North Lake Detention Center

I went to the protest / vigil at the ICE detention center in Baldwin, Michigan on Sunday. It was my first protest in quite a while, and I was glad to be involved again. Many of the protests in Mount Pleasant have been focused on certain candidates for office, and I don’t generally participate in those. As clergy, I can advocate for issues and principles in politics – but not for candidates or political parties. The vigil at North Lake was clearly focused on one issue: the treatment of immigrants in this country.

About 50 of us gathered outside the gate of this facility, and we heard first-hand accounts of detainees and their families. We read aloud the names of those who have been killed by ICE or Border Patrol agents this year: 36 of them including Renee Good and Alex Pretti. (It’s amazing to realize that those two deaths, amid the ICE surge in Minneapolis, were in January of this year. What a year it’s been!) Seven of us travelled to this protest from Mount Pleasant. The gathering included clergy from the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, Unitarian Universalist, and more. An array of social justice movements, mostly from western Michigan, collaborated on the event. All of us were united in our anger and sadness. We were decrying the use of our tax dollars to fund this detention center housing 1,400 detainees from around the country; decrying the brutal treatment and systematic ignoring of due process rights by ICE; and decrying the immorality of for-profit detention centers like North Lake. As one of the speakers at the vigil said, migration is natural. Butterflies and birds migrate; humans migrate. Migration should not be unduly punished.

It was profound and emotional for me to be on the grounds of this detention center—to see in real life what I always hear about on the news. These are the concentration camps of today; these are today’s equivalent of the Japanese internment camps. Singing songs, praying prayers, chanting slogans and holding signs may not make much of a difference in the course of history and in the course of our nation’s policies. But I can’t do nothing. And for a couple of hours on Sunday I was with others who feel the same way. We are not alone, and there are more of us who are appalled by ICE’s immigration tactics than those who support them. May we find one another and find ways to make our voices heard.

PRAYER:

Spirit of Life and Love, I pray for those detained in Baldwin, Michigan.

May they be encouraged by knowing that many of us are doing what we can – through protest, through visitation, through donations, and through voting – to change their situation.

I pray for people to speak up and to demand that governments treat immigrants fairly.

I pray for an end to for-profit prisons.

May tomorrow bring greater harmony, justice, and love to Baldwin and to the whole world with no exceptions.

Amen.

Rev. Drew Frantz

November 3, 2026