his designated time with a bag full of Bibles and Korans in English and Spanish. Slightly stooped from age, Warren wore a wooden cross and a look of disappointment as he waited for two people who had said they would help him. Finally, he decided he could not wait any longer and went in without them.
He was led to the same small classroom where McLoughlin had celebrated Mass the week before.
Warren was not pleased.
“For seven years, we used to be able to go right into the cellblocks,” he said, “and it was much more effective.”
Recently, he has had to conduct his mission in the classroom instead. In the cellblock, Warren could meet the needs of a greater number of detainees, he said. Not as many detainees choose to meet with him in the classroom because they do not understand what his program is about. Moving them from the cellblock to the classroom, he said, also wastes a valuable portion of his allotted hour.
The first small group brought into the classroom consisted of four women. Two of them spoke only Spanish. One middle-aged woman cried and clutched a tissue. After being gently asked, she told Warren that she was from India but had been in the United States for 18 years before her arrest.
Warren led them through the “Peace Prayer of Saint Francis,” in English and Spanish, and offered them other religious materials. He wrote each person who had no money a check for $10. He urged them to be sisters to each other and asked if there was anything else that he could do.
“Yeah, get us out of here,” said a stocky, bilingual Latina woman, laughing shortly.
The next few groups to file into the classroom each had nine to 10 men, about half of whom did not speak English. Warren relied upon volunteer translators among the detainees to relay his message of peace and unity. He repeated his prayer, wrote checks and handed out religious materials.
Some of them participated fully, bowing their heads during the prayer and saying the words aloud. Others stared off into space until Warren pulled out his checkbook. One Somali man was visibly angry but said he did not speak English when Warren inquired into his emotional state.
At the end, after the last group returned to their cellblock, Warren appeared somewhat discouraged as he gathered his materials.
“They are depressed, despondent and sometimes suicidal,” he said in a separate interview. “We have to get back into the cellblocks to really help them.”
Bridging the gap
At the core of the conversation about how to meet the spiritual needs of the detainees are two words -- access and resources. McLoughlin contends that more of both are needed.
“I understand that jail policies change,” he said, “but the Catholic Church doesn’t change that much. It is a sacramental faith.”
Due to limited access to a detainee population that has many Catholic faithful, he has been largely unable to administer sacraments, such as communion, confession and anointing of the sick. He believes the religious access bill would give clergy more freedom to engage in practices of faith.
But McLoughlin also sees a need for more volunteer ministers, preferably bilingual, to serve the inmates at McHenry. He is currently working with the Diocese of Rockford, he said, to hire a bilingual priest to serve McHenry. He is also trying to arrange for Polish- and Spanish-speaking priests to visit and help Warren with his mission.
“David Warren’s not going to be doing this forever,” he said. “We have to find some people to bridge the gap.”
Though Chaplain Love does not think the bill will affect much change at McHenry, he welcomes more religious workers to help tend to the various faiths represented among the detainees. Bilingual ministers, in particular, can always be put to good use, he said, to help get beyond cultural differences.
“Once you get beyond the cultural differences, you start peeling the onion back,” Love said, smiling and miming the process with his hands, “you find all the same issues common to mankind.”
June 2008