The Walls Answered Back: Standing in prayer outside an ICE detention center, we heard the people inside answer

Yesterday we were grateful to join the Day of Remembering Our Interdependence, a Buddhist-led interfaith pilgrimage across New York City’s five boroughs. Inspired by the Buddhist monks’ Walk for Peace, we walked, prayed, chanted, and stood together at places that hold both pain and hope, remembering that our lives really do belong to one another.

One of our stops was the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where ICE is holding many immigrants in federal custody.

We were grateful for the chance to simply show up in solidarity and prayer.

Standing outside the detention center was heartbreaking. Families had attached signs to the fence: “Happy Birthday, Dad.” “You’re the best dad in the world.” “We love you.” Messages from children whose fathers had been taken from them and were now being held inside. It is one thing to know this is happening. It is another to stand there and read those words.

This is a facility where multiple people have died in custody in recent years. It has also faced years of criticism over prolonged lockdowns, inadequate medical care, chronic understaffing, and conditions that many have described as inhumane.

Alongside Buddhist recitations and the testimony of a priest who has been accompanying many of the families with loved ones inside, I offered a litany of prayer. These are a few lines from it, with everyone responding, "May love set us free."

Forgive us, O God, whenever we build cages where you have called us to build homes.

Forgive us whenever we choose comfort over compassion.

Forgive us whenever we remain silent because speaking the truth is costly.

Deliver us from every obedience that betrays love.

When laws demand what mercy forbids, grant us the perseverance to obey conscience before comfort and your love before every earthly power.

Keep us faithful to the nonviolent way of Christ, who overcame hatred not with hatred but with love.

Woe to those who build walls where you have called us to build tables, who teach us to fear the stranger instead of welcoming our neighbor, and who ask us to believe that another person’s suffering can become the price of our own security.

Strip away every lie that justifies cruelty.

Break the spell of indifference.

Teach those entrusted with power that no nation is made stronger by forgetting the sacredness of the human person, and that no law is worthy of honor when it denies the dignity you have given.

As we prayed, as we mourned, as we stood there in silence, all of a sudden, from inside the building came the sound of people banging on the windows and the walls.

They were responding, and they wanted us to know that they could hear us.

And we wanted them to know that they had not been forgotten.

Sometimes this is where we begin: by showing up, praying, bearing witness, organizing, and putting pressure on the machinery that turns people into strangers, that keeps building walls where we are called to become neighbors, and that keeps building cages where we have been called to build homes.

Deep gratitude to MahaSangha NYC, to the many organizers and volunteers, and to everyone who walked, prayed, chanted, and bore witness together yesterday.