The Rev. Michael Woolf’s pulpit was lined with mini Jesus figurines Sunday morning as he stood and faced his congregation.
Under his suit, his body was marred by bruises sustained, he said, when he was arrested by state, county and local police with 20 others during a clergy-led protest outside the immigration facility in Broadview on Friday. Woolf said he spent seven hours in custody.
“Jesus himself was a criminal by state accounts,” he said during his sermon at Lake Street Church of Evanston, where he has led the congregation for nearly seven years.
Friday’s gathering was intended to provide religious counseling to detainees at the facility, though an official there again denied clergy members access to detainees. Similar requests have been denied since the start of the federal government’s Operation Midway Blitz in September. On Friday, when demonstrators attempted to move closer to the facility — so those housed inside could hear their prayers and know they weren’t forgotten — several were arrested.
Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson said protesters, whom she called “out-of-towners,” had “chosen their fists,” though video of Woolf’s arrest minutes after the protesters were pushed out of the street shows the situation was calm before an officer grabs him by the wrist from the crowd.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Office noted four officers were injured during the protest. It did not answer if changes were being made after the mass arrest Friday or address accusations the agencies were in violation of the TRUST Act, which prohibits Illinois law enforcement from working with federal agents on immigration enforcement.
“Sheriff’s police will continue to protect the health and safety of all individuals and enable the peaceful expression of First Amendment rights,” the agency said in a statement.
Woolf said officers wrestled him to the ground and pressed their knees into his body.
“When you understand there’s torture in a concentration camp in your backyard, it would be wild if people from Chicagoland weren’t going to Broadview,” Woolf later said in an interview. “But [Thompson] doesn’t care about out-of-town cops coming to brutalize us.”
at one point, i watched a cook county sheriff’s officer (who appears to be in charge) point out a priest in the crowd.
he and a couple officers then went into the crowd , dragged him into the street, and arrested him.
situation is still tense as crowd jostles with police to get into the street.
Pastor Luke Harris-Ferree said he and others were also targeted and “plucked” from the line. He accused state and county police of “actively aiding in ICE’s racist terror” in violation of the state’s TRUST Act.
Woolf said Gov. JB Pritzker needed to answer for the excessive use of force.
Harris-Ferree also said Thompson’s description of the events in her Friday statement were “completely false.” Though it was Harris-Ferree’s first time in Broadview, Woolf said he previously had been shot by pepper balls and shoved by state and county police there.
Thompson “said we came raising our fists violently, but I had my hands raised in prayer, saying I was nonviolent, and I was arrested,” Harris-Ferree told the Sun-Times. “And when our neighbors are being abducted and placed in that inhumane facility, we have a call to show up and to try to come to their aid and bring dignity and light to what’s happening.”
Woolf and Harris-Ferree said they want to keep the focus on those facing the unsanitary conditions at Broadview. Woolf said his experience was “one-one-thousandth” of the suffering of those being held at the facility because “what happens in there is torture.”
“If they were willing to do that to clergy in broad daylight in front of rows of media who were recording, I just can’t even imagine what they’re doing to our immigrant neighbors behind boarded-up windows and doors,” Harris-Ferree said.
Woolf’s Sunday morning sermon wasn’t solely focused on the pain felt across the Chicago area. Instead, he prayed for the residents of Charlotte, North Carolina, who are now facing the same enhanced federal immigration enforcement that Chicago has endured for months.
Woolf then preached of a utopia without the immigration enforcement that has plagued the Chicago area for months. He told his congregants that “evil is only temporarily and momentarily cocky, strutting around in power across our TV screens and in our neighborhoods,” but that heaven on Earth, as he said is promised in Scripture, can be possible, even if it will take work to get there.
“It is hard to believe in this vision when you’re in a jail cell, and when evil seems like its unstoppable, or try as we may, those folks are still in Broadview and in the concentration camps dotted around the United States,” he told a group of about 100 parishioners at the church. “[But] I don’t think it’s going to be that way forever. … We have to have hope. If we think it’s all broken and it’ll never get better, then we can never fix it.”
Contributing: Mohammad Samra